into more expensive discount schemes operated by the big department stores in the city.
Ten yards from the entrance Franklin paused, looking up at the huge metal sign mounted in an enclosure at the edge of the car park. Unlike the other signs and hoardings that proliferated everywhere, no attempt had been made to decorate it, or disguise the gaunt bare rectangle of riveted steel mesh. Power lines wound down its sides, and the concrete surface of the car park was crossed by a long scar where a cable had been sunk.
Franklin strolled along. Fifty feet from the sign he stopped and turned, realizing that he would be late for the hospital and needed a new carton of cigarettes. A dim but powerful humming emanated from the transformers below the sign, fading as he retraced his steps to the supermarket.
Going over to the automats in the foyer, he felt for his change, then whistled sharply when he remembered why he had delierate1y emptied his pockets.
‘Hathaway!’ he said, loudly enough for two shoppers to staie at him. Reluctant to look directly at the sign, he watched its reflection in one of the glass door-panes, so that any subliminal message would be reversed.
Almost certainly he had received two distinct signals — ‘Keep Away’ and ‘Buy Cigarettes’. The people who normally parked their cars along the perimeter of the apron were avoiding the area under the enclosure, the cars describing a loose semi-circle fifty feet around it.
He turned to the janitor sweeping out the foyer. ‘What’s that sign for?’
The man leaned on his broom, gazing dully at the sign. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Must be something to do with the airport.’ He had a fresh cigarette in his mouth, but his right hand reached to his hip pocket and pulled out a pack. He drummed the second cigarette absently on his thumbnail as Franklin walked away.
Everyone entering the supermarket was buying cigarettes.
Cruising quietly along the 40 m.p.h. lane, Franklin began to take a closer interest in the landscape around him. Usually he was either too tired or too preoccupied to do more than think about his driving, but now he examined the expressway methodically, scanning the roadside cafs for any smaller versions of the new signs. A host of neon displays covered the doorways and windows, but most of them seemed innocuous, and he turned his attention to the larger billboards erected along the open stretches of the expressway. Many of these were as high as four-storey houses, elaborate three-dimensional devices in which giant housewives with electric eyes and teeth jerked and postured around their ideal kitchens, neon flashes exploding from their smiles.
The areas on either side of the expressway were wasteland, continuous junkyards filled with cars and trucks, washing machines and refrigerators, all perfectly workable but jettisoned by the economic pressure of the succeeding waves of discount models. Their intact chrome hardly tarnished, the metal shells and cabinets glittered in the sunlight. Nearer the city the billboards were sufficiently close together to hide them but now and then, as he slowed to approach one of the flyovers, Franklin caught a glimpse of the huge pyramids of metal, gleaming silently like the refuse grounds of some forgotten El Dorado.
That evening Hathaway was waiting for him as he came down the hospital steps. Franklin waved him across the court, then led the way quickly to his car.
‘What’s the matter, Doctor?’ Hathaway asked as Franklin wound up the windows and glanced around the lines of parked cars. ‘Is someone after you?’
Franklin laughed sombrely. ‘I don’t know. I hope not, but if what you say is right, I suppose there is.’
Hathaway leaned back with a chuckle, propping one knee up on the dashboard. ‘So you’ve seen something, Doctor, after all.’
‘Well, I’m not sure yet, but there’s just a chance you may be right. This morning at the Fairlawne supermarket…’ He broke off, uneasily remembering the huge black sign and the abrupt way in which he had turned back to the supermarket as he approached it, then described his encounter.
Hathaway nodded. ‘I’ve seen the sign there. It’s big, but not as big as some that are going up. They’re building them everywhere now. All over the city. What are you going to do, Doctor?’
Franklin gripped the wheel tightly. Hathaway’s thinly veiled amusement irritated him. ‘Nothing, of course. Damn it, it may be just auto-suggestion, you’ve probably got me imagining—’
Hathaway sat up with a jerk. ‘Don’t be absurd, Doctor! If you can’t believe your own senses what chance have you left? They’re invading your brain, if you don’t defend yourself they’ll take it over completely! We’ve got to act now, before we’re all paralysed.’
Wearily Franklin raised one hand to restrain him. ‘Just a minute. Assuming that these signs are going up everywhere, what would be their object? Apart from wasting the enormous amount of capital invested in all the other millions of signs and billboards, the amounts of discretionary spending power still available must be infinitesimal. Some of the present mortgage and discount schemes reach half a century ahead. A big trade war would be disastrous.’
‘Quite right, Doctor,’ Hathaway rejoined evenly, ‘but you’re forgetting one thing. What would supply that extra spending power? A big increase in production. Already they’ve started to raise the working day from twelve hours to fourteen. In some of the appliance plants around the city Sunday working is being introduced as a norm. Can you visualize it, Doctor — a seven-day week, everyone with at least three jobs.’
Franklin shook his head. ‘People won’t stand for it.’
‘They will. Within the last twenty-five years the gross national product has risen by fifty per cent, but so have the average hours worked. Ultimately we’ll all be working and spending twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No one will dare refuse. Think what a slump would mean — millions of lay-offs, people with time on their hands and nothing to spend it on. Real leisure, not just time spent buying things,’ He seized Franklin by the shoulder. ‘Well, Doctor, are you going to join me?’
Franklin freed himself. Half a mile away, partly hidden by the fourstorey bulk of the Pathology Department, was the upper half of one of the giant signs, workmen still crawling across its girders. The airlines over the city had deliberately been routed away from the hospital, and the sign obviously had no connection with approaching aircraft.
‘Isn’t there a prohibition on — what did they call it — subliminal living? How can the unions accept it?’
‘The fear of a slump. You know the new economic dogmas. Unless output rises by a steady inflationary five per cent the economy is stagnating. Ten years ago increased efficiency alone would raise output, but the advantages there are minimal now and only one thing is left. More work. Subliminal advertising will provide the spur.’
‘What are you planning to do?’
‘I can’t tell you, Doctor, unless you accept equal responsibility for it.’
‘That sounds rather Quixotic,’ Franklin commented. ‘Tilting at windmills. You won’t be able to chop those things down with an axe.’
‘I won’t try.’ Hathaway opened the door. ‘Don’t wait too long to make up your mind, Doctor. By then it may not be yours to make up.’ With a wave he was gone.
On the way home Franklin’s scepticism returned. The idea of the conspiracy was preposterous, and the economic arguments were too plausible. As usual, though, there had been a hook in the soft bait Hathaway dangled before him — Sunday working. His own consultancy had been extended into Sunday morning with his appointment as visiting factory doctor to one of the automobile plants that had started Sunday shifts. But instead of resenting this incursion into his already meagre hours of leisure he had been glad. For one frightening reason — he needed the extra income.
Looking out over the lines of scurrying cars, he noticed that at least a dozen of the great signs had been erected along the expressway. As Hathaway had said, more were going up everywhere, rearing over the supermarkets in the housing developments like rusty metal sails.
Judith was in the kitchen when he reached home, watching the TV programme on the hand-set over the cooker. Franklin climbed past a big cardboard carton, its seals still unbroken, which blocked the doorway, kissed her on the cheek as she scribbled numbers down on her pad. The pleasant odour of pot-roast chicken — or, rather a gelatine dummy of a chicken fully flavoured and free of any toxic or nutritional properties mollified his irritation at finding her still playing the Spot Bargains.
He tapped the carton with his foot. ‘What’s this?’
‘No idea, darling, something’s always coming these days, I can’t keep up with it all.’ She peered through the glass door at the chicken — an economy twelve-pounder, the size of a turkey, with stylized legs and wings and an enormous breast, most of which would be discarded at the end of the meal (there were no dogs or cats these days,
