The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth Page A

"Why do they call Venus the Mourning Star?" for instance. Well, it doesn't make sense in print; but the pun is basic humor, and the basic drive of the human race is sex. And what is, essentially, more important in life than to mold and channel the deepest torrential flow of human emotion into its proper directions? (I am not apologizing for those renegades who talk fancifully about some imagined "Death-Wish" to hook their sales appeals to. I leave that sort of thing to the Tauntons of our profession; it's dirty; it's immoral, I want nothing to do with it. Besides, it leads to fewer consumers in the long run, if they'd only think the thing through.) For there is no doubt that linking a sales message to one of the great prime motivations of the human spirit does more than sell goods; it strengthens the motivation, helps it come to the surface, provides it with focus. And thus we are assured of the steady annual increment of consumers so essential to expansion.
    Chlorella, I was pleased to learn, took extremely good care of its workers' welfare in that respect. There was an adequate hormone component in the diet, and a splendid thousand-bed Recreation Room on the 50th tier. The only stipulation the company made was that children born on the plantation were automatically indentured to Chlorella if either parent was still an employee on the child's tenth birthday.
    But I had no time for the Recreation Room. I was learning the ropes, studying my milieu, waiting for opportunity to come. If opportunity didn't come soon I would make opportunity; but first I had to study and learn.
    Meanwhile, I kept my ears open for the results of the Venus campaign. It went beautifully—for a while. The limericks, the planted magazine stories, the gay little songs had their effect.
    Then something went sour.
    There was a downtrend. It took me a day to notice it, and a week to believe it could be true. The word "Venus" drifted out of the small talk. When the space rocket was mentioned it was in connection with reference points like "radiation poisoning," "taxes," "sacrifice." There was a new, dangerous kind of Folkways material— "Didja hear the one about the punchy that got caught in his space suit?"
    You might not have recognized what was going on, and Fowler Schocken, scanning his daily precis of the summary of the digests of the skeletonized reports of the abstracts of the charts of progress on Venus Project, would never have the chance to question or doubt what was told him. But I knew Venus Project. And I knew what was happening.
    Matt Runstead had taken over.
    The aristocrat of Dorm Ten was Herrera. After ten years with Chlorella he had worked his way up—topographically it was down—to Master Slicer. He worked in the great, cool vault underground, where Chicken Little grew and was cropped by him and other artisans. He swung a sort of two-handed sword that carved off great slabs of the tissue, leaving it to the lesser packers and trimmers and their faceless helpers to weigh it, shape it, freeze it, cook it, flavor it, package it, and ship it off to the area on quota for the day.
    He had more than a production job. He was a safety valve. Chicken Little grew and grew, as she had been growing for decades. Since she had started as a lump of heart tissue, she didn't know any better than to grow up against a foreign body and surround it. She didn't know any better than to grow and fill her concrete vault and keep growing, compressing her cells and rupturing them. As long as she got nutrient, she grew. Herrera saw to it that she grew round and plump, that no tissue got old and tough before it was sliced, that one side was not neglected for the other.
    With this responsibility went commensurate pay, and yet Herrera had not taken a wife or an apartment in one of the upper tiers of the pylon. He made trips that were the subject of bawdy debate while he was gone—and which were never referred to without careful politeness while he was present. He kept