More specifically it started the sunny spring day Rod Cheatwood misplaced his TV remote control for the forty-eighth time.
Rod was a concepteer at Beasleyland in Vanaheim, California. By that it was meant that he was a technician.
Although he worked out of Beasleyland, he was no maintainer of attractions. No designer of rides. Instead, Rod was strictly research and development.
Five years out of Cal Tech, Rod was a specialist in lasers. The downsizing of the defense industry put him on the street. He answered a blind ad and was surprised to see a happy cartoon mouse grinning back from the door when he showed up for the interview.
"Why do you need a laser technician for a theme park?" Rod asked the interviewer, a suit with a blank face. "You can order all the light-show lasers you could ever want."
"We want our own lasers."
"I'm strictly into lasers as a military application."
"You could do that here," the interviewer said, his glassy smile matching his glassy eyes. Did they all become so fatuous working here? Rod wonder.
"I could perfect military lasers working for Sam Beasley?"
"In a manner of speaking. We have a problem at our French base."
"Base?"
"Euro Beasley."
"Never thought of it as a base."
"The French hate us. Won't stand in line in the cold weather. Won't buy our souvenirs. They take day trips so our hotels are practically empty. We've lost billions."
"So close the park."
"You don't understand. We have a great track record in France. Our magazine, Journal de Mongo, has been a bestseller since 1934. The French love us. They just haven't warmed up to the park yet."
"Lower your prices."
"We've tried everything," the interviewer went on as if Rod's suggestion was out of the question. "Aroma therapy. Coupons. Nondiscount inducements. We even broke a long-standing rule and allowed beer and wine to be served in our park restaurants. Nothing seems to staunch the hemorrhaging."
"A laser light show won't do it, either."
"We'll give you a lab to work in, a full staff and anything you could want."
Rod stood up. "Sorry. If I'd known this was you Beasley boys, I'd never have come in for the interview. I hear you treat your employees like dirt."
"If you change your mind, give us a call, won't you?" the inteviewer said without taking offense or losing his fixed smile.
Rod Cheatwood did come around in time. There were no defense jobs in California, true. And he was loath to move out of state, also true.
But the real reason-entirely lost to posterity-that Rod came back to the Beasley Corporation was that he lost his TV remote and it was the forty-eighth time by actual count. It was also the last straw.
The UHF band of the TV dial could not be accessed without the remote clicker, and while Rod flung sofa cushions about with wild abandon and raged at the cruel and unjust gods who had turned their faces from his simple wants and desires, he missed the twopart final episode of "Star Trek: the Next Generation."
The next morning Rod was back in the Beasley employment office.
"I'd take the job on one condition," he said.
"We don't do conditions here at Beasley, but I'm willing to listen."
"In my spare time I use your facilities to work on a side research project of my own."
"What kind of project?"
"A TV remote finder."
"We own all marketing rights outright," the interviewer said quickly.
"Two conditions," said Rod. "I get marketing rights."
After a three-day negotiation involving slamming telephones, harsh words and veiled death threats, Rod Cheatwood agreed to split marketing rights on anything he developed with the Sam Beasley Corporation fifty-fifty.
In his first day they explained color therapy to him.
"Color therapy?"
"It's old. It's very old. The Pythagoreans used it to heal the sick. So did the Greeks and Egyptians. They found that exposing the eyes to different colors produces different psychological effects on the brain. We discovered it works. We just need to make it work on a grander scale."
"With lasers?"
"The brighter the color, the better it works. Lasers are as bright as color gets outside of nature."
"I follow," said Rod Cheatwood, fingering his tufted chin.
"We want you to develop the brightest, most colorful laser light possible."
"We're talking a cold laser here?"
"Yeah. We don't want to burn holes in tourists by accident. It might kill repeat business."
"An eximer laser system is what you need. But I can't guarantee it will do what you want."
"We can prove it to you."
"Go ahead."
"You're still unhappy over our contract negotiation?"
"You people," Rod said bitterly, "probably don't bury your dearly departed dead until you yank the gold fillings from their teeth, sell their bones to make gelatin and remove the fat for tallow."
Surprisingly they took no offense. One even smiled with a quiet inner satisfaction.
"How's your blood pressure these days?"
"My blood pressure has been elevated ten points since I started here," Rod added testily. "And it's only been a day."
"Come with us."
They took him to a sealed chamber in Utiliduck beneath Beasleyland. The door was labeled Pink Room.
The door was not pink, but when it was opened, the room was certainly pink. The walls were a mellow pink. Overhead lights shed a warm pink radiance. Even the recliner chair was pink. And when they closed the door after him, Rod saw the other side of the door was also pink. He was entirely enveloped in a womb of pink.
"Sit down," he was told by intercom.
Rod sat. He reclined in his chair and at first he didn't feel anything. After a few moments he relaxed. Then he really relaxed. His muscles softened. Even his bones seemed to soften.
When they came to take him out fifteen minutes later, he didn't want to go.
"Please let me stay a few minutes," Rod begged.
"Fifteen minutes more. But you have to sign a release."
"Anything," Rod said, signing without reading a sheet of paper thrust under his nose.
After the fifteen minutes were up, he still refused to go. A Beasley doctor was summoned, a blood-pressure cuff was clamped over his exposed bicep and, when the doctor announced that his blood pressure was perfect, Rod was surprised.
"Can I work in there?" he asked.
"No. You won't get anything accomplished."
"I don't mind."
Eventually they had to shut off the lights and leave him alone in the dark room until he begged to be let out of the Pink Room.
"Our research tells us color therapy works through the second visual pathway."
"There's more than one?" Rod muttered, staring at a pink spot on the other man's tie. It brought back calming memories of the Pink Room.
"The first visual pathway goes from the retina to the optic nerve. That's how we see. But there's a second pathway, a more primitive one, that goes from the retina to the hypothalamus, which is in the reptile part of the brain."
"Did you say reptile?"
"Evolution has successively added layers to man's brain structure, sort of like stacking blocks," one of the Beasley boys explained. "The human brain is stacked atop our animal brain, and under that is the most primitive-the so-called reptile brain. That's where the second visual pathway leads. Other than to trigger melanin production, biologists don't know what it's for. But we've determined that strong primary colors follow this evolutionarily abandoned pathway to affect the reptile brain in a very primal way."
"I've always hated green. Hated it with a passion."
"Orange makes me nervous. And bright red can trigger seizures in some epileptics. It's our reptile brains reacting to color stimulation of the retina. As I say, it's an ancient psuedoscience that's still kicking around. They paint prison walls in some penitentiaries pink to calm down the most-violent inmates. Works like a charm, too. In fact, it's the secret behind the success of our Technicolor cartoons. We used only positive hues."