CHAPTER 1 : III

Bill, Jerry and I slipped into a booth at the tavern near the plant. Looking across the table at Jerry, I marveled at how well he was keeping up the act, the casual off-hours good-fellowship. As for me, I felt sure my tense nerves were showing.

While Jerry called Bill’s attention to the waitress’ walk, I droрped a little, fast-dissolving white tablet into Bill’s drink.

As he picked it up and sipped, I felt a qualm which I ruthlessly stifled. This test had to be made. We—Jerry and I, since I’d taken him into my confidence as a man I could trust and a wizard at organic chemistry—had studied the lie soap formula backward and forward. We’d analyzed samples of it I’d obtained from Grandma, and isolated—or so we thought—the active ingredients. But we had to know, and we could hardly experiment on animals.

Bill set down an empty glass. I grew tenser. Jerry inquired, “Another?” and when Bill shook his head, asked the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “So—you’ve decided to quit lushing around, and get some work done for a change?”

That was one of the trick questions we’d settled on—a variation of the old “Have you stopped beating your wife?” formula. If Bill had been quite normal, he’d have answered, “Hell no,” or, “Yeah, guess I better,” or some answer as jocular and meaningless as the question. But if our elixir of lie soap worked, he’d answer—with a peculiar, embarrassed gulp of hesitation: “But I don’t lush around, and I get a good deal of work done.”

Which was what he did say. Because it was the truth, silly and pompous as it sounded there and then.

I could see Jerry rallying himself to ask some more telling questions, and I knew he was feeling an emotion exactly like mine—exultation curiously mixed with shame.

Both of us realized at that moment, I guess, that it was going to mean no more friendly kidding over a couple of beers, no more harmless insults and bragging, no more fish stories.... But of course there’s always a price.

I went to O’Brien.

He heard me out without changing expression. When I’d laid all the cards on the table, he said slowly, “If this stuff will really do what you say—”

“It will,” I assured him. “It has.”

“In that case, my young scientific friend, do you realize what you’re asking me to do? I’ve spent twenty years in the advertising game. You might say I’ve devoted my life to it. Now you want me to help you with a scheme that’ll wipe out advertising as we know it—lock, stock, and barrel.”

“I—I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

“In other words,” O’Brien went on, “you’re offering me the fulfillment of my fondest dreams. Shake on it, kid!”

Then he settled back and grew thoughtful. “But it isn’t going to be easy. I guess you still have trouble believing it, but I can’t just walk into a sales conference and say, ‘See here, I’ve got wind of a prоduct that’s the greatest boon to humanity since fire and the wheel,’ and expect them to fall all over me. We need a good promotion angle.”

“There’s got to be some way.”

“Keep your shirt on. I’ll find one, I haven’t been in the business for twenty years for nothing. But one thing anyway. Until this deal is swung, keep your witch’s brew away from me!”

The convincer came, after all, from an idea I had. But it was O’Brien who saw the possibilities and, by dint of massive doses of double-talk and cajolery, arranged for a test survey of a hundred volunteer subjects. These human guinea pigs were furnished gratis with a thirty days’ supply of a new toothpaste—a standard base, plus Grandma’s lie soap—and, when the time was up, were quizzed as to their reactions to the experiment.

Almost without exception, they professed themselves well pleased. Of course, that was what the sales department wanted to hear about satisfied customers.

As to why our subjects felt better after trying a new dentifrice, they couldn’t say because they didn’t know. It was merely that their outlook on life seemed to have become sunnier, and their personal relations more agreeable—apart from a few unfortunate domestic upsets, about which, however, the victims themselves seemed remarkably cheerful.

I thought I knew why. My pet theory was working out. Though I was no psychologist, I’d always been sure that a lot of people’s mental difficulties and prevailing unhappiness was due solely to their inveterate habit of deceiving themselves. But these people who’d tried Grandma’s lie soap couldn’t even lie to themselves any more.

This outcome made our brave new world look braver in prospect—as well as likelier. A couple of days later the company’s directors made the decision to go into production; and it was rumored that another of the biggest firms was already dickering for a look at the formula.

We had no trouble with the Bureau of Standards. After all, we only had to satisfy them that the stuff was harmless. Presumably they tried it on mice....

To celebrate the directors’ decision, I invited Alice and her new fiancé to dinner. I was rather vague about what we were celebrating, so that they left no wiser than when they came. But they were much more candid, since I had a supply of the little white tablets on hand.

I gave the leaven most of the evening to work, and at eleven o’clock called Alice’s apartment. I’d timed it correctly. She was in. In tears, too—judging by her voice.

“You and he must have said some pretty nasty things to each other,” I remarked sympathetically. “Too bad about the engagement.”

“Oh, it was awful! He said—he admitted that if it weren’t for my b-bosom—And I told him—oh, how could I say that? But Oliver, how did you know?”

“I saw it coming. And now you’re home all alone, and sort of wishing I was there to console you ... aren’t you?”

There was one of those pauses I’d learned to recognize. Then she said strangledly, “Y-yes. I was. I am. But Oliver—people don’t-”

“Sometimes they do,” I said. “Hold on. I’ll be right up.”

When a woman has once told the truth to a man, either everything is over between them, or everything has just begun.

From then on the story is mostly history.

Gorley and Gorley’s new improved toothpaste with Verolin began outselling all other brands. Other companies saw that the new ingredient—for reasons nobody quite understood—was becoming more indispensable than chlorophyll had been somewhat earlier, and paid through the nose for the right to use it. G and G added a Verolin mouthwash to their line, and it was also a snowballing success. All the time, of course, Verolin was really Grandma’s lie soaр.

These products blanketed the country and went into the export market. They went all over civilization, if you define civilization as those regions of the Earth where people use toothbrushes and seek to avoid halitosis—or, anyway, all over what was then called “the free world” by its inhabitants and “the enslaved world” by the publicists of the “free world” on the other side.

The returns began coming in.