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, it _tricks_ 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: