The Secret Martians — Key Ideas to Explore

She was staring after me, open-mouthed, as the door slid neatly shut behind us.

"_W-Will_ I be back?" I asked desperately, as we waited for the elevator. "At all? Am I under arrest? What's up, anyhow?"

"You will be informed," said the man again. I had to let it go at that. Security men were not hired for their loquaciousness. They had a car waiting at the curb downstairs, in the No Parking zone. The cop on the beat very politely opened the door for them when we got there. Those red-and-bronze uniforms carry an awful lot of weight. Not to mention the golden bulk of their holstered collapsers.

There was nothing for me to do but sweat it out and to try and enjoy the ride, wherever we were going.

"_You_ are Jery Delvin?"

The man who spoke seemed more than surprised; he seemed stunned. His voice held an incredulous squeak, a squeak which would have amazed his subordinates. It certainly amazed me. Because the speaker was Philip Baxter, Chief of Interplanetary Security, second only to the World President in power, and not even that in matters of security. I managed to nod.

He shook his white-maned head, slowly. "I don't believe it."

"But I am, sir," I insisted doggedly.

Baxter pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes for a moment, then sighed, grinned wryly, and waggled an index finger at an empty plastic contour chair.

"I guess maybe you are at that, son. Sit down, sit down."

I folded gingerly at knees and hips and slid back into the chair, pressing my perspiring palms against the sides of my pants to get rid of their uncomfortably slippery feel. "Thank you, sir."

There was a silence, during which I breathed uneasily, and a bit too loudly. Baxter seemed to be trying to say something.

"I suppose you're wondering why I've called--" he started, then stopped short and flushed with embarrassment. I felt a sympathetic hot wave flooding my own features. A copy chief in an advertising company almost always reacts to an obvious cliche.

Then, with something like a look of relief on his blunt face, he snatched up a brochure from his kidney-shaped desktop and his eyes raced over the lettering on its face.

"Jery Delvin," he read, musingly and dispassionately. "Five foot eleven inches tall, brown hair, slate-gray eyes. Citizen. Honest, sober, civic-minded, slightly antisocial...."

He looked at me, questioningly.

"I'd rather not discuss that, sir, if you don't mind."

"Do you mind if I do mind?"

"Oh ... Oh, well if you put it like that. It's girls, sir. They block my mind. Ruin my work."

"Well, in my job--See, I've got this gift. I'm a spotter."

"A spotter. I can't be fooled. By advertising. Or mostly anything else. Except girls."

"I'm still not sure that I--"

"It's like this. I designate ratios, by the minute. They hand me a new ad, and I read it by a stopwatch. Then, as soon as I spot the clinker, they stop the watch. If I get it in five seconds, it passes. But if I spot it in less, they throw it out and start over again. Or is that clear? No, I guess you're still confused, sir."

"Just a bit," Baxter said.

I took a deep breath and tried again.

"Maybe an example would be better. Uh, you know the one about 'Three out of five New York lawyers use Hamilton Bond Paper for note-taking'?"

"I've heard that, yes."

"Well, the clinker--that's the sneaky part of the ad, sir, or what we call weasel-wording--the clinker in that one is that while it seems to imply sixty percent of New York lawyers, it actually means precisely what it says: Three out of five. For that particular product, we had to question seventy-nine lawyers before we could come up with three who liked Hamilton Bond, see? Then we took the names of the three, and the names of two of the seventy-six men remaining, and kept them on file."

"On file?" Baxter frowned. "What for?"

"In case the Federal Trade Council got on our necks. We could prove that three out of five lawyers used the product. Three out of those five. See?"

"Ah," said Baxter, grinning. "I begin to. And your job is to test these ads, before they reach the public. What fools you for five seconds will fool the average consumer indefinitely."

I sat back, feeling much better. "That's right, sir."

Then Baxter frowned again. "But what's this about girls?"