The Penultimate Truth

9

His speech still--it seemed eternally--in his briefcase, undisclosed to David Lantano and never fed to Megavac 6-V, Joseph Adams made his way by horizontal express belt from the building at 580 Fifth Avenue to the Agency's titanic repository of reference material, its official archives of every known datum of knowledge from before the war retained and fixed for perpetuity and of course instantly available to the elite, such as himself, whenever needed.

He needed it--some fragment of it--now.

At the great central station he lined up, and when he found himself facing the combination type XXXV leady and Megavac 2-B which acted as ruling monad of the labyrinthine organism of spool upon spool of microtape--whole twenty-six volume reference books reduced to the size of a yo-yo, and merely a yo-yo's shape and width and weight--he said, rather plaintively, it seemed to him as he heard himself speak, "Um, I'm sort of confused. I'm not looking for any one particular source, as for instance Lucretius' _De Rerum Natura_ or Pascal's _Provincial Letters_ or Kafka's _The Castle_." Those had been instances of his past: sources which had molded him along with the eternal John Donne and Cicero and Seneca and Shakespeare et al.

"Your ident-key, please," the ruling monad of the archives buzzed.

He slid his key into the slot; it registered, and now the ruling monad, after consulting its memory bank, knew and remembered every source item he had ever utilized, and in what sequence; it comprehended the entire pattern of his formal knowledge. From the archives' standpoint, it now knew him without limit, and so it could declare--or so he hoped--the next point on the graph of his growing, organic, mentationlife. The historic development of him as a knowing entity.

God knew he didn't have any notion of what the next point on the graph would be; David Lantano's reading matter had completely knocked the slats from under him and he wobbled in a horrid daze--crisis, for the last and critical time, perhaps, in his professional career. He faced, at least potentially, what all speech writers for the Talbot Yancy sim feared: the cessation of their powers. The drying-up of their ability to program the 'vac, in fact to program anything at all.

The ruling monad of the Agency's official archives clicked a few times, as if gnashing its electronic gearteeth, and then it said, "Mr. Adams, do not be alarmed at this."

"Okay," he said, thoroughly alarmed already. Behind him those in line, his fellow Yance-men, waited impatiently. "Let's have it," he said.

The ruling monad said, "You are respectfully referred back to Source One. The two documentaries of 1982, both versions, A and B; with no criticism intended you will, if you step to the counter directly to your right, be handed the spools of Gottlieb Fischer's original work."

The bottom, the support and structure, the form itself, of Joseph Adams' world, fell out. And, as he made his way to the counter to his right, to receive the spools, he died inside, and died in great pain, deprived of the fundamental metabolic rhythm of existence.

Because if he didn't yet understand Gottlieb Fischer's two documentaries of 1982, he didn't understand anything.

For the fabric of Yancy, what he was and how he had come into being--and hence their existence, the hive of Yancy-men such as himself and Verne Lindblom and Lantano, even horrible, powerful old Brose himself--all this rested on documentaries A and B. A, which had been for Wes-Dem; B, produced for Pac-Peop. Beyond these, one could not go.

He had been thrown back years. To the inception of his professional career as a Yance-man. And if it could happen to him the entire edifice could totter; he felt the world he knew melt under his feet.