anson, _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 col