was obviously recorded; it showed the rocket as it had been weeks or months ago in an earlier stage of construction, not poised as if ready for take-off, as I had seen it earlier. A voice from the screen said triumphantly and inaccurately: “This is the ship that spans the stars!” I recognized the voice as belonging to one of the organ-toned commentators in Aural Effects and expertized the scripts without effort as emanating from one of Tildy’s English-major copywriters. The talented slovenliness that would confuse Venus with a star had to come from somebody on Tildy’s staff. “This is the ship that a modern Columbus will drive through the void,” said the voice. “Six and a half million tons of trapped lightning and steel-an ark for eighteen hundred men and women, and everything to make a new world for their home. Who will man it? What fortunate pioneers will tear an empire from the rich, fresh soil of another world? Let me introduce you to them-a man and his wife, two of the intrepid . . .” The voice kept on going. On the screen the picture dissolved to a spacious suburban roomette in early morning. On the screen the husband folding the bed into the wall and taking down the partition to the children’s nook; the wife dialing breakfast and erecting the table. Over the breakfast juices and the children’s pablum (with a steaming mug of Coffiest for each, of course) they spoke persuasively to each other about how wise and brave they had been to apply for passage in the Venus rocket. And the closing question of their youngest babbler (“Mommy, when I grow up kin I take my littul boys and girls to a place as nice as Venus?”) cued the switch to a highly imaginative series of shots of Venus as it would be when the child grew up-verdant valleys, crystal lakes, brilliant mountain vistas. The commentary did not exactly deny, and neither did it dwell on, the decades of hydroponics and life in hermetically sealed cabins that the pioneers would have to endure while working in Venus’s unbreathable atmosphere and waterless chemistry. Instinctively I had set the timer button on my watch when the picture started. When it was over I read the dial: nine minutes! Three times as long as any commercial could legally run. One full minute more than we were accustomed to get. It was only after the lights were on again, the cigarettes lit, and
Fowler Schocken well into his pep talk for the day that I began to see how that was possible. He began in the dithering, circumlocutory way that has become a part of the flavor of our business. He called our attention to the history of advertising-from the simple handmaiden task of selling already manufactured goods to its present role of creating industries and redesigning a world’s folkways to meet the needs of commerce. He touched once more on what we ourselves, Fowler Schocken Associates, had done with our own expansive career. And then he said: “There’s an old saying, men. ‘The world is our oyster.’ We’ve made it come true. But we’ve eaten that oyster.” He crushed out his cigarette carefully. “We’ve eaten it,” he repeated. “We’ve actually and literally conquered the world. Like Alexander, we weep for new worlds to conquer. And there-“he waved at the screen behind him, “there you have just seen the first of those worlds.” I have never liked Matt Runstead, as you may have gathered. He is a Paul Pry whom I suspect of wiretapping even within the company. He must have spied out the Venus Project well in advance, because not even the most talented reflexes could have brought out his little speech. While the rest of us were still busy assimilating what Fowler Schocken had told us, Runstead was leaping to his feet. “Gentlemen,” he said with passion, “this is truly the work of genius. Not just India. Not just a commodity. But a whole planet to sell. I salute you, Fowler Schocken-the Clive, the Bolivar, the John Jacob Astor of a new world!” Matt was first, as I say, but every one of us got up and said in turn about the same thing. Including me. It was easy; I’d been doing it for years. Kathy had never understood it and I’d tried to explain, with the light touch, that it was a religious ritual-like the champagne-bottle smash on the ship’s prow, or the sacrifice of the virgin to the corn crop. Even with the light touch I never pressed the analogy too far. I don’t think any of us, except maybe Matt Run-stead, would feed opium derivatives to the world for money alone. But listening to Fowler Schocken speak, hypnotizing ourselves with our antiphonal responses, made all of us capable of any act that served our god of Sales. I do not mean to say that we were criminals. The alkaloids in Coffiest were, as Harvey pointed out, not harmful. When all of us had done, Fowler Schocken touched another