Nobody knows how they did it, but NBC and CBS got a dual contract with the Martians for the commercials! Yes, it's true. The Martians agreed to monitor their commercials, and then rebroadcast them as part of the Big Show that was to introduce Earthmen to Martians.
The sponsors weren't difficult to sell! They fell all over themselves to get spots on the program.
Actually, the whole thing was the most serious development in world history. Picture it for yourself. Out of a clear sky, one day (and night, because it involved the whole Earth in the same instant) a voice came from outer space, from Mars, and introduced us to a form of life our scientists had always claimed was a member of the lichen family, but which actually was a lot more human than you are. What we had thought was the lowest form of mossback, was actually the highest human civilization in the solar system. Wedgewood china, suspension bridges, and hot dogs were old stuff thirty thousand years ago with the Martians. They were really advanced. And when we understood it (most of us, that is) we felt mighty flattered to think that they were going to try to rub some of it off on us.
Actually the Big Show idea was a good one. Their psychologists had studied us, and had decided that the best way to educate us was the painless way—by entertaining us. They knew how TV fascinated us. They noted our bowed shoulders, our kinked necks, our TV squint. What more natural thing than to put on the biggest TV show of all, and at the same time take the bow out of our shoulders, the kink out of our necks, and restore the focus of our eyes to the natural one of infinity? The whole sky was going to become one gigantic television screen, in perfect focus, in full (how full we never imagined until we saw it!) color, and in Three-D.
This Big Show, they said, was going to come in like cosmic rays, from every direction, but seeming to focus directly overhead. Every seat in the house would be the best seat in the house. You were the entire audience, sitting in the one seat, surrounded from horizon to zenith by the entire stage. The Earth's EMF, they said, was a perfect lens shape—and it formed a perfect focus on the center of the Earth. The atmosphere was a perfect lens also, because it was governed by, and in fact owed its existence, as did the entire Earth, to the EMF.
Ever stop to think that it's the EMF that makes the direction exactly opposite to your feet the direction we call up, no matter where we stand on Earth? To a Chinese, up is the other way. It's the EMF does that. The EMF, expressing itself as gravity. There really isn't anything called gravity, as an entity. The EMF is the entity, and gravity is one of its legs. Magnetism is the other. Maybe the only way you could describe the EMF would be to call it the body. And nobody knows what the head is!
The egotist who thinks he is the center of the universe may be right after all. Except that he's not alone. Everybody else is at the center too!
Not that Edith Miller was ego-centric. She was beautiful, yes, but not ego-centric. She was not only beautiful, but she was private secretary to Herman Fendler, head of the new NBC-CBS Big Show Merger. It was quite true that she would not have been secretary had she not been beautiful. After all, it's what you see on TV that counts, and the bosses never let that fact get very far out of their minds. Anything that couldn't go before a camera, didn't go in TV, anywhere. Edith went everywhere. She was the kind of a girl who, when you saw her, you wanted to see more—and you cursed the "things as they are" that made it impossible. It just wasn't fair, was the thought that instantly suggested itself as you saw enough to realize there was much more.