employee of Fowler Schocken Associates. Ever since cadet days I have tried to live my life “for Company and for Sales.” But industrial feuds, even in our profession, can be pretty messy. It was only a few decades ago that a small but effective agency in London filed a feud against the English branch of B.B.D. & O. and wiped it out to the man except for two Bartons and a single underage Osborn. And they say there are still bloodstains on the steps of the General Post Office where United Parcel and American Express fought it out for the mail contract. Schocken was speaking again. “There’s one thing you’ll have to watch out for: the lunatic fringe. This is the kind of project that’s bound to bring them out. Every crackpot organization on the list, from the Consies to the G.O.P., is going to come out for or against it. Make sure they’re all for; they swing weight.” “Even the Consies?” I squeaked. “Well, no. I didn’t mean that; they’d be more of a liability.” His white hair glinted as he nodded thoughtfully. “Mm. Maybe you could spread the word that spaceflight and Conservationism are diametrically opposed. It uses up too many raw materials, hurts the living standard-you know. Bring in the fact that the fuel uses organic material that the Consies think should be made into fertilizer-” I like to watch an expert at work. Fowler Schocken laid down a whole subcampaign for me right there; all I had to do was fill in the details. The Conservationists were fair game, those wild-eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way “plundering” our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab. I had been exposed to Consie sentiment in my time, and the arguments had all come down to one thing: Nature’s way of living was the right way of living. Silly. If “Nature” had intended us to eat fresh vegetables, it wouldn’t have given us niacin or ascorbic acid. I sat still for twenty minutes more of Fowler Schocken’s inspirational talk, and came away with the discovery I had often made before; briefly and effectively, he had given me every fact and instruction I needed. The details he left to me, but I knew my job: We wanted Venus colonized by Americans. To accomplish this,
three things were needed: colonists; a way of getting them to Venus; and something for them to do when they got there. The first was easy to handle through direct advertising. Schocken’s TV commercial was the perfect model on which we could base the rest of that facet of our appeal. It is always easy to persuade a consumer that the grass is greener far away. I had already penciled in a tentative campaign with the budget well under a megabuck. More would have been extravagant. The second was only partly our problem. The ships had been designed-by Republic Aviation, Bell Telephone Labs and U.S. Steel, I believe, under Defense Department contract. Our job wasn’t to make the transportation to Venus possible but to make it palatable. When your wife found her burned-out toaster impossible to replace because its nichrome element was part of a Venus rocket’s main drive jet, or when the inevitable disgruntled congressman for a small and frozen-out firm waved an appropriations sheet around his head and talked about government waste on wildcat schemes, our job began: We had to convince your wife that rockets are more important than toasters; we had to convince the congressman’s constituent’s firm that its tactics were unpopular and would cost it profits. I thought briefly of an austerity campaign and vetoed it. Our other accounts would suffer. A religious movement, perhaps- something that would offer vicarious dedication to the eight hundred million who would not ride the rockets themselves. . . . I tabled that; Bruner could help me there. And I went on to point three. There had to be something to keep the colonists busy on Venus. This, I knew, was what Fowler Schocken had his eye on. The government money that would pay for the basic campaign was a nice addition to our year’s billing, but Fowler Schocken was too big for one-shot accounts. What we wanted was the year-after-year reliability of a major industrial complex; what we wanted was the colonists, and their children, added to our complex of accounts. Fowler, of course, hoped to repeat on an enormously magnified scale our smashing success with Indiastries. His Boards and he had organized all of India into a single giant cartel, with every last woven basket and iridium ingot and caddy of opium it produced sold through Fowler Schocken advertising. Now he could do the same with Venus. Potentially this was worth as much as every dollar of value in exis-