It was Burckhardt's idea and Swanson despised it, but he went along.
He was the type who always went along.
"It's dangerous," he grumbled worriedly. "Suppose somebody comes by?
They'll spot us and--"
"What have we got to lose?"
Swanson shrugged. "It's dangerous," he said again. But he went along.
Burckhardt's idea was very simple. He was sure of only one thing--the
tunnel went somewhere. Martians or Russians, fantastic plot or crazy
hallucination, whatever was wrong with Tylerton had an explanation,
and the place to look for it was at the end of the tunnel.
They jogged along. It was more than a mile before they began to see an
end. They were in luck--at least no one came through the tunnel to
spot them. But Swanson had said that it was only at certain hours that
the tunnel seemed to be in use.
Always the fifteenth of June. Why? Burckhardt asked himself. Never
mind the how. _Why?_
And falling asleep, completely involuntarily--everyone at the same
time, it seemed. And not remembering, never remembering
anything--Swanson had said how eagerly he saw Burckhardt again, the
morning after Burckhardt had incautiously waited five minutes too many
before retreating into the darkroom. When Swanson had come to,
Burckhardt was gone. Swanson had seen him in the street that
afternoon, but Burckhardt had remembered nothing.
And Swanson had lived his mouse's existence for weeks, hiding in the
woodwork at night, stealing out by day to search for Burckhardt in
pitiful hope, scurrying around the fringe of life, trying to keep from
the deadly eyes of _them_.
Them. One of "them" was the girl named April Horn. It was by seeing
her walk carelessly into a telephone booth and never come out that
Swanson had found the tunnel. Another was the man at the cigar stand
in Burckhardt's office building. There were more, at least a dozen
that Swanson knew of or suspected.
They were easy enough to spot, once you knew where to look--for they,
alone in Tylerton, changed their roles from day to day. Burckhardt was
on that 8:51 bus, every morning of every day-that-was-June-15th, never
different by a hair or a moment. But April Horn was sometimes gaudy in
the cellophane skirt, giving away candy or cigarettes; sometimes
plainly dressed; sometimes not seen by Swanson at all.
Russians? Martians? Whatever they were, what could they be hoping to
gain from this mad masquerade?
Burckhardt didn't know the answer--but perhaps it lay beyond the door
at the end of the tunnel. They listened carefully and heard distant
sounds that could not quite be made out, but nothing that seemed
dangerous. They slipped through.
And, through a wide chamber and up a flight of steps, they found they
were in what Burckhardt recognized as the Contro Chemicals plant.
* * * * *
Nobody was in sight. By itself, that was not so very odd--the
automatized factory had never had very many persons in it. But
Burckhardt remembered, from his single visit, the endless, ceaseless
busyness of the plant, the valves that opened and closed, the vats
that emptied themselves and filled themselves and stirred and cooked
and chemically tasted the bubbling liquids they held inside
themselves. The plant was never populated, but it was never still.
Only--now it _was_ still. Except for the distant sounds, there was no
breath of life in it. The captive electronic minds were sending out no
commands; the coils and relays were at rest.
Burckhardt said, "Come on." Swanson reluctantly followed him through
the tangled aisles of stainless steel columns and tanks.
They walked as though they were in the presence of the dead. In a way,
they were, for what were the automatons that once had run the factory,
if not corpses? The machines were controlled by computers that were
really not computers at all, but the electronic analogues of living
brains. And if they were turned off, were they not dead? For each had
once been a human mind.
Take a master petroleum chemist, infinitely skilled in the separation
of crude oil into its fractions. Strap him down, probe into his brain
with searching electronic needles. The machine scans the patterns of
the mind, translates what it sees into charts and sine waves. Impress
these same waves on a robot computer and you have your chemist. Or a
thousand copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his
knowledge and skill, and no human limitations at all.
Put a dozen copies of him into a plant and they will run it all,
twenty-four hours a day, seven days of every week, never tiring, never
overlooking anything, never forgetting....
Swanson stepped up closer to Burckhardt. "I'm scared," he said.
They were across the room now and the sounds were louder. They were
not machine sounds, but voices; Burckhardt moved cautiously up to a
door and dared to peer around it.
It was a smaller room, lined with television screens, each one--a
dozen or more, at least--with a man or woman sitting before it,
staring into the screen and dictating notes into a recorder. The
viewers dialed from scene to scene; no two screens ever showed the
same picture.
The pictures seemed to have little in common. One was a store, where a
girl dressed like April Horn was demonstrating home freezers. One was
a series of shots of kitchens. Burckhardt caught a glimpse of what
looked like the cigar stand in his office building.
It was baffling and Burckhardt would have loved to stand there and
puzzle it out, but it was too busy a place. There was the chance that
someone would look their way or walk out and find them.
* * * * *
They found another room. This one was empty. It was an office, large
and sumptuous. It had a desk, littered with papers. Burckhardt stared
at them, briefly at first--then, as the words on one of them caught
his attention, with incredulous fascination.
He snatched up the topmost sheet, scanned it, and another, while
Swanson was frenziedly searching through the drawers.
Burckhardt swore unbelievingly and dropped the papers to the desk.
Swanson, hardly noticing, yelped with delight: "Look!" He dragged a
gun from the desk. "And it's loaded, too!"
Burckhardt stared at him blankly, trying to assimilate what he had
read. Then, as he realized what Swanson had said, Burckhardt's eyes
sparked. "Good man!" he cried. "We'll take it. We're getting out of
here with that gun, Swanson. And we're going to the police! Not the
cops in Tylerton, but the F.B.I., maybe. Take a look at this!"
The sheaf he handed Swanson was headed: "Test Area Progress Report.
Subject: Marlin Cigarettes Campaign." It was mostly tabulated figures
that made little sense to Burckhardt and Swanson, but at the end was a
summary that said:
Although Test 47-K3 pulled nearly double the number of new
users of any of the other tests conducted, it probably
cannot be used in the field because of local sound-truck
control ordinances.
The tests in the 47-K12 group were second best and our
recommendation is that retests be conducted in this appeal,
testing each of the three best campaigns with and without
the addition of sampling techniques.
An alternative suggestion might be to proceed directly with
the top appeal in the K12 series, if the client is unwilling
to go to the expense of additional tests.
All of these forecast expectations have an 80% probability
of being within one-half of one per cent of results
forecast, and more than 99% probability of coming within 5%.
Swanson looked up from the paper into Burckhardt's eyes. "I don't get
it," he complained.
Burckhardt said, "I don't blame you. It's crazy, but it fits the
facts, Swanson, _it fits the facts_. They aren't Russians and they
aren't Martians. These people are advertising men! Somehow--heaven
knows how they did it--they've taken Tylerton over. They've got us,
all of us, you and me and twenty or thirty thousand other people,
right under their thumbs.
"Maybe they hypnotize us and maybe it's something else; but however
they do it, what happens is that they let us live a day at a time.
They pour advertising into us the whole damned day long. And at the
end of the day, they see what happened--and then they wash the day out
of our minds and start again the next day with different advertising."
* * * * *
Swanson's jaw was hanging. He managed to close it and swallow. "Nuts!"
he said flatly.
Burckhardt shook his head. "Sure, it sounds crazy--but this whole
thing is crazy. How else would you explain it? You can't deny that
most of Tylerton lives the same day over and over again. You've _seen_
it! And that's the crazy part and we have to admit that that's
true--unless we are the crazy ones. And once you admit that somebody,
somehow, knows how to accomplish that, the rest of it makes all kinds
of sense.
"Think of it, Swanson! They test every last detail before they spend a
nickel on advertising! Do you have any idea what that means? Lord
knows how much money is involved, but I know for a fact that some
companies spend twenty or thirty million dollars a year on
advertising. Multiply it, say, by a hundred companies. Say that every
one of them learns how to cut its advertising cost by only ten per
cent. And that's peanuts, believe me!
"If they know in advance what's going to work, they can cut their
costs in half--maybe to less than half, I don't know. But that's
saving two or three hundred million dollars a year--and if they pay
only ten or twenty per cent of that for the use of Tylerton, it's
still dirt cheap for them and a fortune for whoever took over
Tylerton."
Swanson licked his lips. "You mean," he offered hesitantly, "that
we're a--well, a kind of captive audience?"
Burckhardt frowned. "Not exactly." He thought for a minute. "You know
how a doctor tests something like penicillin? He sets up a series of
little colonies of germs on gelatine disks and he tries the stuff on
one after another, changing it a little each time. Well, that's
us--we're the germs, Swanson. Only it's even more efficient than that.
They don't have to test more than one colony, because they can use it
over and over again."
It was too hard for Swanson to take in. He only said: "What do we do
about it?"
"We go to the police. They can't use human beings for guinea pigs!"
"How do we get to the police?"
Burckhardt hesitated. "I think--" he began slowly. "Sure. This place
is the office of somebody important. We've got a gun. We'll stay right
here until he comes along. And he'll get us out of here."
Simple and direct. Swanson subsided and found a place to sit, against
the wall, out of sight of the door. Burckhardt took up a position
behind the door itself--
And waited.
* * * * *
The wait was not as long as it might have been. Half an hour, perhaps.
Then Burckhardt heard approaching voices and had time for a swift
whisper to Swanson before he flattened himself against the wall.
It was a man's voice, and a girl's. The man was saying, "--reason why
you couldn't report on the phone? You're ruining your whole day's
test! What the devil's the matter with you, Janet?"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Dorchin," she said in a sweet, clear tone. "I thought
it was important."
The man grumbled, "Important! One lousy unit out of twenty-one
thousand."
"But it's the Burckhardt one, Mr. Dorchin. Again. And the way he got
out of sight, he must have had some help."
"All right, all right. It doesn't matter, Janet; the Choco-Bite
program is ahead of schedule anyhow. As long as you're this far, come
on in the office and make out your worksheet. And don't worry about
the Burckhardt business. He's probably just wandering around. We'll
pick him up tonight and--"
They were inside the door. Burckhardt kicked it shut and pointed the
gun.
"That's what you think," he said triumphantly.
It was worth the terrified hours, the bewildered sense of insanity,
the confusion and fear. It was the most satisfying sensation
Burckhardt had ever had in his life. The expression on the man's face
was one he had read about but never actually seen: Dorchin's mouth
fell open and his eyes went wide, and though he managed to make a
sound that might have been a question, it was not in words.
The girl was almost as surprised. And Burckhardt, looking at her, knew
why her voice had been so familiar. The girl was the one who had
introduced herself to him as April Horn.
Dorchin recovered himself quickly. "Is this the one?" he asked
sharply.