“What do you mean, in times like these?”
“Mister, where you been? Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
“No,” said John MacVeagh dazedly. The daughter-in-law looked after him, not believing her ears.
MacVeagh hardly believed his, either. Not until he reached the metropolis of Zenith was he fully convinced. He studied newspapers there, talked with soldiers and defense workers.
There was no doubt at all. The world was at war.
He guessed the answer roughly. Something about relative truths and spheres of influence. He could work it out clearly later.
His head was spinning as he got back to his parked car. There was a stocky young man in a plain gray suit standing beside it, staring at the name plate GROVER attached to the license.
As MacVeagh started to get in, the young man accosted him. “You from Grover, Mac?”
MacVeagh nodded automatically, and the man slipped into the seat beside him. “We’ve got to have a talk, Mac. A long talk.”
“And who are you?”
“Kruger. FBI.” He flashed a card. “The Bureau is interested in Grover.”
“Look,” said MacVeagh, “I’ve got an appointment at the Zenith Bulletin in five minutes. After that, I’m at your disposal. You can come along,” he added as the G-man hesitated.
“OK, Mac. Start thinking up answers.”
Downtown traffic in Zenith was still fairly heavy, even in wartime. Pedestrian traffic was terrific. MacVeagh pulled his car up in the yellow zone in front of the Bulletin Building. He opened his door and stepped out. Kruger did the same. Then in an instant MacVeagh was back in the driver’s seat and the car was pulling away.
He had the breaks with him. A hole opened up in the traffic just long enough to ensure his getaway. He knew there were too many bystanders for Kruger to risk a shot. Two blocks away, he deliberately stalled the car in the middle of an intersection. In the confusion of the resulting pile-up he managed to slip away unnoticed.
The car had to be abandoned anyway. Where could he get gas for it with no ration coupons? The important thing was to get away with his skin.
For he had realized in an instant that one of Kruger’s first questions would be, “Where’s your draft card, Mac?” And whatever steps he had to take to solve the magnificent confusion which his godhead had created, he could take none of them in Federal prison as a draft evader.
Molly stared at the tramp who had forced his way into the Sentinel office. “Well,” she growled, “what do you want?”
“Molly, don’t you know me?”
“Boss!”
The huskies on either side of him reluctantly relaxed their grips. “You can go, boys,” she said. They went, in frowning dumbness.
MacVeagh spoke rapidly. “I can’t tell it all to you now, Molly. It’s too long. You won’t believe it, but I’ve had the Feds on my tail. That’s why this choice costume, mostly filth. The rods were the only safe route to Grover. And you thought I should take a vacation—”
“But why—”
“Listen, Molly. I’ve made a world of truth, all right. But that truth holds good only where the Sentinel dominates. There’s an imaginary outside to go with it, an outside that sends me dispatches based on my own statements, that maintains banking relations with our banks, that feeds peacetime programs to our radios, and so on, but it’s a false outside, a world of If. The true outside is what it would be without me: a world at war.”
For a moment Molly gasped speechlessly. Then she said, “Mr. Johansen!”
“What about him?”
“You sent him to the Office of Peacetime Reconstruction. That’s in your world of If. What’s become of him?”
“I never thought of that one. But there are problems enough. It isn’t fair to the people here to make them live in an unreal world, even if it’s better than the real one. Man isn’t man all by himself. Man is in and of his time and the rest of mankind. If he’s false to his time, he’s false to himself. Grover’s going to rejoin the world.”
“But how, boss? Are you going to have to start the war all over?”
“I never stopped it except in our pretty dream world. But I’m going to do more than that. I’m going to reveal the whole fake—to call it all a fake in print.”
“Boss!” Molly gasped. “You . . . you realize this is suicide? Nobody’ll ever read the Sentinel again. And suicide,” she added with grim personal humor, “isn’t anything I’d recommend.”
“I don’t count beside Grover. I don’t count beside men. ‘For God,’ ” he quoted wryly, “ ‘so loved the world—’ ”
“This is it,” said John MacVeagh much later.
That edition of the Sentinel had been prepared by a staff of three. The large, fine new staff of the large, fine new Sentinel had frankly decided that its proprietor was mad or drunk or both. Storming in dressed like a bum and giving the craziest orders. There had been a mass meeting and a mass refusal to have anything to do with the proposed all-is-lies edition.
Luke Sellers had filled the breach again. He read the copy and nodded. “You never talked much, Johnny, but I had it figured pretty much like this. I was in at the start, so I guess it’s right I ought to be in at the end.”
This was the end now. This minute a two-sheet edition, its front page one huge headline and its inside pages containing nothing but MacVeagh’s confession in large type, was set up and ready to run.
The confession told little. MacVeagh could not expect to make anyone believe in Whalen Smith and wishes and variable truths. It read simply like the story of a colossal and unparalleled hoax.
“There won’t be enough rails in town for the guys that’ll want to run you out on one, Johnny,” Luke Sellers warned.
“I’m taking the chance. Go ahead: print it.”
The presses clanked.
There was a moment of complete chaos.
Somewhere in that chaos a part of MacVeagh’s mind was thinking. This was what
