The Trouble with Truth

BY JULIAN F. GROW
ILLUSTRATED BY LUTJENS
Nobody knows where it will end. I only know where it began—in Rutlan—twenty-four hours ago!
The WPA stinks, Sara said. Now, I've known Sara four year. We've been engaged three times and married once—only marriage, not matrimony—so I pretty much know what to expect from her. I didn't speak.
She rummaged in her belt pouch and waved something from it under my nose. It was a plastic tube, pointed and dark at one end. Do you know what this is? She said it loud enough to make people at other tables look away from the program on the Rutlan Community Room cubeo.
As it happened, I did know what it was. Sure, I said. It's a pencil.
A pencil! she hissed back. A pencil such as they've been making for, I don't know, maybe three hundred years. Plastic and a black core, that's all. An atavistic, human writing instrument. But there is more real, solid news in this one pencil than in all the gadgets and wires and whirling wheels of the whole stinking WPA, your World Press Association! And in one edition of my poor little Argus , that funny little country monthly....
Fortunately, at this point, the familiar Thomas Edison Pageant broadcast ended and the announcer on the cubeo rang his Town Crier bell. Copies of the Northeast Region edition of the Sun began pouring out of the Fotofax slot. As a matter of habit I rose and got a Sun for each of us, Sara taking hers with a snort, and sat down again as the announcer gave the World Press Association opening format:
An informed people is a free people, he droned. Read your Sun and know the truth. Stand by now for an official synopsis of the day's happenings prepared by the World Press Association.
We both got up to go, leaving our Suns behind as most in the room later would too. Oh, I almost forgot, Sara said, the way she does when she's been thinking about something all day. That reminds me. I'm pregnant.
Ah? I said. Okay. Good. Not just marriage this time: matrimony it was. We walked out, and she held my hand, a thing she doesn't normally do.