Schocken priority number. A priority number was one of the little luxuries I’d have to learn to live without. I hung up slowly. The coins were not returned. I could write to everybody, I thought. Write to Kathy and Jack O’Shea and Fowler and Collier and Hester and Tildy. Leave no stone unturned. Dear Wife (or Boss): This is to advise you that your husband (or employee) who you know quite well is dead is not really dead but inexplicably a contract laborer for Costa Rican Chlorella and please drop everything and get him out. Signed, your loving husband (or employee), Mitchell Courtenay. But there was the company censor to think of. I wandered blankly back into the dorm. The rest of the Dorm Ten people were beginning to drift in. “A crumb!” one of them yelled, sighting me. “Court’s called to order!” another one trumpeted. I don’t hold what followed against any of them. It was traditional, a break in the monotony, a chance to lord it over somebody more miserable than themselves, something they had all gone through too. I presume that in Dorm Seven it would have been a memorably nasty experience, and in Dorm Twelve I might not have lived through it. Dorm Ten was just high-spirited. I paid my “fine” -more pay vouchers-and took my lumps and recited the blasphemous oath and then I was a full-fledged member of the dorm. I didn’t troop with them to the mess hall for dinner. I just lay on my bunk and wished I were as dead as the rest of the world thought I was.
eight Scum-skimming wasn’t hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Contest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with * your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America. Every hour you could drink from your canteen and take a salt tablet. Every two hours you could take five minutes. At sunset you turned in your coveralls and went to dinner-more slices from Chicken Little -and then you were on your own. You could talk, you could read, you could go into a trance before the dayroom hypnoteleset, you could shop, you could pick fights, you could drive yourself crazy thinking of what might have been, you could go to sleep. Mostly you went to sleep. I wrote a lot of letters and tried to sleep a lot. Payday came as a surprise. I didn’t know two weeks had slipped by. It left me owing Chlorella Proteins only eighty-odd dollars and a few cents. Besides the various assignments I had made, there were the Employee Welfare Fund (as closely as I could figure that one out, it meant that I was paying Chlorella’s taxes); union dues and installment on the initiation fee; withholding tax (this time my own taxes); hospitaliza-tion (but try and get it, the older men said) and old age insurance. One of the things I faintheartedly consoled myself with was the
thought that when-when, I always said firmly-I got out I’d be closer to the consumers than any ad man in the profession. Of course at Fowler Schocken we’d had our boys up from the ranks: scholarship kids. I knew now that they had been too snobbish to give me the straight facts on consumers’ lives and thoughts. Or they hadn’t cared to admit even to themselves what they had been like. I think I learned that ads work more strongly on the unconscious than even we in the profession had thought. I was shocked repeatedly to hear advertising referred to as “that crap.” I was at first puzzled and then gratified to see it sink in and take effect anyway. The Venus-rocket response was, of course, my greatest interest. For one week I listened when I could to enthusiasm growing among these men who would never go to Venus, who knew nobody who would ever go to Venus. I heard the limericks we had launched from Fowler Schocken Associates chuckled over: A midget space-jock named O’Shea Loved a girl who was built like a dray- Or: A socially misfit machinist Asked his sweetheart: “Dear, what’s come between us?” Or any of the others, with their engineered-in message: that Venus environment increased male potency. Ben Winston’s subsection on Folkways, I had always said, was one of the most important talent groups in the whole Schocken enterprise. They were particularly fine on riddles: “Why do they calLVenus the Mourning Star?” for instance. Well, it doesn’t make sense in print; but the pun is basic humor, and the basic drive of the human race is sex. And what is, essentially, more important in life than to mold and channel the deepest torrential flow of human emotion into its proper directions? (I am not apologizing for those renegades who talk fancifully about some imagined “Death-Wish” to hook their sales appeals to. I leave that sort of thing to the Tauntons of our profession; it’s dirty; it’s immoral, I want nothing to do with it. Besides, it leads to fewer consumers in the long run, if they’d only think the thing through.) For there is no doubt that linking a sales message to one of the great prime motivations of the human spirit does more than sell goods; it strengthens the motivation, helps it come to the surface,