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and get his paycheck docked.
    The train finally came. Quaid squeezed on, feeling like a sardine in a monstrous can. What a contrast to Mars!
    Video screens were mounted everywhere, each playing its commercial. It was like the multiple windows of their home screen, except that here it was unremittingly hard-sell. This was a captive market, and the sponsors were merciless. He tried to tune out the nearest screen, but the alternative was to listen to the labored breathing of those packed in around him, and smell their body odors. On the screen a cabbie turned, as if looking at a passenger in the backseat. Beneath the old-fashioned checkered cap was the face of a mannequin. Smiling mechanically, it said: “Thank you for taking JohnnyCab! I hope you enjoyed the ride.” The commercial faded and another began. His eyes moved there of their own accord.
    A happy fellow lay on a round bed, next to a sexpot. He had evidently just made love with her, or was about to. They were under a glass dome at the bottom of the ocean; colorful fish swam around outside. Quaid knew that most of the pretty fish were up near the surface, not three miles down, and that they had better things to do than pose for the eyes of tourists who paid them no attention anyway. Not when there were sexpots to be stroked! But, hell, it was their commercial. It was foolish even to expect realism in a commercial.
    “Do you dream of a vacation at the bottom of the ocean . . .” the narrator said, in that deafeningly loud voice that advertisers insisted on inflicting on their victims. Quaid winced and tried to nudge away from the screen, but the other passengers refused to give way. They didn’t want to be deafened either.
    The screen jump-cut to a poverty-level apartment, much worse than Quaid’s own conapt, where the fellow of the underwater dome sat alone, surrounded by a towering pile of bills. He looked woebegone.
    “. . . but you can’t float the bill?” the narrator continued from offscreen.
    He was scoring there! If Quaid just had the money to move to Mars! That was the real reason Lori opposed it; she knew there was no way they could afford it. Oh, there was the bonus for new colonists, but he knew that was quickly dissipated in moving expenses. There had to be a sufficient cushion, so that a man didn’t have to be a miner to survive there. So she made the best of their real-life situation, and he had to admit she did a good job of it, and that he should be grateful. But he was like the poor schnook in the commercial: he longed for a distant planet, instead of the crowded mundane life he could afford. Except that the guy in the commercial couldn’t even afford a decent conapt.
    The scene jumped again. This time a sophisticated woman was skiing to a stop next to a flock of penguins. She was attractive in her snow outfit, and seemed to be on top of the world—or the bottom of it, as the case might be.
    “Would you like to ski Antarctica . . .”
    Then the same woman was in an office, surrounded by ten employees, all of them demanding decisions. She looked properly harried. Her hair was mussed, and she no longer looked attractive, just tired. Quaid had seen executive women just like that.
    “. . . but you’re snowed under with work?”
    Despite himself, Quaid was responding to these ads. Antarctica was a long way away, a forbidding, desolate region, similar in its fashion to Mars . . .
    “Have you always wanted to climb the mountains of Mars . . .”
    Quaid jumped. His attention was abruptly riveted to the screen. There, a sportsman was climbing a rugged pyramid-shaped mountain that looked startlingly like the one in Quaid’s dream. Was he imagining this? Was his dream taking over the mundane world, or his perception of it? No, this really was the commercial! It was not himself, Douglas Quaid, in the scene, but a smaller man in a tourist-type space suit, the kind that was made more for comfort than efficiency.
    Then the sportsman became an old man