"You got it, friend. It"s _always_ today!"
It took time to penetrate.
Burckhardt said wonderingly, "You"ve hidden out in that darkroom for how many weeks?"
"How can I tell? Four or five, maybe. I lost count. And every day the same--always the 15th of June, always my landlady, Mrs. Keefer, is sweeping the front steps, always the same headline in the papers at the corner. It gets monotonous, friend."
IV
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.
n.o.body 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 a.n.a.logues 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 a.s.similate 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 d.a.m.ned 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.