"If this is about encyclopedias, you might as well not waste your time," he said. "I sell Britannica part time."

So it goes.

The subdivisions I worked were almost as horrifying as the Collier's sales pitch. There were flags everywhere-on poles, stuck on cars, even pasted to front doors. There were even more yapping dogs than there were flags. And at least three of the streets seemed to be named "Waco."

As befits the name, they had absolutely no shade.

By eight o'clock on the first night my head was swelling to the size of a 24-volume home library from the sun and lack of liquid-of course there were no stores. And my fingers had started to lose feeling because my 15 pound display case was cutting off my circulation.

I would have loved to have given the developer of the subdivision a free set of encyclopedias for $600. Instead I wasted an hour of working time walking, in the streets because there were no sidewalks, to a shopping center for a Coke and a glass of lemonade. Collier's wouldn't have liked that.

It was easy for the spy to find the doorbells, because they were all at the same place on the houses. None of the people seemed angry at his intrusion, maybe because most of them keep him out of their houses. He couldn't even tell their truths from their fictions.

"We have a sick child."

"I don't think you had better talk to my husband just now. He's trying to install a new air conditioner we ordered, and it came in the wrong size, and he's awfully irritated."

"We have company." (The spy heard that one dozens of times; the company usually had come from out of town.)

"Talk to me now? Are you crazy? This is the middle of the rendezvous!" The spy knew that one was true, because he could hear Walter Cronkite sputtering in the man's living room. And because girls playing Monopoly on their front porch had abandoned their game in a hurry when their mother yelled that Mike Collins' voice had come on.

The managing director of the Greater Louisville Better Business Bureau, Joe D. Proctor, feels that sales pitches like Collier's will be changed one way or the other.

"I think the time has come," he said. "These companies are acutely aware they are going to have to change their operations, or have their operations changed for them by legislation."

One student who actually sold some encyclopedias for Collier's told me he doesn't think laws alone can make much difference, since the prospective customers seemed to expect the Collier's approach as a matter of course: "It gets you a little disgusted with people in general."

The spy returned safely from his assignment, back to the newspaper office with its hundreds of square yards of carpeting. Apollo 11 was coming back, too, and everyone crowded around the six huge American color television sets for splashdown.

But the bosses wouldn't let them turn on the sound, so they watched the festivities on a silent screen: Nixon flapping his arms around like a man possessed, the three astronauts inside their glass cage on board the ship, grinning like monkeys in a wonderfully exotic zoo.

And the people in the newsroom, delighted to have the astronauts back, talked about how all-American they looked.

"Neil Armstrong has the most typically all-American face I have ever seen." one said.

"I'd match John Davidson with him any time," another replied.