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Title: Grandma's lie soap
Author: Robert Abernathy
Illustrator: Kelley Freas
Release date: January 9, 2026 [eBook #77659]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1955
Credits: Tom Trussel (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GRANDMA'S LIE SOAP ***
Grandma’s Lie Soap
by Robert Abernathy
_To free Truth from its wrappings with the sparkling irony and
engaging insight of a prophetic pen was the self-appointed task of
Robert Abernathy in this remarkable story. He’s succeeded so well
that we’ll never see a frail old woman hobbling down a country lane
or a cake of homemade soap without bracing ourselves against the
collapse of our world and the coming of the millennium._
=Grandma’s soap was a miracle of miracles under the stars. If you
don’t believe it--just try lying to the flying saucer folk.=
Of course you’ll believe this story. Everybody will. The funny thing is
that it _could_ be a lie....
To make that point clearer: A little while ago I happened to be at a
gathering of literary amateurs and critics, one of those sprawling
aimless affairs where people mill around with drinks in their hands,
congealing in little clusters to talk or listen to somebody talk.
I listened. I heard a serious bespectacled, young man discourse not
unintelligently on Proust, and I heard a plump gentleman make some
safe, sound comments on Faulkner.
Nobody disagreed with them. Nobody argued. Nobody even said, “But--”
I can remember when arguments were the order of the day.
After I’d had a little more of it than I could stand, I spoke up. “Say
what you like about those scribblers,” I declared firmly, “none of them
can hold a candle to Wolf.”
“Thomas?” someone asked--not with the air of being about to contradict
me, but merely as one sincerely, infuriatingly desiring instruction.
“No, _Howling_,” I retorted with flamboyant irony. “Do you mean to say
you never heard of Howling Wolf, the genius of the North Woods, the
greatest author of all time? The one writer who grasped the human soul
in all its depth, breadth, and angular momentum? Who painted Life in
its true colors on a canvas vast as all Nature, with a non-union brush?
Who sounded every note of emotional experience, and rang all the bells
in belles lettres? Who--”
I ran out of breath, paused, and added, “Of course, unfortunately all
of Wolf’s mighty works were written in his native language, which
happened to be Chinook Trade Jargon, and they’ve never been translated.
So if you don’t know the Jargon....”
At my age I should have known better. Naturally, every word I
uttered was gospel but all I got back were earnest requests for more
information about the great Wolf. To explain that I’d just been
kidding--that I say such things experimentally and to keep in practice
as one of the few remaining liars in a truthful world--would have been
worse than useless. It would have been cruelty to talking animals.
I mumbled, “Pardon me,” to all the nice, candid, inquisitive, credulous
faces. I grabbed my hat and pulled it over my eyes, and ducked out. Not
that I imagined I’d get away from the consequences. I could already
envisage how the ripples would spread. For a long while to come I’d
get inquiries in the mail from literary clubs, collectors, compilers
of biographical dictionaries. Probably there’d be a Howling Wolf
Commemorative Society organized, and if I told them he was buried at
the bottom of the Chicago Drainage Canal, they’d go and strew posies
there.
But this is not the story of Howling Wolf. It is the story of Grandma’s
lie soap.
When I first remember Grandma, back when I was one of the numerous
grandchildren--my brothers, sisters, and assorted cousins who overran
the old hill-country farm during vacations--she was already a dried-up
little old lady who couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, with a brown,
wrinkled face and intolerant black eyes.
She ruled the farm with an iron hand and my two taciturn uncles, who
did the heavy work, moved silently about, tending to chores, crops, and
stock in obedience to her orders. The farm thrived, too. Even in bad
years, when other people’s corn was stunted and wells ran dry, nothing
of the sort befell Grandma.
Sometimes--though I didn’t know this until I was older--the neighbors
muttered, and insisted, obviously out of envy, there was something
queer about Grandma. Queerness they detected, I suppose, in her
fondness for cats--which most of the country people tolerated without
affection--and in her long walks in the woods by herself, gathering
plants that she dried and kept in unlabeled jars.
Too, a tradition had it that back in England in the seventeenth century
one of her female ancestors had been accused of bewitching cattle by
the celebrated witchfinder, Mr. Samson Broadforks, who fell ill shortly
afterward of an ailment believed to be foot-and-mouth disease. Be that
as it may, the ancestor in question emigrated to America around that
time.
But we children, of course, saw nothing odd about our Grandma.
Childishly, we assumed that everybody had a grandmother who kept a
piece of lie soap on the high shelf over the washstand.
This was a chunk of strong brown soap, like all the rest of the
boiled-fat products that Grandma made in the old iron wash-kettle after
hog-killing. But it wasn’t ordinary soap. It was made separately and
privately, from some of the herbs that Grandma had in her jars, from a
recipe she kept in her head and nowhere else.
Because, you see, another thing about Grandma was that she couldn’t
abide being lied to. Not, I’m sure, out of any abstract devotion to
Truth, but simply because the idea of anyone fooling _her_ made her
furious. If somebody tried it, and that somebody was one of her own
grandchildren, she knew what to do....
For instance, I can still vividly recall the time when my city cousin
Richard first came visiting on the farm. This Richard was a pale,
supercilious brat who lived in New York City. As soon as he made sure
that no one else on the farm had been similarly blessed, he sized
us up for yokels and set about overawing us with the marvels of the
metropolis.
Grandma, busy round the kitchen range, listened silently for a while.
But we who knew her well could see the storm warnings going up--the
tightening lips and the dangerous gleam in her eye. Richard didn’t
see anything, naturally. He finished describing the George Washington
Bridge and went on to the skyscrapers.
That did it. Grandma slammed a skillet down and fastened a harpy grip
on Richard’s collar. “Come along, young man,” she said grimly. “You
needn’t think you can pull _my_ leg!”
And she wagged him off to the washstand, the rest of us trailing after
in delighted horror.
“Oliver--” Grandma addressed me, because I was already a gangling
thirteen then--“Reach me down the lie soap!”
I did so, gingerly, and before the bawling Richard knew what was
happening he was sputtering through a haze of suds, his mouth
thoroughly washed out with the strong soар.
“Now!” said Grandma briskly, releasing him and stepping back. “Take
a dipper of water, and then answer me: Were you or weren’t you
exaggerating when you said there was buildings there ten miles high?”
Richard opened and closed his mouth. He grew red in the face with
effort. He said, “N... N... Yes, ma’am, I was exaggerating.”
You could see that he was thunderstruck to find that he couldn’t do
anything but tell the truth. Не had yet to learn what the rest of
us knew and took for granted. Once anybody had his mouth washed out
with Grandma’s lie soap, he could never again in this life speak a
falsehood, however much he might want to.
A quarter of an hour later, Grandma had mollified Richard with bread
and jam and encouraged him to talk some more. She listened with
keen interest as he described the Holland Tunnel, nodding her head
occasionally and exclaiming, “My, my! Who would have thought it?” Now,
you see, she knew that every word was true. If I’d been smarter--but
maybe I’m still not smart, except in hindsight--I might have seen the
shapе of things to come in that incident. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t.
II
At one time or another, all of Grandma’s grandchildren got their mouths
washed with the lie soap--all but me. Why I was spared, I’ve often
wondered. It wasn’t for lack of provocation, that’s certain. I’ve
thought perhaps Grandma had an intuitive grasp of scientific method,
and kept me as a control. Or ... well, so far as I know, Grandma was
the only one of the family in her generation who possessed the secret
of the lie soap, and she didn’t pass it on to any of her children, who
were all sober, truthful, financially unsuccessful citizens. But I’m
pretty sure that Grandma herself never got the lie soap treatment as a
child.
I grew up, and summers on the farm receded into memory. I went to
college, specialized in chemistry, and emerged with rosy visions of
science remaking the world. I fell then, naturally into a research
job with Gorley and Gorley, who at that time were one of the bigger
companies making chemicals, synthetics, cleansers, pharmaceuticals and
the like.
The laboratories which I shared with a number of other young and
not-so-young research men were magnificent, their chrome-and-porcelain
splendor making the university labs where we’d studied seem small and
dingy by comparison.
Here I had the facilities and--assigned work being light at the
time--the spare time to follow up a project of which I’d become
enamored in school--a line on antibiotic synthesis. I almost lived in
that lab for some weeks, at the end of which time I had sufficient
promising results to make up a summary of them, together with an urgent
request for materials needed to carry the investigation through to a
successful conclusion.
I submitted this report to the Coordinator, a fussy, harassed little
man, who nervously promised to call it to the attention of the front
office, and assigned me to work on the problem of producing a red
detergent powder that would not make pink suds.
Time went by, and nothing happened. Naturally I reminded the
Coordinator, but he assured me that the matter had merely slipped his
mind. To make a sad story short, I finally found out how things worked.
Communications between the research department and the front office,
i.e. the sales department, went only one way.
When the latter had decided just what sort of epoch-making miracle of
modern science the buying public was ripe for, word would come down,
and if we happened to have such a miracle on hand, well and good.
Otherwise, we could produce it, or a reasonable faсsimile thereof, in
time for the scheduled start of the advertising campaign.
It was O’Brien who first explained this system in full to me. O’Brien
was an Assistant Sales Manager and an advertising man from way back.
But he was also a human being.
“Over there with your test tubes, kid,” he said bluntly. “You’re
playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Sometimes you hit, oftener you
miss. But you’re never quite sure in advance. Right?”
I had to admit he had hit on a pretty fair description of scientific
research in general.
“But,” said O’Brien, “by us in Sales it’s _hit, hit, hit_, all the
time. We can’t wait for you boys to get that tail pinned on straight.
But sometimes you do, don’t you?” Hе sighed.
“God help us, some of the characters I associate with don’t even know
that. They can’t see any difference between having something to sell
and having to sell something. So when you _do_ hit, let me know, and
I’ll see what I can do at my end.”
He was as good as his word, too. A couple of times when we’d fumbled
around and come up with a product that people really needed, something
to keep them from dying, for instance, or to make not dying worth their
while, he went to bat for us in the sales department.
I’ve described at length the situation at Gorley and Gorley, first
because it had a direct bearing on what happened later, and second
because it was typical of a way of life which is past, and which the
younger generation nowadays has difficulty even in imagining. I’m
referring, of course, to the middle of the twentieth century with its
feverish atmosphere of compulsory Progress or a reasonable facsimile
thereof and of the glitter that was sometimes gold.
It was the era of the false front, the false rear and the questionable
middle, of scandal, slander, and the Hard Sell. It was also the Age of
the Big Lie, as somebody called it. But it was even more the age of the
little half-truth.
During those years when I was growing up--a painful process then,
though it doesn’t seem to be so any more--my education prоgressed along
other lines as well.
There was my baptism of politics. I joined with the enthusiasts working
for nomination of a reform slate of candidates against those of the
city machine. We were too innocent to know that it was an unpropitious
time. For one thing, it wasn’t a Presidential year and the vote was
bound to be light, and for another, the last reform administration was
still too fresh in public memory, and the machine was riding high.
The opposition called us idealistic crackpots, conniving scoundrels,
and dimwits who didn’t know what it was all about. They had the money
and they spent it on a flood of lies from the platform, through the
mail, and from sound trucks that rolled bellowing through the streets.
Finally, our candidates were snowed under in the primaries and not so
much as a reform dogcatcher appeared on the ticket.
That was another bruising experience for an easy bruiser such as I
was. After the crescendo of activity, the speeches, the leaflets, the
house-to-house canvasses, after the starry-eyed phrases about cleaning
up local government as a first step toward cleaning up the country and
the world....
I took a freshly disillusioned look at that world. It was a world
where the leaders of great nations daily pointed to one another
as conspirators plotting to exterminate the human race, and where
“security” and fear grew rankly intertwined as the ordinary man learned
to swallow the idea that _he_ couldn’t be trusted with the truth about
anything really important. It was a world where, consequently, the
scaremongers, the inside scoopers, and the genuine conspirators throve
mightily.
And, finally, there was Alice.
* * * * *
Alice was in the bookkeeping department at Gorley and Gorley. She
didn’t have the kind of looks that make cover photographers and movie
scouts drool and lunge. But she had something, a spontaneous allure, a
magnetism that must surely have upset the IBM machines she worked with.
I met Alice, was magnetized, polarized, and lost. Lost and happy. When
I proposed to her, and she said _Yes_, I felt that my good fortune was
_too_ good to be true. And it was. Some three weeks later she handed
back the ring. She couldn’t marry me. It had all been a mistake, and so
on.
Two days afterward I encountered her by accident in a corridor at the
plant. She wore another ring, with a bigger diamond. I stopped her, and
roughly demanded: “Who?”
Stumblingly, she told me. He was a junior executive, a
young-man-who-would-go-far with family connections and stock in the
company. Alice was a smart girl, and she’d simply bettered herself. I
guess I said some rather bitter things on that subject.
“No, Oliver,” she insisted. “It’s not like that at all. It’s just that
I don’t love you. I never did.” But she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
When I’d cooled down a bit, I realized that she was being honest with
me after a fashion. She was lying to me in just the same terms she was
lying to herself. And at the same time, recalling little details of her
behavior, I realized why.
Alice was afraid. Her people had been poor, and she knew what it meant.
Anyway, who _wasn’t_ afraid in those days, except for the feeble-minded
and some of the insane? So she was looking for security, a place to
hide, in that world of the nineteen-fifties where there wasn’t any
place to hide. But what was the use of telling her that?
I did some serious drinking, enough to convince me that I wasn’t cut
out to make a career of it. It was during the sobering-up process that
I got the Idea. I wonder how many of the thoughts that changed the
world have been fathered by hangovers?
I had some days’ vacation with pay coming, so it was comparatively
easy. I took a plane, a train, and a ramshackle bus. I then swung in on
a grapevine and there I was, walking up the familiar path to the old
farmhouse door, where I hadn’t been for a span of years that astonished
me when I counted them.
Grandma was out in the back yard hanging out a wash of patched work
shirts and faded blue overalls. She said without surprise, “How do,
Oliver,” and went right on finishing her task, while I watched with
suppressed impatience.
* * * * *
Finally she picked up the empty clothes basket and led the way into the
house. It was getting dusk, so she lit a kerosene lamp in the kitchen,
where supper was simmering on the cast-iron range.
“Grandma,” I fumbled, “I came down here--”
“I can see that,” Grandma interrupted. “How do you like my
new teeth, Oliver?” She grinned at me alarmingly. “Today’s my
birthday--ninety-first or ninety-fourth or something like that, I
forget--so I went to town and got me my new teeth. Pretty, eh, boy?
Figure they ought to do me another ten or twelve years.”
“Yes, Grandma,” I said, a little dazedly.
She peered at me searchingly. “Well, Oliver? Speak up. You’ve got
troubles written all over you.”
I’d more or less rehearsed a persuasive speech, but sitting there in
Grandma’s lamplit kitchen I felt as if the years had fallen away and I
was like a little boy who had run away from home and come back sorry.
In considerable disorder I poured out the story of how I’d gone out
into the world and what I’d found it like. I covered all of it, my work
and how little it amounted to compared to what it could have meant to
me, and my experience with the way people were governed--even Alice.
Above all, I told her how at every turning I had been lied to, and had
heard people lie to one another, and seen them lie to themselves.
Grandma nodded once or twice as she listened, which encouraged me.
I remembered a scrap from the arguments I’d meant to muster: “Some
philosopher once said that a lie is the Original Sin itself. Without
it, all other crimes become impossible.”
“So,” Grandma broke in, “you want the recipe for my lie soap.”
“Uh ... yes, that’s right,” I admitted, “It’s the answer. Your
ancestors and mine had no right to hold it back this long. Look,
Grandma. The company I work for makes mouth washes, toothpastes, and
the like. Millions of people use their products; and if a new ‘miracle
ingredient’ were publicized the right way, other companies with more
millions of customers would have to adopt it too.”
I was counting on O’Brien. I’d explain it to him squarely, and somehow
we’d manage to put it over.
Grandma got up to stir a kettle. She took her time, while I held my
breath. Finally she said, “I’m going to give you the recipe, Oliver--”
My heart leaped.
“--but not for ten or twenty years yet. Not until you’ve learned a
mite of caution. I was your age once, myself, and I thought how nice
it would be to make the world over tomorrow morning, and sit down and
admire it tomorrow afternoon. Now I know better, and so will you.”
I pleaded and argued, but it was no use. The old lady was adamant.
Finally I fell glumly silent, while Grandma went about setting the
table for supper.
On the train coming down I’d bought a newspaper out of sheer habit,
and, preoccupied, hadn’t even opened it. It lay now on the table, and
Grandma picked it up to glance at the headlines. Suddenly I realized
she’d been standing motionless, staring at the paper, for a remarkably
long time. There was a look I’d never seen before on her wrinkled face.
I heard her whisper to herself, “_The Moon!_” But that didn’t make any
sense until I looked over her shoulder and read:
_Air Force Rocket Lands on Moon_
Still I didn’t understand Grandma’s agitation. I said banally, “Well,
we’ve known for quite a while they were going to try it.”
“The Moon!” Grandma repeated. She went on wanderingly, “You know, that
just reminds me of one night in a buggy....” Her voice trailed off, and
she brooded darkly, which was strange indeed in her.
Then she let the paper fall, and said briskly, “I’ve changed my mind,
Oliver.”
“You mean--”
“Yes. You can have the lie soap. I’ll write the recipe out and give it
to you for a birthday present.”
I said stupidly, “It’s not my birthday, though.”
“No, it’s mine.” She cackled with a return of the old merriment. She
found a stub of pencil, tore off a corner of newspaper, and began
writing in a crabbed hand. As she wrote she muttered, only half to me:
“Evening of the day they dropped the Bomb, your Uncle Henry told me:
‘Ma, the time’s come.’ But I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘People may be crazy,
but they’re not crazy enough to blow the whole world up and them on it.’
“But now.... If there’s a Man in the Moon, and he’s got a Bomb in his
hand and all he’s got to do is fling it, what’s to stop him? _Him_.
He’s safe in the Moon.... _There!_” She held out the scrap of paper.
“Go on, boy, do what you like with it, and I hope you like what you
do! I held back, I never thought I’d live to see times like these, But
there’s some duties you just can’t shirk, boy, I don’t have to tell you
that.”
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.
IV
A well-known radio news commentator paused for a refreshing gargle in
the mid-break of his program, was unable to continue broadcasting, and
resigned the same day.
Various other commentators and newspaper columnists suffered more
or less similar fates, while a good many newspapers and periodicals
underwent violent shifts of editorial policy.
Half a dozen magazines having the word “True” in their titles suspended
publication.
Quite a few authors, including some more than usually successful ones,
abandoned their profession. Surprisingly, those who quit included some
who had been praised by the critics for the stark realism of their
work, and among those who did not quit were some whose writings were
regarded as sheer imaginative flights.
As for the critics, most of them took up useful trades.
A number of university professors conscientiously resigned, stating
that they could not teach “facts” which they did not know to be true.
Several hitherto popular and, to their founders, profitable religious
cults abruptly disintegrated. In one case there was a riot, when the
Prophet of the Luminous Truth appeared in a mass meeting and told his
followers some home truths about himself, his doctrines, and themselves.
Most of the churches lost grievously in membership, though at the same
time they enjoyed an accession of new converts. Those whose rites
included confession complained that, somehow, the act appeared to be
losing its deep significance.
Psychoanalysts at first rejoiced over their sudden wholesale success
in overcoming their patients’ “resistances,” and a little later were
appalled by their empty waiting rooms.
The divorce rate skyrocketed, then plunged to a permanent record low.
Conversely, the marriage rate at first fell off sharply, then climbed
gradually back to normal. The birth rate was unaffected.
Innumerable lawyers took down their shingles.
Congressional investigating committees enjoyed a field day, but fell
prey to an increasing nervous frustration as witness after witness
refused to perjure himself.
In Washington, D. C., a conservatively-dressed gentleman checked into a
hotel, came down to the lobby after brushing his teeth, and in response
to a commercial traveler’s casual question said, “My business? Well,
I’m a secret agent for the Soviet Union. And you?”
Police in scores of cities were swamped by confessions of offenses
ranging from multiple murder to double parking, and were bewildered by
the absence of the expected percentage of false confessions.
For the first time in modern history, the number of homicides exceeded
the number of suicides. In general, crimes of stealth virtually ceased
to occur, while crimes of violence continued at about their previous
level and reported cases of rape declined spectacularly.
Numerous government officials admitted themselves guilty of peculation
and malfeasance in office. The business bureaucracy was even harder
hit. Among the casualties was a prominent board member of Gorley and
Gorley.
To my particular satisfaction, the mayor our local machine had elected
made a public speech--apparently unaware that he was doing anything out
of the way--in which he thanked by name the boys who had purchased the
most votes for him in the last campaign, also those who had put in the
strong-arm work.
All the F.B.I. agents doing undercover work in the Communist Party
were exposed, and as a result the party went bankrupt for lack of dues
paying members.
As O’Brien had predicted, the advertising business collapsed, burying
many lesser enterprises under the ruins. But somehow no general
financial panic took place.
A man from Texas was heard to confess that he sometimes got tired of
hearing about Texas, and even admitted it couldn’t be twice as large as
the rest of the United States.
Events such as these were the convulsions, the death throes of an old
world and the birth pangs of a new.
Their final phase was the breakdown of the international situation,
which had continued for over a decade in a sort of deadly balance.
The balance was destroyed when U. S. and other Western diplomats
adopted a new tack which provoked, in their Eastern-bloc opponents,
reactions first of suspicious alarm, then of bafflement, and finally
of a dazed conviction that the spirit of Marxian history had at long
last delivered the enemy into their hands--which last impression led
directly to their undoing.
Forgetting the chiseler’s basic precept--you can’t cheat an honest
man--they set about exploiting the situation by extracting from the
West all the technical information they coveted, and which was now
theirs for the asking. Along with plutonium refinement methods and
guided missile designs, they obtained, naturally, the formula for
Grandma’s lie soap, alias Verolin.
The counterparts of Gorley and Gorley’s sales department, in their
government-run industries, were also shrewdly alive to the importance
of having satisfied customers. Clearly, they reasoned, studying our
records, this is a good thing, this is a valuable bit of _kul’tura_....
From there on developments followed pretty much the pattern already
established in the West. There were some painful incidents, such as the
Kiev massacre of former secret police agents, and the three days when
_Pravda_ shut down to retool. But on the whole, the reaction was more
than anything else like that of a man who comes to the top and takes
breath at last, after very nearly drowning.
The Iron Curtain sagged, fell apart, and sank into oblivion. Grandma’s
lie soap had conquered the world.
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.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GRANDMA'S LIE SOAP ***
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