“I saw it coming. And now you’re home all alone, and sort of wishing I was there to console you . . . aren’t you?”
There was one of those pauses I’d learned to recognize. Then she said strangledly, “Y-Yes. I was. I am. But Oliver— people don’t—”
“Sometimes they do,” I said. “Hold on. I’ll be right up.”
When a woman has once told the truth to a man, either everything is over between them, or everything has just begun.
From then on the story is mostly history.
Gorley and Gorley’s new improved toothpaste with Verolin began outselling all other brands. Other companies saw that the new ingredient—for reasons nobody quite understood—was becoming more indispensable than chlorophyll had been somewhat earlier, and paid through the nose for the right to use it. G and G added a Verolin mouthwash to their line, and it was also a snowballing success. All the time, of course, Verolin was really Grandma’s lie soap.
These products blanketed the country and went into the export market. They went all over civilization, if you define civilization as those regions of the Earth where people use toothbrushes and seek to avoid halitosis—or, anyway, all over what was then called “the free world” by its inhabitants and “the enslaved world” by the publicists of the “free world” on the other side.
The returns began coming in.
A well-known radio news commentator paused for a refreshing gargle in the mid-break of his program, was unable to continue broadcasting, and resigned the same day.
Various other commentators and newspaper columnists suffered more or less similar fates, while a good many newspapers and periodicals underwent violent shifts of editorial policy.
Half a dozen magazines having the word ‘True” in their titles suspended publication.
Quite a few authors, including some more than usually successful ones, abandoned their profession. Surprisingly, those who quit included some who had been praised by the critics for the stark realism of their work, and among those who did not quit were some whose writings were regarded as sheer imaginative flights.
As for the critics, most of them took up useful trades.
A number of university professors conscientiously resigned, stating that they could not teach “facts” which they did not know to be true.
Several hitherto popular and, to their founders, profitable religious cults abruptly disintegrated. In one case there was a riot, when the Prophet of the Luminous Truth appeared in a mass meeting and told his followers some home truths about himself, his doctrines, and themselves.
Most of the churches lost grievously in membership, though at the same time they enjoyed an accession of new converts. Those whose rites included confession complained that, somehow, the act appeared to be losing its deep significance.
Psychoanalysts at first rejoiced over their sudden wholesale success in overcoming their patients’ “resistances,” and a little later were appalled by their empty waiting rooms.
The divorce rate skyrocketed, then plunged to a permanent record low. Conversely, the marriage rate at first fell off sharply, then climbed gradually back to normal. The birth rate was unaffected.
Innumerable lawyers took down their shingles.
Congressional investigating committees enjoyed a field day, but fell prey to an increasing nervous frustration as witness after witness refused to perjure himself.
In Washington, D. C., a conservatively dressed gentleman checked into a hotel, came down to the lobby after brushing his teeth, and in response to a commercial traveler’s casual question said, “My business? Well, I’m a secret agent for the Soviet Union. And you?”
Police in scores of cities were swamped by confessions of offenses ranging from multiple murder to double parking, and were bewildered by the absence of the expected percentage of false confessions.
For the first time in modern history, the number of homicides exceeded the number of suicides. In general, crimes of stealth virtually ceased to occur, while crimes of violence continued at about their previous level and reported cases of rape declined spectacularly.
Numerous government officials admitted themselves guilty of peculation and malfeasance in office. The business bureaucracy was even harder hit. Among the casualties was a prominent board member of Gorley and Gorley.
To my particular satisfaction, the mayor our local machine had elected made a public speech—apparently unaware that he was doing anything out of the way—in which he thanked by name the boys who had purchased the most votes for him in the last campaign, also those who had put in the strong-arm work.
All the F.B.I, agents doing undercover work in the Communist Party were exposed, and as a result the party went bankrupt for lack of dues-paying members.
As O’Brien had predicted, the advertising business collapsed, burying many lesser enterprises under the ruins. But somehow no general financial panic took place.
A man from Texas was heard to confess that he sometimes got tired of hearing about Texas, and even admitted it couldn’t be twice as large as the rest of the United States.
Events such as these were the convulsions, the death throes of an old world and the birth pangs of a new.
Their final phase was the breakdown of the international situation, which had continued for over a decade in a sort of deadly balance. The balance was destroyed when U. S. and other Western diplomats adopted a new tack which provoked, in their Eastern-bloc opponents, reactions first of suspicious alarm, then of bafflement, and finally of a dazed conviction that the spirit of Marxian history had at long last delivered the enemy into their hands—which last impression led directly to their undoing.
Forgetting the chiseler’s basic precept—you can’t cheat an honest man—they set about exploiting the situation by extracting from the West all the technical information they coveted, and which was now theirs for the asking. Along with plutonium refinement methods and guided missile designs, they obtained, naturally, the formula for Grandma’s lie soap, alias Verolin.
The counterparts of Gorley and Gorley’s sales department, in their government-run industries, were also shrewdly alive to the importance of having satisfied customers. Clearly, they reasoned, studying our records, this is a good thing, this is a valuable bit of kul’tura . . .
From there on developments followed pretty much the pattern already established in the West. The Iron Curtain sagged, fell apart, and sank into oblivion.
Grandma’s lie soap had conquered the world.
Since I retired, I’ve been using my leisure in exploration and observation of this world which I did a good deal to create, this world which differs so much from the one I grew up in and can remember better than most others even of my own generation. They’ve had the treatment, and they’ve changed. But I still brush my teeth with a salt-and-soda mixture.
In many ways, the present era answers to the visions that were called Utopian when I was a boy—called that, usually, with a sneer. A lot of the social and political reforms we only dreamed about then have been carried out as a matter of course, which was inevitable once people stopped lying themselves and one another black in the face.
Mental diseases, tangled lives, crime have all been swept away—not to mention the threat of war that was the Great Shadow overlying all the lesser shadows of the old world.
An election campaign now is carried on in an atmosphere of sobriety and statesmanship that would have given an old-time politician the creeps. None of the old bandstand, circus stuff . . . Speaking of that, one thing I miss is the circus. I used to like to listen to the sideshow barkers—an extinct tribe. I know, they still have circuses, or call them that; but P. T. Barnum would disown them.