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More than a few among the crowds and police initially used the words sick, sickening, and/or nasty when the tank’s deltate nozzle was affixed to the protuberance at the center of the figure’s rear end’s white-and-navy bullseye design. All such expressions of distaste were silenced by the subsequent inflation. First the bottom and belly and thighs ballooned, forcing the figure out from the window and contorting him slightly to keep his forehead’s cup affixed. The airtight Lycra rounded and became shiny. The long-haired man on Dexedrine patted his bicycle’s slim rear tire and told the young lady he’d lent the field glasses to that he’d figured all along what they (presumably meaning the little protuberances) were. One shoulder’s valve inflated the left arm, the other the right arm, & c., until the figure’s entire costume had become large, bulbous, and doughily cartoonish. There was no coherent response from the crowd, however, until a nearly suicidal-looking series of nozzle-to-temple motions from the figure began to fill the head’s baggy mask, the crumpled white Mylar at first collapsing slightly to the left and then coming back up erect as it filled with gas, the face’s array of patternless lines rounding to resolve into something that produced from 400+ ground-level US adults loud cries of recognition and an almost childlike delight.

. . And that the time, Schmidt told the Focus Group, had — probably not at all to their disappointment, he said with a tiny pained smile — that the time had now arrived for them to elect a foreman and for Schmidt himself to withdraw and allow the Focus Group’s constituents to take counsel together here in the darkening conference room, to compare their individual responses and opinions of the Taste, Texture, and Overall Satisfaction of Felonies! and to try now together to come up with agreed-upon GRDS ratings for same. In some of the fantasies in which he and Darlene Lilley were having high-impact intercourse on the firms’ conference tables Schmidt kept finding himself saying Thank you, oh thank you in rhythm to the undulatory thrusting motions of the coitus, and was unable to stop himself, and couldn’t help seeing the confused and then distasteful expression that the rhythmic Oh God, thank yous produced on Darlene Lilley’s face even as her glasses fogged and her crosstrainers’ heels drummed thunderously on the table’s surface, and sometimes it almost wrecked the whole fantasy. If, after time and a reasonable amount of discussion, the Focus Group by chance for whatever reason found that they couldn’t get together on a certain specific number to express the whole group’s true feelings, Schmidt told them (by this time three of the men actually had their heads down on the table, including the overeccentric UAF, who was also emitting tiny low moans, and Schmidt had decided he was going to give this fellow a very low TFG Performance Rating indeed on the evaluations all Team Δy facilitators had to fill out on UAFs at the end of a research cycle), what he’d ask is that the Focus Group then just go ahead and submit two separate Group Response Data Summaries, one GRDS comprising each of the numbers on which the Focus Group’s two opposed camps had settled — there was no such thing as a hung jury in TFG testing, he said with a grin that he hoped wasn’t rigid or pained — and that if splitting into even two such subgroups proved unfeasible because one or more of the men at the table felt that neither subgroup’s number adequately captured their own individual feelings and preferences, why then if necessary three separate GRDSs should be completed, or four, and so on — but with the overall idea being please keep in mind that Team Δy, Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, and the Mister Squishy Co. were asking for the very lowest possible number of separate GRDS responses an intelligent group of discerning consumers could come up with today. Schmidt in fact had as many as thirteen separate GRDS packets in the manila folder he now held rather dramatically up as he mentioned the GRDS forms, though he removed only one packet from the folder, since there was no point in proactively doing anything to encourage the Focus Group to atomize and not unite. The fantasy would of course have been exponentially better if it were Darlene Lilley who gasped

Thank you, thank you in rhythm to the damp lisping slapping sounds, and Schmidt was well aware of this, and of his apparent inability to enforce his preferences even in fantasy. It made him wonder if he even had what convention called a Free Will at all, deep down. Only two of the room’s fifteen total males noticed that there had been no hint of distant window-muffled exterior noise in the conference room for quite some time; neither of these two were actual test subjects. Schmidt knew also that by this time — the exordial presentation had so far taken 23 minutes, but it felt, as always, much longer, and even the more upright and insulin-tolerant members’ restive expressions indicated that they too were feeling hungry and tired and probably thinking this preliminary background was taking an oppressively long time (when in reality Robert Awad had explicitly told Schmidt that Alan Britton had authorized up to 32 minutes for the putatively experimental Full-Access TFG presentation, and had said that Terry’s reputation for relative conciseness and smooth preemption of digressive questions and ephemera was one of the reasons he [meaning R. Awad] had selected Schmidt to facilitate the quote unquote experimental TFG’s GRDS phase) — Schmidt also knew that by this time Darlene Lilley’s own Focus Group was in camera and deeply into its own GRDS caucus, and that Darlene was thus back in the R.S.B. Research green room making a brisk cup of Lipton tea in the microwave, what she liked to call her grownup shoes off and resting — one perhaps on its burgundy side — with her briefcase and purse beside one of the comfortable chairs opposite the green room’s four-part viewing screen, Darlene at this moment facing the microwave and with her great broad back to the door so that Schmidt would have to sigh loudly or cough or jingle his keys as he came down the hall to the green room in order to avoid making her jump and lay her palm against the flounces of her blouse’s front by ‘com[ing] up behind [her] like that,’ as she’d accused him of doing once during the six-month period when SRD Awad really had been coming up stealthily behind her all the time and her own and everyone else’s nerves were understandably strung out and on edge. Schmidt would shortly then pour a cup of R.S.B.’s strong sour coffee and join Darlene Lilley and today’s so-called experimental project’s other two Field Researchers and perhaps one or two silent and very intense young R.S.B. Market Research interns in the row of cushioned chairs before the screens, Schmidt next to Lilley and somewhat in the shadow of her very tall hair, and Ron Mounce would as always produce a pack of cigarettes, and Trudi Keener would laugh at the way Mounce always made a show of clawing a cigarette desperately out of the pack and lighting it with a tremorous hand, and the fact that neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley smoked (Darlene had grown up in a household with heavy smokers and was now allergic) would cause a slight alliance of posture as they both leaned slightly away from the smoke. Schmidt had once swallowed hard in his chair and mentioned the whole smoking issue to Mounce, gallantly claiming the allergy as his own, but since R.S.B. equipped its green room with both ashtrays and exhaust fans and it was eighteen floors down and 100 yards out the Gap’s rear service doors into a small cobbled area where people without private offices gathered on breaks to smoke, it wasn’t the sort of issue that could really be pressed without appearing either like a militant crank or like someone putting on a show of patronizing chivalry for Darlene, who often crossed her legs ankle-on-knee-style and massaged her instep with both hands as she watched her Focus Group’s private deliberations and Schmidt tried to focus on his own TFG. There was never much conversation; the four facilitators were still technically on, ready at any moment to return to their respective groups’ conference rooms if the screen showed their foreman moving to press the button that the Groups were told activated an amber signal light.