The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online Page A

a good speech like the one here beside me that I got off last night finally, but the very simple, calm statement of what gives. I'll get through the 'vac to the sim itself, then onto aud and vid tape, because since that's autonomic there's no editing, unless of course Eisenbludt happens to stroll in . . . and even he, technically, can't touch the speech part of the reading matter.
     
         And then the sky will fail in.
     
         But that ought to be interesting to watch, Adams mused. If you could get far enough off to watch.
     
         "Listen," he would program to Megavac 6-V. And all those funny little dingbats that the 'vac had in it would spin, and out of the sim's mouth would come the utterance but transformed; the simple word would be given that fine, corroborative detail to supply verisimilitude to what was--let us face it, he thought caustically---an otherwise _incredibly_ bald and unconvincing narrative. What entered Megavac 6-V as a mere _logos_ would emerge for the TV lenses and mikes to capture in the guise of a pronouncement, one which nobody in his right mind--especially if encapsulated subsurface for fifteen years-- would doubt. But--it would be a paradox, because Yancy himself would be pontificating it; like the old saw, "Everything I say is a lie," this would confound itself, tie its skinny, slippery self into a good hard sailor's knot.
     
         And what would be achieved? Since, after all, Geneva would pounce on it . . . and we are not amused, Joseph Adams articulated within his own mind, the voice which he, like every other Yance-man, had long ago introjected. The super ego, as the prewar intellectuals had called it, or, before that the ayenbite of inwyt, or some such rustic Medieval old phrase.
     
         Conscience.
     
         Stanton Brose, holed up in his castlelike _Festung_ in Geneva like some pointed-hat alchemist, like a corrupted, decayed but, as they say, shining and stinking, glowing pale white fish of the sea, a dead mackerel with clouded-over glaucomalike eyes . . . or did Brose look like this?
     
         Only twice in his life had he, Joseph Adams, actually seen Brose in the flesh. Brose was old. What was it, eighty-two? And not lean. Not a stick, ribboned with the streamers of smoked, dried flesh; Brose at eighty-two weighed a ton, waddled and rolled, pitched, with his mouth drizzling and his nose as well . . . and yet the heart still beat, because of course it was an artiforg heart, and an artiforg spleen and an artiforg and so on.
     
         But yet the authentic Brose remained. Because the brain was not artiforg; there was no such thing; to manufacture an artiforg brain--to have done so, when that firm, Arti-Gan Corporation of Phoenix, existed, back before the war--would have been to go into what Adams liked to think of as the "genuine simulated silver" business . . . his term for what he considered with its multiform spawned offspring: the universe of authentic fakes.
     
         And that universe, he reflected, which you would think you could enter the IN door of, pass through and then exit by the OUT door of in say roughly two minutes . . . that universe, like Eisenbludt's propheaps in the Moscow film studios, was endless, was room beyond room; the OUT door of one room was only the IN door for the next.
     
         And now, if Verne Lindblom were correct, if the man from the private intelligence corporation, Webster Foote, Limited of London, were correct some new IN door had swung open, given momentum by the hand that reached in all its trembling senility from Geneva . . . in Adams' mind the metaphor, growing, became visual and frightening; he actually experienced the doorway ahead, felt the darkness breathed by it--room lacking light, into which he would soon tread, faced by god knew what task that was not a nightmare, not, like the black, listless fogs from within and without, formless, but--
     
         Too distinct. Spelled out, in