Chapter V

All the wrong things were in the face of the man I saw approaching now, through the tube from the elevator. You know how you can spot the dreamers? I could see it on this one 50 yards away, and I swore, because it was almost time for my shift to end.

He came on, hurrying with that expression in his eyes, a little girl trotting after him. They were father and daughter. Both had the look, though he seemed a little old to have a young child.

He passed the outer gate well enough, fumbling his ID against the lockplate and fidgeting during the seconds it took for preliminary verification to come. The lock clicked and he burst in, pulling the girl after him.

"We wish to report ..." he began. I waved at him to shut up. "Name, number and duty," I said. "That's the routine." Of course the information had typed out from the banks before he got in.

"Oh. I'm sorry." I think he really was. "My name is Karl Onlon, professor of elementary biology, downstairs." That meant he tended a teaching machine at the center mid-town branch of the university. "Number ... my number is--" and he peered at his ID "--ah, US1006-929 113 274CE."

The point of asking for name, number and duty is to let the Source cool down a bit. He had, a little, so I said, "Okay, what's your story?"

"We wish to report signs of the presence of a herd of small ruminant animals in Central Park Memorial Plaza," he said. He waved toward the patch of white-mottled brown about a kilometer away, where dirt and rocks and a whole lake had been raised to rooftop level for an open-air park. Naturally, that was done when pointless things were still being done.

"What you tell me doesn't matter as far as appearing in the _Sun_ is concerned," I told him. "But I have to know details before I can pass you in to the Scoop. The World Press Association decides on the stories." He nodded. "You are the Source?"

"Ah ... actually, no," Onlon said. "I'm the Second. My daughter Gini--" he'd been standing with his arm around the little girl, and squeezed her shoulder "--is the, uh, Source. But she is a very sensible person, and I will vouch for--Second--anything she tells you."

Truly, I was already getting a little uncomfortable with this pair. The girl hadn't said anything, but she stood looking grave and important, and something else too, up at her father. Open pride, it looked like. Yet sometimes she almost smiled. He was earnest enough, except when he looked down at her.

I was weighing all this while I listened with half an ear to the story. This wasn't a Flack, or a Flack's trick. That I was certain of. You can tell. Deviates don't come in father-daughter pairs, so it wasn't an obscenity kick. And this wasn't a Scoop-smash.

I didn't think it was a news story, either. But Onlon seemed quite convinced that this pack of animals that left the tracks was rare, not only in Nork but anywhere. The tracks were distinctive, he said. And the girl, whose voice matched her face, grave yet with a kind of ... happiness in it, did seem sensible. So I passed them in, to the Scoop.

Odd, I thought of Sara as I did it.

"I don't think this will make the paper," I warned them. "Children don't make good Sources. And your being her father weakens the Second. This herd, or whatever it was, could have been a dog or rat pack ... there still are some in Central Park. But the Greeley'll decide. Go on in."

As the glass door swung shut behind them, he held it and said, "They're early, you see." And I swear the little girl giggled.

I watched her reach up to the sensor plate with her ID.

* * * * *

They weren't in the Scoop cubicle long, for Ron Obrin, my relief, reached the top of the elevator just as the girl started to talk into the Scoop, and he was opening the vestibule door when the pair came out. Ron was, of course, on the dot of noon.

The father was talking to the girl as Ron checked in at the time clock. "There, Gini, I promised you, and we tried," I heard him say. She thanked me, still grave and almost smiling, and he thanked me, and they left. I was glad to see them go.

"Quiet morning, Ron," I said. That reminded me of Vern, and Vern's blunder, and suddenly that made me edgy. I went in to the Scoop and tore off the dupe of the Onlon report.

The first warning I had was the slug, "CHURCH," stamped at the end of their transmission on signal from the Greeley. It meant the Greeley had evaluated the transmission and referred it to the editorial level.

And that was wrong, way wrong.

Every trade has its vulgar and, some would say, irreverent catchwords. Actual churches had become pretty rare as Congris took over more and more direction of public life. You can depend on advice you get from a cybernetic system that doesn't stop eating if you stop asking. So as religion dwindled, in the WPA we came to call the Greeley's editorials "sermons," and the ratiocinating levels of the Greeley, "Church." It's rather juvenile, I suppose.

Still the Onlon transmission was slugged "CHURCH." I looked at the father's Second report, and saw why.

"THE STORY I TOLD TO GAIN ENTRANCE HERE WAS A JOKE," he had said. "THERE WERE NO TRACKS OF TINY REINDEER IN CENTRAL PARK MEMORIAL PLAZA ... AT LEAST NONE WHOSE TRACKS I SAW....

"PLEASE ... WHOMEVER THIS MAY CONCERN ... DO NOT BLAME THE REPORTER WHO LET US IN ... HE IS TRAINED ONLY TO RECOGNIZE COLD TRUTH AND COLD LIES ... AND HAS NO EXPERIENCE WITH JOKES ... WHICH ARE NEITHER ... I FULLY UNDERSTAND THAT ... IN OUR SOCIETY ... A JOKE IS A LIE AND A CRIME ... I THINK THAT IS A TRUE CRIME ... THANK YOU....

"AND IME SORRY...."

Bad, bad, bad for me. Beyond a possible editorial about these "jokes," the Church would ignore the matter. But the fact I had passed a lie would show on my performance audit, and it wouldn't look good; even so, the treatment I got from Civil Service would be a lot gentler than the things I was thinking about myself. I doubted that Onlon would even get more than a reprimand--he apparently meant no harm. He would be separated from the child, of course.

As for the girl's transmission, it was shocking and stupid. I jammed the dupe in my belt-pouch, and went out without a word to Ron, to start the trip to Sara and Vermont.

* * * * *

I was poor company when I got there. Sara tried every trick she knew to find out what the trouble was, for naturally I told her there was trouble. But I couldn't yet make myself tell her how I'd been duped, by a professor and a child.

Finally she dragged me off to the Milbry Community Room to, as she said, "dissolve my unwept tears in humanity's soothing sea." Knowing full well it was Crimmuseve didn't help me a bit.

As I feared, the gaiety of Crimmus was rank in the room: a lot of excited talk, snatches of humming. And even, when the Fotofax bell sounded, somebody said, "Ring out, wild bells," and a few people laughed out loud. Though most looked around guiltily.

I got up automatically to get our copies of the _Sun_ as the cubeo announcer went into the WPA opening format:

"An informed people is a free people. Read your _Sun_ and know the truth. Stand by now for an official synopsis of the day's happenings prepared by the World Press Association." That was the standard formula. But then he departed from standard, and it rattled him. I sat next to Sara and watched, interested.

"I have been directed," he said, "to call your full attention to the editorial on the front page of your _Sun_." Good grief, I thought: Church! Surely not the Onlon thing! The announcer looked around him rather wildly, then blurted: "I now turn you over to the Orator, for a direct-voice proclamation of this editorial."

The vocal unit of Church, highest level of the WPA and the actual voice of Congris! The last time it spoke, 2 years ago, it was the Pan-asian War--this couldn't be the Onlon thing. The announcer's image faded from the cubeo prism and was replaced by a soft light, and an organ note as the local station engineers patched to the nationwide WPA circuit. Everyone in the room stared into the light, even Sara, waiting for the voice.

When it came, deep and resonant, I could feel it in my own chest. I could feel too the tension go out of Sara, and feel the sigh she and everyone else sighed, at the end of waiting.

The voice said:

"I speak to you about the question asked by a little girl. I answer her, but my answer is for all children, and women and men, and for all time...."

I almost shouted aloud, in sheer disbelief. It wasn't war, it wasn't even Onlon's joke--it was that silly thing from Onlon's daughter!

* * * * *

I grabbed the dupe up out of my belt-pouch, and read along with that deep, throbbing voice:

"I am eight years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, if you see it in the _Sun_, it's so. Please tell me the truth: is there a Santa Claus?"

And the voice read off the name the way the girl, with her grave little voice, would have formally given it: Virginia O'Hanlon. But what could the Church in all dignity say, to nonsense like that?

"Virginia," said the voice, "your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see...."

I was stunned. The broadcast is a hoax, I thought; a Flack's trick, or an incredible act of sabotage on an entire social system. Barely conscious of Sara sitting raptly beside me, I tried to make sense out of that deep organ note sounding through the roaring in my ears.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," it was saying. "He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist.... How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! There would be no child-like faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished...."

I turned to Sara, tried to speak. She turned to me, eyes shining, and raised her fingertips to my mouth, then went back to the light, and the voice. Over the buzz I heard:

"... there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance can push aside the curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond.

"Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus? Thank God, he lives! and lives forever! A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

The echoes of the voice seemed to ring even after the light had faded and left a roomful of people staring at the place where it had been; then looking up, with widening eyes, into the faces of others.

"I'll be damned," Sara whispered. "I will be damned! or just maybe ... maybe not, after all...."

As I said, I don't know where it will end. Nobody does.

END

End of Project Gutenberg's The Trouble with Truth, by Julian F. Grow