The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick Page B

him, shattering his taut attention; he sat back, glanced up, found himself confronted by Colleen.
     
         "Wait," he said to her. "Don't say anything. For just one second." Again he put his eyes to the scanner, fervid and frightened, like some poor tanker, he thought, who in his phobic terror has caught--imagines, rather--the Stink of Shrink, the olfactory harbinger of death. But I am not imagining this; Joseph Adams knew. And the horror inside him grew until he could stand not a bit more; and yet he continued to watch, and all the time, Alexander Sourberry murmured and whispered away, and Joseph Adams thought, _Is this how it feels down below, to them? If they get the intimation, the scent, of what it truly is they're seeing? That what is given them is our adaptation of this_--and this petrified him.
     
         Sourberry purred, "A loyal American Secret Serviceman took these remarkable sequences with a telescopic-lens camera disguised as a collar button; that is why these particular moments are a trifle blurred."
     
         And, a trifle blurred, as Sourberry had said, two figures moved together along a rampart. Roosevelt and--Josef Stalin, the latter standing, Roosevelt in a wheelchair with a robe over his lap, pushed by a uniformed servant.
     
         "Special long-range microphonic equipment," Sourberry purred, "in the loyal Secret Serviceman's possession, permitted him to pick up--"
     
         Okay, Joseph Adams thought. It seems fine. Camera the size of a collar button; who in 1982 remembered that no such miniaturized spy gadget existed in 1944? So that gets by unchallenged--got by, when this horrible thing was put on the coax to all Wes-Dem. No one wrote in to the Washington, D.C. government and said, "Dear Sirs: Regarding the 'collar button' camera of the 'loyal Secret Serviceman' at Yalta; this is to inform you that--" No, this hadn't happened; or if it had the letter had quietly been buried . . . if not the person who had written it.
     
         "What episode are you looking at, Joe?" Colleen asked.
     
         Again he sat back, stopped the spool. "The great scene. Where FDR and Stalin agree to sell out the Western Democracies."
     
         "Oh yes." She nodded, seated herself beside him. "The blurred, long-distance shot. Who could forget that? It's been drummed into us--"
     
         "You realize," he said, "of course, what the flaw in it is."
     
         "We were _taught_ what the flaw was. Brose himself, and since he was alive and Fischer's pupil--"
     
         "Nobody now," Adams said, "makes errors like that. In preparing reading matter. We've learned; we're more expert. Want to watch? Listen?"
     
         "No thanks. I frankly don't care for it."
     
         Adams said, "I don't care for it either. But it fascinates me; it fascinates me in that it got by--and was accepted." Again putting his eyes to the scanner he started the spool up.
     
         On the aud-track the voices of the two blurred figures could be made out. A high background hiss--proof of the long-range aspect of the hidden mike employed by the "loyal Secret Serviceman" --made it a little hard to understand, but not impossible.
     
         Roosevelt and Stalin were, in this version A scene, talking in English; Roosevelt with his Harvard intonations, Stalin in heavy, Slavic-accented, guttural near-grunts.
     
         You therefore could understand Roosevelt better. And what he had to say was quite important, inasmuch as he was saying, candidly, not knowing about the "hidden mike," that he, Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States, was--a Communist agent. Under Party discipline. He was selling out the U.S. to his boss Josef Stalin, and his boss was saying, "Yes, comrade. You understand our needs; it is arranged that you will hold back the Allied armies in the West so that our Red Army can penetrate deeply enough into Central Europe, in fact to Berlin to establish Soviet mastery as