The Trouble with Truth

Julian Grow

• Publisher: Jovian Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781531299712
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Nobody knows where it will end. I only know where it began - in Rutlan - twenty-four hours ago! Julian Grow weaves a science fiction tale of epic proportions, demonstrating a clear and concise understanding of the futuristic genre!

II

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HER VOICE WAS MUFFLED COMING from the jon. But I knew she was reading from a document she kept framed there, and I knew well what it said.

The Edict

Be it enacted by the unanimous voice of these United Nations of America, Europe, Africa and Free Asia, in congress this 14th day of April, 1997 that, henceforth:

No person, group of persons, organization, or governing body of any town, city, state or nation existing under the articles of this federation, shall print, or cause to be printed, or knowingly permit to be printed, or disseminate or knowingly permit to be disseminated any word, phrase or work, excepting only certain scientific treaties of explicit speculative nature as hereinafter defined by statute, that is not both wholly and in part demonstrably true.

“Great Judah,” I heard Sara say. “What a disaster!”

---

“Stop muttering and come out here,” I shouted. “You said food.”

“I’ll be with you in a minute. I’m almost finished undressing.” Since we weren’t expecting company I had already hung up my coverall—a new though serviceable one of diaphragm-weave thermoplast, bought especially for Vermont and warranted for 30 degrees below.

With or without the chiton and hose she favored over coveralls, Sara was a handsome woman. Strong, straight and, I knew, a fit mother for our children. But right at the moment, she was angry at me all over again.

She strode to the foodbar. “You!” she said, chucking a handful of steakpaks into the infra, twisting the dial. “You and your Edict!” she said, hurling potatopaks into a pan of hot water and yelping when the water splashed on her thigh. “You and your stupid, buzzing, clicking, inhuman WPA!” she said, filling milkpaks with water, cramming them into holders and slapping them sloshing down on the table.

“You talk about type and belief and truth. Truth! You have the gall to keep on parroting those same old defenses about that electronic scrap heap you have the effrontery to call a—a Greeley! Elias Witherill thought Horace Greeley was a rotten newspaperman, but rotten or not, he was still too good to have that whining junkpile named after him.

“What does a tangle of wires know about newspapering. What does WPA know about writing a story? What do you know about news?”

“Now, Sara,” I said.

“Don’t now-sara me, dammit. You still fail utterly to realize that news is more than just what happened, when, where, to whom, how and why. It’s what might still happen, even what might have happened otherwise or never did happen, if that’s part of the story.

“The Edict forbids every bit of it!

“But most important, news is expressed—and this you simply cannot see—expressed in basic human terms, designed to arouse the basic human curiosity or sympathy that makes an abstract description palatable to people. If you like, ittricks people into informing themselves. The Sun, your wonderful Sun, sticks to facts and statistics, and make a hurricane dull. It doesn’t tell about people, it lists numbers!

“Real news has, by God, Heart! Without it, a newspaper is just a list, a long, long list that ... nobody ... will ... READ!”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay! This is better?” I tramped over to a framed Argus front page down the wall from Vol. 1, No. 1, that was dated April 17, 1904. She started to protest, but I overrode her. “Listen to this,” I said. And read from a story given prominent play on the page:

NEAR-DEATH ... AND TRAGEDY

“WHERE’S TINKLE?”

HER FIRST QUESTION

Death’s clammy hand brushed a golden-haired moppet Tuesday afternoon.

Gentlewomen swooned in the crowd that quickly gathered at the corner of South Main and Elm Streets, so near had tragedy come to that little girl, Irma Littlefield, aged four, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Adoniram Littlefield of 324 Elm Street, that afternoon. Men wept unashamedly when little Irma, lying crumpled in the dust, stirred her tiny limbs and opened eyes of deepest blue, even as her shrieking mother flew to the side of her baby.

Death had passed by Irma, yes. Yet the uncaring runaway freight wagon that had so nearly snuffed out her brief existence had dealt the child a blow even as cruel, more savage; perhaps as grievous a hurt as would have been the sweet baby’s death to her stricken parent, sobbing now with the child’s golden head in her lap.

For from Irma’s ashen lips, cold still with the awful nearness of the Grim Reaper, the first faltering words were,

“Where’s Tinkle, my little doggie?”

Tinkle, a curly-haired mongrel to the unseeing world, nothing to the insens...

Table of contents

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• II
• III
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