The Penultimate Truth

by Philip K. Dick

Groaning, Colleen disappeared to search for a leady to fix her the drink. Joseph Adams, at his desk and rhetorizor, heard her go and was glad. For some reason—but here he did not care to probe his own mind too deeply—he was lonelier with Colleen Hackett than without her, and anyhow late on Sunday night he fixed a dreadful drink; it was always too sweet, as if by mistake one of his leadies had dug up a bottle of Tokay and he had used it, not dry vermouth, in the martinis. Ironically, left to themselves, the leadies never made that error . . . was this an omen? Joe Adams wondered. Are they getting smarter than us?

“Listen,” he said grimly. “I want to see what this stupid assist that cost me fifteen thousand Wes-Dem dollars is going to do with that. I’m serious; I’m waiting.” He jabbed the rerun tab of the machine. “When’s the speech due?” she asked. “Tomorrow.” “Get up early.” “Oh no.” He thought, I hate it even more when it’s early. The rhetorizor, in its cricket’s voice, intoned folksily. “We think of rats, of course, as our enemy. But consider their vast value to us in cancer research alone. The lowly rat has done yeoman’s service for huma—” Again, at his savage instigation, it died into silence. “—nity,” Colleen said distantly; she was inspecting the authentic long-ago dug up Epstein bust in the niche that divided the west wall shelves of books, where Joseph Adams kept his reference texts on TV commercials of the last, past, great twentieth century, in particular the religious and the Mars candy bar inspired creations of Stan Freberg. “A miserable metaphor,” she murmured. “A yeoman rat . . . yeomen were young villagers during the Medieval period, and I bet even though you’re such a pro you didn’t know that.” She nodded to a leady which had come to the library door at her request. “Get my cloak and have my flapple brought to the main entrance.” To Joe she said, “I’m flapping back to my own villa.” When he didn’t answer she said, “Joe, try it, the entire speech, without that assist; write it in your own words. And then you won’t have ‘yeoman rats’ to make you so cross.”

Any moment now one of his staff of leadies would come clanking in with blank white paper; he was sure he possessed it, somewhere. And if he didn’t he could swap some item with a neighbor, make a trip, surrounded and protected, of course, by his entourage of leadies, to the demesne and villa to the south, that of Ferris Granville. Ferris would have paper; he had told them on the open-channel vidline last week, composing his—god forbid—memoirs. Whatever in, on or over Earth memoirs were.

The aud-track grew; the drums drifted foward and the camera, no doubt from an eye-spy Wes-Dem satellite, panned up on one great public building, library, church, school or bank; perhaps all of these combined. It showed, somewhat slowed down, the solidity of the structure as it demolecularized. Objects have been carried back to their dust-origin again. And it could have been us up there, not leadies, because he himself had lived a year in Detroit as a child.

“I want you to certify the death papers,” Carol said, walking toward the elevator. “For poor old Maury—” “But why now?” There was more; he knew it. She said nothing; both of them were silent on the trip down to the clinic, to the freeze locker in which the rigid body lay—he glanced under the wrapper briefly, then emerged from the locker to sign the forms which Carol had laid out, five copies in all, neatly typed and ready to be sent up by vidline to the bureaucrats on the surface. Then, from the buttoned front of her white smock, Carol brought forth a tiny electronic instrument which he recognized as a you-don’t-know-I-have-it aud-recorder. She extracted the spool of tape, unlocked the steel drawer of a cabinet of what appeared to be medical supplies—and exposed to his sight, briefly, other spools of tape and other electronic instruments, none of them related as far as he could see to her medical work.

Carol said, “If leadies are fighting the war, what are in the military hospitals? Leadies? No. Because they send damaged leadies down to shops, our shop for instance. And a leady is a metal construct and it has no pancreas. There are a few humans on the surface, of course; the Estes Park Government. And in Pac-Peop, the Soviet. Are the pancreases for them?” He was silent; she had him completely. “Something,” she said, “is wrong. There can’t be military hospitals because there aren’t civilians or soldiers who’ve been maimed in the fighting and who need artiforgs. Yet—they won’t release the artiforgs to us. To me, for instance, for Souza; even though they know we can’t survive without Souza. Think about it, Nick.” “Hmm,” he said. Carol said quietly. “You’re going to have to come up with something better than ‘Hmm,’ Nick. And soon.”

And then, beyond the Mississippi, he saw a manmade focus of upright, hard structures, and these, too, gave him a funny feeling. Because these were the Ozymandias-who-he? great conapt dwellings erected by that busy builder, Louis Runcible. That one-man ant army that, in its marches, did not gnaw down with its mandibles but set up, with its many metal arms, one gigantic dormlike structure, including kids’ playgrounds, swimming pools, Ping-Pong tables and dart boards. Ye shall know the truth, Adams thought, and by this thou shalt enslave. Or, as Yancy would put it, “My fellow Americans. I have before me a document so sacred and momentous that I am going to ask you to—” And so on.

“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.

“So now,” Adams said, “we have fully representative weapons and bones. At last. The conjectures of thirty years ago have been verified and this is a moment of vast scientific import.” He walked to the window, pretended to look out. The conapt builder Louis Runcible, when notified of the finds, would guess wrong—would suspect that they had been planted on his land so that he would lose that land; and, guessing wrong, would conceal the finds and continue with his digging and construction work. Whereupon— Motivated by loyalty to science rather than to his “employer” and that industrial magnate’s greed, Robert Hig would “reluctantly” leak the discovery of the artifacts to the Estes Park Government.

But Runcible would not merely lose his land. It would be a prison sentence for forty to fifty years, depending on the skill of the Estes Park Government’s attorneys before the Council. And the Precious Relics Ordinance, as the law was called, had been tested by a number of Yance-men various times; discoveries of magnitude which had deliberately gone unreported and then been found out—the council would throw the book at Runcible and he would be wiped out; the economic empire which he had built up, his conapts all over the world, would revert to public domain: this was the punitive clause of the Precious Relics Ordinance, the clause that gave it such fierce gnashing teeth. The person convicted under the ordinance not only went to prison—he forfeited his holdings in toto.

Aloud he said, “Lindblom, I’m standing with my back to Brose. Therefore he can’t hear me. You can. I want you to casually turn your back to him; don’t move toward me—just turn so your face is toward me and not toward him. And then for god’s sake tell me why.” After a moment he heard Lindblom stir. Then say, “Why what, Joe?” “Why are they after Runcible?” Lindblom said, “Didn’t you know?” At the desk Brose said, “Nobody’s facing me; please turn so we can continue the mapping of this project.” “Say,” Adams grated, staring out the window of the office at the other buildings of the Agency. “They think Runcible is systematically tipping off one ant tank after another,” Lindblom said. “To the fact that the war is over. Someone is. They know that. Webster Foote and his field people found that out during routine interviews of a group of tankers who surfaced a month or so ago.” Brose complained with growing peevish suspicion, “What’s going on? You two are conversing.”

Joseph Adams trembled. Because, unlike Brose, unlike Verne Lindblom and probably Robert Hig and anyone and everyone else connected with this project—he had a dreadful intuition that it was all a mistake. And his intuition was not going to halt the project. Not one bit. Again turning his back to Brose, Adam said, “Lindblom, they may be wrong. It may not be Runcible.” There was no answer. Lindblom could not respond because he was, at the moment, facing Brose, who now, on his feet, was waddling and groping his way, supported by a magnesium crutch, toward the office door, mumbling as he departed. “Honest to god,” Adams said, staring fixedly out the window, “I’ll write the articles, but if it isn’t him, I’m going to tip him off.” He turned, then, toward Lindblom, tried to read his reaction. It was not there to read. But Lindblom had heard.

All it would take would be one who got away, wasn’t picked up by Brose’s agents or Footemen, made his way back to his own ant tank. Then, from it, contacted a neighboring tank, then from that tank to—” “Yeah,” Lindblom agreed, stolidly. “Sure. Why not? Except would his fellow tankers let him back into his tank? Wouldn’t they think he was hot or had—what name did we make up to call it?—the Bag Plague. They’d massacre him on sight. Because they believe the reading matter we give them on TV every damn day of the week and twice on Saturday night, just in case; they’d think he was a living missile. And anyhow, there’s more you don’t know. You ought to hand over a few bucks to the Foote organization now and then; pick up a little inside news. These tankers that had been tipped off about conditions up here—they weren’t tipped off by anybody they knew; it wasn’t one of their own members coming back.” “Okay, the tanker couldn’t reach his own tank; so instead—” “They got it,” Lindblom said, “over the coax.” For a moment Adams failed to understand; he stared at Lindblom. “That’s right,” Lindblom said. “On their TV set. For about one minute, and very feeble. But enough.”

But he could hardly blame Lindblom for being upset. Because all the Yance-men had this streak. They were selfish; they had made the world into their deer park at the expense of the millions of tankers below; it was wrong and they knew it and they felt guilt—not quite enough guilt to cause them to knock off Brose and let the tankers up, but enough guilt to make their late evenings a thrashing agony of loneliness, emptiness, and their nights impossible. And they knew that if anyone could be said to be amending the crime committed, the theft of an entire planet from its rightful owners, it was Louis Runcible. They gained by keeping the tankers down, and he gained by luring them up; the Yance-man elite confronted Runcible as an antagonist, but one whom they knew, deep down inside, was morally in the right.

“How can you face it,” Adams asked the dark young new Yance-man, who did not even have a demesne, yet, who lived in a lethal hot-spot by night, dying, being scorched, suffering, but still doing this superb job, “how can you openly discuss the fact that those tankers down there are systematically deprived of what they’re entitled to? You actually said it in your speech.” He remembered Lantano’s exact words as they had issued from the firm-jawed mouth of the Yancy. What you have, Talbot Yancy, the synthetic and in a sense actually nonexistent Protector, told the tankers—would be telling them in a couple of weeks, when the tape had passed Geneva’s scrutiny as of course it would—is not enough. Your lives are incomplete, in the sense that Rousseau had meant when he talked of man having been born in one condition, born brought into the light free, and everywhere was now in chains. Only here, in this day and age, as the speech had just pointed out, they had been born onto the surface of a world and now that surface with its air and sunlight and hills, its oceans, its streams, its colors and textures, its very smells, had been swiped from them and they were left with tin-can submarine—figuratively—dwelling boxes in which they were squeezed, under a false light, to breathe repurified stale air, to listen to wired obligatory music and sit daylong at work-benches making leadies for a purpose which—but even Lantano could not go on here. Could not say, for a purpose you don’t know. For...

And—” And here the Yancy, in all its pomp and dignity, the authority of its words that reached so many, many human beings in so many anywhere in the world tanks, had said, “—you, my fellow Americans in subsurface shelters, you have not got even this moment to cling to. To remember or anticipate or enjoy, this short flight through the lighted hall. Brief as it is, you are entitled to it, and yet, because of a terrible madness fifteen years ago, a hell-night, you are doomed; you are paying every day for the insanity that drove you from the surface exactly as the whips of the furies drove our two grandparents from the original garden eons ago. And this is not right. Somehow, one day, I assure you, the alienation will end. The abridgment of your reality, the deprivation of your rightful life—with the swiftness said to accompany the last trump’s first sound, this terrible calamity, this inequity will be abolished. When it comes it will not be gradual. It will hurl you all, expel you, even if you resist it, back to your own land that is waiting for you above, awaiting your claim. My fellow Americans, your claim is staked and we guard it; we are the securing agents only for the present. But everything up here will disappear and you will come back. And even the memory, even the idea of us who are up here now, will forever vanish.” And the Yancy simulacrum had finished, “And you will not be able to curse us because you will not even recall that we existed.”

He looked tired, more so even than Lindblom had; they were all tired, all of their class. What a great burden, Adams thought, the luxury of this way we live. Since no one makes us suffer we have elected to volunteer. He saw this on Lantano’s face, as he had seen it, or something like it, on Verne Lindblom’s. But not on Brose’s, he thought suddenly. The man with the most power and responsibility feels the least—if he feels any—weight. No wonder they all trembled; no wonder their nights were bad. They served—and knew it—a bad master.

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’s 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.

To Colleen he said, “I’ve learned the thing from these spools of Fischer’s two documentaries of 1982 that I’m supposed to learn, so I guess I can knock off.” He rose, picked up the spools. “What I learned was this. Earlier today I saw and heard a speech by a twenty-two-year-old young new Yance-man and it scared me, and then I scanned these two versions of Fischer’s 1982 documentary, and what I learned was this.” She waited, expectantly, with feminine, earth-mother patience. “Even Fischer,” he said, “the greatest of us all, couldn’t have competed with David Lantano.” This was what he had learned, certainly.

“My articles,” Adams said, “aren’t even in rough, yet. And here you have all the completed artifacts themselves.” He had, in fact, merely begun page one of article one; it would be days before he finished the batch of three, turned them over to the Agency’s shops to be printed up into their magazine form, combined with other, probably authentic, scientific articles of thirty years ago, in prewar issues of Natural World. “Don’t fret,” the ancient sagging mass in the motor-driven chair which was Stanton Brose muttered at him. “We don’t need to produce the issues of Natural World until our legal staff hauls Runcible up before the Recon Dis-In Council, and that’ll take time; do them as quickly as you can, but we can go ahead and have these objects buried—we don’t need to wait on you, Adams.” He added, gratuitously, “Thank god.”

Brose said, “I certainly would like to see Louis Runcible’s face when you show him those finds.” His rubbery old eyes were wet with anticipation. “You will,” Lindblom reminded him. “Since Hig will have one of those shirt-button cameras going, complete with aud track. So when the litigation begins we can supply proof that Runcible was not ignorant of either the discoveries or their scientific value.” His voice was faintly edged with contempt—contempt for an aging brain which could not retain all the facts, which had already forgotten this vital part of the project.

Around him the four bearded men continued to stare. “How could I not recognize him?” Nicholas said, then. “I’ve seen him on TV for fifteen years, three or four and even five nights a week.” After a time Jack Blair said, “But—the thing is, there is no Talbot Yancy.” One of the other men spoke up, explaining. “See, what it is, is that it’s a fake; you know?” “What is?” Nicholas said, and yet he did know; he sensed the enormity of it in a flash: a fake so vast that it could not even be described. It truly beggared description; it was hopeless for these men to try and he was going to have to see, to experience it, for himself. Jack Blair said, “What you’re looking at on your TV screen every night, down there in—what’d you say? The Tom Mix?—down in your tank, what you call ‘Yancy,’ the Protector, that’s a robot.” “Not even a robot,” one of the other bearded men corrected. “Not even independent, or what they call intrinsic or homeo; it’s just a dummy that sits there at that desk.” “But it talks,” Nicholas said, reasonably. “It says heroic things. I mean, I’m not arguing with you. I just don’t understand.”

“Is all the world like this?” He gestured at the ruins of Cheyenne around them. “Radioactive? Just rubble?” “Oh hell no,” Blair said agitatedly. “This is a hot-spot; there now aren’t very many left. The rest is a park. They’ve made the world into a great park and it’s split up into their demesnes, their estates; they, the Yance-men—they each have entourages of leadies. Like Medieval kings. It’s sort of interesting.” His voice died away. “But I mean, it’s not fair. At least I don’t think so.” The other bearded men nodded vigorously; they agreed. It was not fair. No doubt of that.

Obviously there was no more hostility between East and West. Eisenbludt was no longer an “enemy” film producer as he had been at the time Nicholas St. James and his wife Rita and his kid brother Stu had been prodded virtually at gun-point into descending into the Tom Mix for what they had believed, at the time, to be for perhaps a year at the longest . . . or, as real pessimists had forecast, two years. Fifteen. And out of that fifteen— “Tell me exactly,” Nicholas said, “when the war ended. How many years ago?” “It’s going to make you hurt,” Blair said. “Say. Anyhow.” Blair nodded. “Thirteen years ago. The war lasted only two years on Earth, after the first one year on Mars. So—thirteen years you’ve been snow-jobbed, Nicholas, or whatever you said; sorry, I forgot again. Nick. How’s that: Nick.”

In fact Foote could not recall ever having seen Brose—or anybody—so messy in their emotionality. So out of control. Foote thought, This special project must have been a critical endeavor. Could it conceivably have been directed at the absolute and total elimination of Louis Runcible? In other words, could we have witnessed here the instigation of the final showdown between Brose and the fabulous empire-building conapt constructor? Instigation—and rapid collapse! My lord, Foote thought mildly, my field rep, in talking to Louis Runcible, and I myself in vidphone conversation with him, obtained no impression that he was preparing such enormously precise and effective steps by which to protect himself. Louise Runcible had seemed utterly unaware—even unconcerned—as to what was being prepared to ensnare him . . . how then could he have responded so decisively, and in such short a time?

But the bedroom contained no such man. In that or any other state. The dead man, peaceful, under his covers, was alone in the room—he and Webster Foote: no one else. And, as Foote made his way cautiously into the adjoining room, through which entry, by the window, had originally been made, he saw no one there either. Behind him his two trained leadies followed; he saw no one there and they saw no one there and they at once began opening side doors, poking into a bathroom with wondrous mosaiclike tile, then two closets. “He got away,” Foote said, aloud. His two leadies said nothing; no comment was indicated. Returning to the phalanx of Lindblom leadies guarding the bedroom hall door, Foote said, “Inform your type VI below that they came too late.” “Yes, Mr. Foote,” the in-charge leady said, and did so. “The response,” it informed him in its metallic, gracious manner, “is that such could not be. The killer of Mr. Lindblom is in the bedroom area; anything else is impossible.” “According to your kind of deduct leady logic, perhaps,” Foote agreed. “But empirical fact says otherwise.”

On the floor rested a portable TV set. Bending, he took hold of it by the handle, ignoring the possible loss of fingerprints; it was unlikely that the murderer had involved himself in moving a TV set around. The TV set was too heavy. He could lift it, but with difficulty. Aloud, Foote said, “This is it.” Within the room’s closet, engaged in unlocking the unit which contained the brain-pattern record, if any, one of Lindblom’s leadies said, “Pardon, sir?” Foote said, “This is the killer. This TV set.”

He had, then, a bleak precog hunch. It was going to take days, even weeks, to get at the works within this “TV set.” Even under the pressure of his many, varied shop assists. Here in his hands he had the death instrument. But a hell of a lot of good it was going to do him.

“You can stop, now,” Foote said to his two leadies. “But sir,” one of them said, “we may also find—” “That’s all,” Foote said. “All which the standard model 2004 Eisenwerke Gestalt-macher produces. Voice, fingerprints, hairs, drop of blood, fiber of clothing, indication of body weight and idiosyncratic Alpha-wave brain emanation pattern—that’s the extent and that’s sufficient. Based on those, any reasonably adequate computer can pop a signal card; you’ve got seven factors of delineation.” And actually six were unnecessary. The brain-emanation pattern alone—if not the fingerprints—was adequate. This was what annoyed him about this wartime West German invention; it overdid its job. Ninety percent of its circuitry, its activities, could have been left out—in which event as portable TV receiver it would have tended to possess the proper weight. But that was the German mentality, their love of the Gestalt, the complete picture.

And there, where the original Kremlin had once stood—before the U.S. Queen Dido self-guiding missile of World War Three had abolished it down to the last particle of old red brick—lay Marshal Harenzany’s villa, the second largest demesne on Earth. Brose’s demesne, in Geneva, of course was by far the larger. Yet still this vast park with its mighty and palacelike, look-on-my-works-ye-mighty-and-despair central buildings was impressive. And Harenzany’s demesne did not have that black, befouled quality of Brose’s, the sense of some evil thing hanging upside down with ragged, aged wings. Like his counterpart in Wes-Dem the marshal was underneath it all a soldier, not a pol-com ex mero motu sybarite. Just the ordinary stag-party extraordinary sybaritic type. A man who liked to live. But also, like General Holt, he remained, despite his nominal control of an army of veteran leadies, under the yoke of Brose.

Nicholas, despite his fatigue from the four-hour hike to Cheyenne from the tunnel, managed to keep up. Hoping, as he trudged on, that it was not far. “You’ve never seen a demesne villa, have you?” Lantano said. “I’ve never even seen a demesne,” Nicholas said. “Then I’ll fly you over a few of them,” Lantano said. “By flapple. It will interest you, the view from above; you’ll think it’s a park—no roads, no cities. Very pretty, except that the animals are all dead. All gone. Forever.” They trudged on. Overhead, the satellite had almost disappeared beyond the line of the horizon, into the gray smoglike haze that, Nicholas realized, would remain in suspension for generations to come.

To Foote, the harassed Yance-man Joseph Adams said, “You fed the clue data to the Moscow computer and it popped Brose’s card. So in your mind Brose is innocent, because the clues are spurious, laid down by a Gestalt-macher; someone hostile to both Lindblom and Brose did it.” Eying him, wondering how he knew this, Foote said, “Hmm.”

With a pencil he drew lines connecting the three indicated arsenals, then, with the edge of a book plucked from a nearby table, he measured off a line which ended at the hypothetical locus which would transform the visible triangle into a square. In five hours, Foote realized, I can have a work detail of leadies digging at that spot; they can sink a shaft and in fifteen minutes determine if a fourth depot, that of medical, hospital emergency equipment, exists there. The chances are—he calculated. About forty percent favorable. But—digs had been essayed on far slimmer evidence in the past, and by his corporation. Some paid off; some did not. But it would be of incalculable value if he were to locate a store of artiforgs. Even a few, three or four . . . even that meager handful would break Brose’s monopoly.

The flapple, at Adams’s instruction, began its spiral down. Toward the spot where Nicholas St. James, the ex-tanker, dug with the assistance of David Lantano’s leadies, seeking the possible buried U.S. Army prewar medical storehouse and the artiforgs—if they existed, and if this was the correct spot—somewhere below the surface. Once landed, Adams made his way toward the diggings. Off to one side, the ex-tanker Nicholas St. James sat among cartons and boxes and Adams realized that the location had proved correct. The U.S. Army dump had been located; already prewar supplies were being recovered. It was, in Yance-man argot, Christmas morning.

Jorgenson said, “We’ve already notified Carol by intercom that it is you; she ought to be here any second. Be patient. Souza’s deep in the freeze; he can wait another hour. She’ll graft in the pancreas sometime around midday. Meanwhile we’re all supposed to take off all our clothes, pile them up, then outside the door there’s this chamber we built down in the shops; we’ll pass through it, naked, one by one, and jets of ‘cide of different types will—” To Nicholas, Adams said, “I never, I just never realized. How completely they accept it. It’s incredible.” He seemed dazed. “We thought of it I guess as an intellectual acceptance. But this.” He gestured. “All the way,” Nicholas said, nodding. “In every emotional level. Down to the basic phobic animal level; to the very deepest layer.” He began to remove his clothes, resignedly. Until the time arrived to tell them, there was no choice; the ritual had to be gone through. At last, as if prodded by a remote reflex of some dim, uncertain source, Adams, too, began unbuttoning his shirt.

“You think,” Nicholas said, “that the biggest lie is still to come?” After a long, visibly tormented pause Adams said, “Yes.” “They can’t just tell the truth?” “The what? Listen, Nick; whoever they are, whatever combination out of all the possible crazy bedfellow conniving, double-dealing deals and deal-outs, whatever group or person has gotten its paws, temporarily anyhow, on the winning cards, after his long day of—whatever took place; they have a job, Nick: they have the job, now. Of explaining away an entire planet of green, neatly trimmed, leady-gardener cared-for park. This is it. And not just satisfactorily explaining it to you or me or a couple of ex-tankers here or there but to hundreds and hundreds of millions of hostile, really furious skeptics who are going to scrutinize every single word that ever issues out of a TV set—by anybody!—from this moment forever into the future. Would you like that job, Nick? Just exactly how well would you like to have to do that?” “I wouldn’t,” Nicholas said.