"I speak to you about the question asked by a little girl. I answer her, but my answer is for all children, and women and men, and for all time...."
I almost shouted aloud, in sheer disbelief. It wasn't war, it wasn't even Onlon's joke—it was that silly thing from Onlon's daughter!
I grabbed the dupe up out of my belt-pouch, and read along with that deep, throbbing voice:
"I am eight years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, if you see it in the Sun, it's so. Please tell me the truth: is there a Santa Claus?"
And the voice read off the name the way the girl, with her grave little voice, would have formally given it: Virginia O'Hanlon. But what could the Church in all dignity say, to nonsense like that?
"Virginia," said the voice, "your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see...."
I was stunned. The broadcast is a hoax, I thought; a Flack's trick, or an incredible act of sabotage on an entire social system. Barely conscious of Sara sitting raptly beside me, I tried to make sense out of that deep organ note sounding through the roaring in my ears.
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," it was saying. "He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist.... How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! There would be no child-like faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished...."
I turned to Sara, tried to speak. She turned to me, eyes shining, and raised her fingertips to my mouth, then went back to the light, and the voice. Over the buzz I heard: