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Dawson’s desk and had carefully traced these three letters with his forefinger. “Do you see it?”
    Scowling, Dawson said, “I saw the E immediately and the other two without much trouble. But I’m finding it hard to believe they were put there on purpose. It could be an accident of shading:”
    “Ice cubes usually don’t photograph well,” Salsbury said. “When you see them in an advertisement, they’ve nearly always been drawn by an artist. In fact, this entire ad has been painted over a photograph. But there’s more than the word in the ice.”
    Squinting at the page, Dawson said, “What else?”
    “The bottle and glass are on a reflective surface.” Salsbury circled that area of the reflection that dealt with the bottle and the cap. “Without stretching your imagination too far, can you see that the reflection of the bottle is divided in two, forming what might be taken to be a pair of legs? Do you see, also, that the reflected bottle cap resembles a penis thrusting out from between those legs?”
    Dawson bristled. “I can see it,” he said coldly.
    Too interested in his own lecture to notice Dawson’s uneasiness, Salsbury said, “Of course, the melting ice on the bottle cap could be semen. That image was never meant to be entirely subliminal. The conscious mind might recognize the intent here. But it would not recognize the reflection in that table unless it was guided to the recognition.” He pointed to another spot on the page. “Would it be going too far to say these shadows between the reflections of the bottle and the glass form vaginal lips? And that this drop of water on the table is positioned on the shadows precisely where the clitoris would be on a vagina?”
    When he perceived the subliminal sex organ, its lips parted, Dawson blushed. “I see it. Or I think I do.”
    Salsbury reached in his briefcase. “I’ve got other examples.”
    One of them was a two-page subscription solicitation that had appeared shortly before Christmas several years before, in Playboy. On the right-hand page, Playmate Liv Lindeland, a busty blonde, knelt on a white carpet. On the lefthand page stood an enormous walnut wreath. She was tying a red bow to the top of the wreath.
    In one test, Salsbury explained, a hundred subjects spent an hour studying two hundred advertisements, including this one. When the hour ended they were asked to list the first ten of those items that they could remember. Eighty-five percent listed the Playboy ad. In describing it, all but two subjects mentioned the wreath. Only five of them mentioned the girl. When questioned further, they had trouble recalling if she was a blonde, brunette, or redhead. They remembered that her breasts were uncovered, but they couldn’t say for sure whether she was wearing a hat or was clothed from the waist down. (She had no hat and was nude.) None of them had trouble describing the wreath, for it was there that the subconscious had been riveted.
    “Do you see why?” Salsbury asked. “There’s not a walnut in that ‘walnut’ wreath. It’s composed of objects that resemble the heads of penises and vaginal slits.”
    Unable to speak, Dawson leafed through the other advertisements without asking Salsbury to explain them. Finally he said, “Camel cigarettes, Seagram’s, Sprite, Bacardi Rum ... Some of the most prominent companies in the country are using subliminals to sell their products.”
    “Why shouldn’t they? It’s legal. If the competition uses them, what choice does even the most morally uplifted company really have? Everyone has to stay competitive. In short, there are no individual villains. The whole system is the villain.”
    Dawson returned to his executive chair, his face a book of his thoughts. One could read there that he disliked any talk against “the system” and that he was nonetheless shocked by what he had been shown. He was also trying to see how he could make a profit from it. He operated with the conviction that God