The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick Page A

acquire what Lantano had left behind. An ultimate end to Adams pathetic irony: the youth's villa, built at such cost--at the expense of his life-would go to someone else who did not have to build, supervise a gang of leadies day after day .
     
         "I presume," Adams said, "that you get the hell out of Cheyenne as often as is legal." Twelve out of every twenty-four hours, according to Recon Dis-In Council law, had to be spent within the new demesne area.
     
         "I come here. I work. As you see me now." Lantano returned to the keyboard of Megavac 6-V; Adams trailed after him. "As you say, Adams, I have a job to do. I expect to live to perform it." Once more Lantano seated himself at the keyboard, facing his copy.
     
         "Well, at least it hasn't impaired your mind," Adams said.
     
         Smiling, Lantano said, "Thanks."
     
         For one hour Joseph Adams stood by while Lantano fed his speech to Megavac 6-V, and when he had read it all and then, as it emerged from the 'vac to the sim, had heard it actually delivered by the dignified, gray-haired father-figure Talbot Yancy himself, he felt, overwhelmingly, the futility of his own speech. The dreadful contrast.
     
         What he himself gripped in his briefcase was beginner's prattle. He felt like slinking away. Into oblivion.
     
         Where does a barely grown radiation-burned unestablished new Yance-man get such ideas? Adams asked himself. And the ability to express them. And--the knowhow as to exactly what the 'vac's treatment of the copy would result in . . . how it would ultimately emerge as spoken by the sim before the cameras. Didn't it take years to learn this? It had taken _him_ years to learn what _he_ knew. To write a sentence and, after examining it, know approximately--that is, sufficiently accurately--how it would in its terminal stage sound, be. What, in other words, would appear on the TV screens of the millions of tankers subsurface, who viewed and believed, were taken in day after day by what was fatuously called _reading matter_.
     
         A polite term, Adams reflected, for a substance lacking substance. But this wasn't strictly true; as for instance young Dave Lantano's speech here and now. It preserved the essential illusion--in fact, Adams had grudgingly to admit--the illusion of Yancy's reality was heightened. But--
     
         "Your speech," he said to Lantano, "isn't just clever. It has real wisdom. Like one of Cicero's orations." Proudly, he traced his own work to such eminent ancient sources as Cicero and Seneca, to speeches in Shakespeare's history plays, and to Tom Paine.
     
         As he stuffed the pages of his copy back into his own briefcase, David Lantano said soberly, "I appreciate your comment, Adams; especially coming from you it means something."
     
         "Why me?"
     
         "Because," Lantano said, thoughtfully, "I know that, despite your limitations--" He shot Adams a keen, quick glance, then. "--you have sincerely tried. I think you know what I mean. There are things, easyway things and bad things, that you've scrupulously avoided. I've watched you for several years and I've seen the difference between you and most of the others. Brose knows the difference, too, and despite the fact that he axes rather than coaxes much of your stuff, he respects you. _He has to_."
     
         "Well," Adams said.
     
         "Has it frightened you, Adams, to see your best work axed at the Geneva level? After getting that far? Do you find it merely frustrating or--" David Lantano scrutinized him. "Yes, it does frighten you."
     
         After a pause Adams said, "I get scared. But at night, when I'm not here at the Agency but alone with my leadies in my villa. Not when I'm actually writing or feeding it to the 'vac or watching the sim itself . . . not here where--" He gestured. "It's busy. But--always whenever I'm alone." He was silent, then, wondering how he had managed to confide