Every so often I hear someone say darkly, "I don't know about those polls. I've never had a call from them and no one I know has ever had a call from them."

I keep quiet or mumble something noncommittal. I could say, truthfully, "I do know about those polls. They ring me up more than twenty times a week." I could say that but I don't.

Not so much because I don't want to seem a crackpot or a liar as because I don't want to spoil a good thing. Or at least what I think is a good thing—and for the time being what I think is a good thing is what the world thinks is a good thing.

Now, in order for you to get the picture you must understand that the New York metropolitan area fashions the literary and musical fads of the United States and the United States by example and by infiltration via writings and movies and recordings fashions the fads of the world. And the New York metropolitan area goes by the opinions I frame.

It probably seems strange to you that I, in any amassing of statistics merely one digit in the neighborhood of the decimal point, can claim to exert such far-reaching influence.

But I've seen much the same sort of thing in my work as a CPA. Someone possessing relatively few shares in a holding company may exercise an inordinate amount of power over the national economy.

An analogous set of operations makes it possible for me to be an esthetic shot of digitalis in the body politic. That's why Bartok's Mikrokosmos is at this writing the top tune and why archaeology professor Dr. Loob is high man on the polls with his TV show Dig This! and why the world has taken such a turn that you may very likely be calling this the Day of the Egghead.

But you're most likely asking at this point, "Why, in the name of statistical probability, did this character get so many calls when so many people got none?" And your next thought is, "Or did he? Was he a paranoiac?"

Here's my answer to your second question. I'm certainly not imagining any of this. You're bound to come upon some signs of these times and know what I've said about the revolution in taste is true. Otherwise there'd be no point in my setting this down or in your reading it.