The Penultimate Truth

by Philip K. Dick

“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...