Free The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick

hand over a few bucks to the Foote organization now and then; pick up a little inside news. These tankers that had been tipped off about conditions up here--they weren't tipped off by anybody they knew; it wasn't one of their own members coming back."
     
         "Okay, the tanker couldn't reach his own tank; so instead--"
     
         "They got it," Lindblom said, "over the coax."
     
         For a moment Adams failed to understand; he stared at Lindblom.
     
         "That's right," Lindblom said. "On their TV set. For about one minute, and very feeble. But enough."
     
         "Good god," Adams said, and he thought, There are millions of them down there. What would it be like if someone cut into the _main_ coax, the chief, sole and central trunk from Estes Park that reaches _all_ the tanks. What would it be like to have the earth open and millions of humans, imprisoned subsurface for fifteen years, believing in a radioactive waste above, with missiles and bacteria and rubble and warring armies--the demesne system would sustain a death blow and the great park over which he flappled twice daily would become a densely populated civilization once more, not quite as before the war, but close enough. Roads would reappear. Cities.
     
         And--ultimately there would be another war.
     
         That was the rationale. The masses had egged their leaders on to war in both Wes-Dem and Pac-Peop. But once the masses were out of the way, stuffed down below into antiseptic tanks, the ruling elite of both East and West were free to conclude a deal . . . although, strangely, in a sense it had not been them at all, not Brose, not General Holt who had been C. in C. of Wes-Dem or even Marshal Harenzany, the top officer in the hierarchy of Soviet brass. But the fact that both Holt and Harenzany knew when it was time to use the missiles (and had done so) and when time had come to quit--this was all true, and without it, without their joint reasonability, peace would not have been possible, but underneath this collaboration of the two top military men lay something else, something which to Adams was real and strange and in a sense deeply moving.
     
         The Recon Dis-In Council of leadies in Mexico City/Amecameca. It had assisted in the job of forcing peace on the planet. And as a governing body, a final arbiter, it had not gone away. Man has built a weapon that could think for itself, and after it had thought a while, two years in which vile destruction had occurred, with the leadies locked hip and thigh each with the other, two huge artificial armies from two land masses . . . advanced varieties of leadies, who had been constructed with an eye toward utilizing their analytical brains for planning tactics and finally overall strategy--these advanced types, the X, XI and XII varieties, had figured out that the best strategy was something which the Phoenicians had learned five thousand years ago. It was summed up, Adams reflected, in _The Mikado_. If merely _saying_ that a man had been executed was enough to satisfy everyone, why not merely say it instead of doing it? The problem was really--to the advanced leadies--that simple. They were not Gilbert and Sullivan buffs, and Gilbert's words were not in their artificial brains; the text of _The Mikado_ had not been programmed into them as operational data. But they had arrived at the same conclusion--and had in addition acted on it, in conjunction with Marshal Harenzany and C. in C. General Holt.
     
         Aloud, Adams said, "But they didn't see the advantage."
     
         "Pardon?" Lindblom murmured, still shaky, still unwilling to engage in any more talk; he looked tired.
     
         "What the Recon Dis-In Council didn't see," Adams said, "and can't see now, because there's no libido-component to their perceptmentation systems, is that the maxim, Why execute someone-"
     
         "Aw, shut up," Lindblom said, and, turning, stalked out of Joseph Adams'