Chapter V

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.

But ... people look one another in the eyes much more than they ever used to. They don’t seem afraid. There’s confidence--not the ballooning confidence that led to big economic booms and bigger busts, but a trust resting on solid foundations.

Still, sometimes I wonder.

Not long ago I ran into O’Brien, for the first time in years, in a bar. People don’t drink as much as they did, but O’Brien had been drinking a good deal.

“How are you?” I said automatically, the sight of such a long-remembered face making me forget that that particular greeting wasn’t used nowadays.

He began a detailed description of his general state of health and present state of intoxication. “Oh,” I said. “You’ve had it.”

“Yeah,” said O’Brien. “I broke down and took the treatment. I got like everybody else. I couldn’t stand the temptation any more. You know what I mean?”

I knew exactly what he meant. For him, with his background, it must have been much worse.

“Maybe,” said O’Brien thickly, “I could have been dictator of the world if I’d wanted. But this way’s better.” He signaled the waiter, then looked at me curiously. “You--not yet?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Maybe never. I like to watch things.”

“Watch the sheep run,” mumbled O’Brien. “All sheep....”

* * * * *

He was drunk, but he’d had Grandma’s lie soap, and he spoke the truth.

Perhaps there’s too much confidence.

Once in a while I yield a little to that temptation O’Brien mentioned, but always in harmless ways, merely for amusement or out of curiosity to see just how much people _will_ swallow. Like in that fabrication of Howling Wolf, the genius of the North Woods, which I told you about in the beginning. More and more I find that they’ll believe almost anything, especially the younger generation. Older people still have a residuum of skepticism.

Now it’s plain--using hindsight--that we should easily have foreseen the secondary effect. But it developed very slowly. No physiological effect, this, but a psychological one--or simply logical. Once people stop lying, they’ll also stop suspecting deceit. They’ll believe as they expect to be believed. Little by little, particularly as the young ones who don’t remember grow up, they’ll become totally--gullible, it used to be called.

A while back, down South, there was an unwashed prophet who made converts right and left to а weird sect of his own devising--until somebody seduced him into heathenish ways, and he tried brushing his teeth. But incidents like that don’t really disturb me. As the example shows, they all come out in the wash.

Yet there is something that bothers me. Back before Grandma’s lie soap, we used to get sporadic reports of “mysterious airships”, “Flying saucers”, or similarly named equivalents for unexplained objects in the sky. We laughed them off, mostly, because people were always starting crazy rumors.... After the great change, those reports might have been expected to stop coming.

But they didn’t.

And more recently there have been some queer phenomena noted by the space station and the bubbles on the Moon.

So suppose we’re not alone in the Universe or even in the Solar System? And suppose that whoever is out there--circling us, observing us with immense caution for so long--are beings like _we_ used to be--fierce, wary, enormously suspicious as their behavior suggests, capable of any falsehood, any treachery?

Wolves, circling the sheep....

Perhaps it’s all my imagination. I can’t be sure. There’s only one way I can be sure even of what I think myself.

Pretty soon now I’ll go into the bathroom and wash my mouth with Grandma’s lie soap. Then I’ll look into the mirror and ask myself, face to face, with no possibility of deception: _Did I do right?_

What will my answer be?

Transcriber’s note:

This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe, February 1956 (Vol. 5, No. 1.). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but minor inconsistencies have been retained as printed.