  We study a bosonic open string coupled to a tachyonic background field $T[X]$
and find that the tachyon field can effectively be replaced by a configuration
of D-branes placed at either the zeros or the critical points of $T[X]$,
depending on our choice of boundary conditions. This dual picture of the open
string tachyon is explored in detail for the explicit case when the tachyonic
field is quadratic.
