The Trouble with Truth and The Fastest Gun Dead

Excerpt from ''The Double With Truth'': ''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....''This volume also includes The Fastest Gun Dead