"An informed people is a free people. 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." That was the standard formula. But then he departed from standard, and it rattled him. I sat next to Sara and watched, interested. "I have been directed," he said, "to call your full attention to the editorial on the front page of your _Sun_." Good grief, I thought: Church! Surely not the Onlon thing! The announcer looked around him rather wildly, then blurted: "I now turn you over to the Orator, for a direct-voice proclamation of this editorial." The vocal unit of Church, highest level of the WPA and the actual voice of Congris! The last time it spoke, 2 years ago, it was the Pan-asian War--this couldn't be the Onlon thing. The announcer's image faded from the cubeo prism and was replaced by a soft light, and an organ note as the local station engineers patched to the nationwide WPA circuit. Everyone in the room stared into the light, even Sara, waiting for the voice. When it came, deep and resonant, I could feel it in my own chest. I could feel too the tension go out of Sara, and feel the sigh she and everyone else sighed, at the end of waiting. The voice said: "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...."