Time Out of Joint (21 page)

LOONIES ON THE RUN MARCH

Carrying the sheet music back with him, he handed it to Vic. "See," he said. "Read the words."

Together, they read the verse under the music staff.

You’re a goon, Mister Loon,
One World you’ll never sunder.
A buffoon, Mister Loon,
Oh what a dreadful blunder.
The sky you find so cozy;
The future tinted rosy;
But Uncle’s gonna spank — you wait!
So hands ina sky, hands ina sky,
Before it is too late!!

"Do you play, mister?" the old woman was asking.

Ragle said to her, "The enemy — they’re the lunatics, aren’t they?"

The sky, he thought. The Moon. Luna.

It wasn’t himself and Vic that the MPs hunted. It was the enemy. The war was being fought between Earth and the Moon. And if the kids upstairs could take him and Vic for lunatics, then lunatics had to be human beings. Not creatures. They were colonists, perhaps.

A civil war.

I know what I do, now. I know what the contest is, and what I am. I’m the savior of this planet. When I solve a puzzle I solve the time and place the next missile will strike. I file one entry after another. And these people, whatever they call themselves, hustle an anti-missile unit to that square on the graph. To that place and at that time. And so everyone stays alive, the kids upstairs with their nose-flutes, the waitress, Ted the driver, my brother-in-law, Bill Black, the Kesselmans, the Keitelbeins....

That’s what Mrs. Keitelbein and her son had started telling me. Civil Defense ... nothing but a history of war up to the present. Models from 1998, to remind me.

But why have I forgotten?

To Mrs. McFee he said, "Does the name Ragle Gumm mean anything to you?"

The old woman laughed. "Not a darn thing," she said. "As far as I’m concerned Ragle Gumm can go jump in a hat. There isn’t any one person who can do that; it’s a whole bunch of people, and they always call them ’Ragle Gumm.’ I’ve known that from the start."

With a deep, unsteady breath, Vic said, "I think you’re wrong, Mrs. McFee. I think there is such a person and he really does do that."

She said slyly, "And be right, day in day out?"

"Yes," Ragle said. Beside him, Vic nodded.

"Oh come on," she said, screeching.

"A talent," Ragle said. "An ability to see a pattern."

"Listen," Mrs. McFee said. "I’m a lot older than you boys. I can remember when Ragle Gumm was nothing but a fashion designer, making those hideous Miss Adonis hats."

"Hats," Ragle said.

"In fact I still have one." Grunting, she rose to her feet and lumbered to a closet. "Here." She held up a derby hat. "Nothing but a man’s hat. Why, he got them wearing men’s hats just to get rid of a lot of old hats when men stopped buying them."

"And he made money in the hat business?" Vic said.

"Those fashion designers make millions," Mrs. McFee said. "They all do; every one of them. He was just lucky. That’s it—luck. Nothing but luck. And later when he got into the synthetic aluminum business." She reflected. "Aluminide. That was luck. One of these fireball lucky men, but they always wind up the same way; their luck runs out on them at the end. His did." Knowingly, she said, "His ran out, but they never told us. That’s why nobody sees Gumm any more. His luck ran out, and he committed suicide. It’s not a rumor. It’s a fact. I know a man whose wife worked for the MPs for a summer, and she told him it’s positive; Gumm killed himself two years ago. And they’ve had one person after another predicting those missiles."

"I see," Ragle said.

Triumphantly, Mrs. McFee told him, "When they made him put up — when he accepted that offer to come to Denver and do their missile predicting for them, then they saw through him; they saw it was just bluff. And rather than stand the public shame, the disgrace, he—"

Vic interrupted, "We have to leave."

"Yes," Ragle said. "Good night." Both he and Vic started toward the door.

"What about your rooms?" Mrs. McFee demanded, following after them. "I haven’t had a chance to show you anything."

"Good night," Ragle said. He and Vic stepped out onto the porch, down the steps to the path, and to the sidewalk.

"Will you be back?" Mrs. McFee called from the porch.

"Later," Vic said.

The two of them walked away from the house.

"I forgot," Ragle said. "I forgot all this." But I kept on predicting, he thought. I did it anyhow. So in a sense it doesn’t matter, because I’m still doing my job.

Vic said, "I always believed you couldn’t learn anything from popular tune lyrics. I was wrong."

And, Ragle realized, if I’m not sitting in my room working on the puzzle tomorrow, as I always do, our lives may well be snuffed out. No wonder Ted the driver pleaded with me. And no wonder my face was on the cover of Time as Man of the Year.

"I remember," he said, stopping. "That night. The Kesselmans. The photograph of my aluminum plant."

"Aluminide," Vic said. "She said, anyhow."

Do I remember everything? Ragle asked himself. What else is there?

"We can go back," Vic said. "We have to go back. You do, at least. I guess they needed a bunch of people around you, so that it would look natural. Margo, myself, Bill Black. The conditioned responses, when I reached around in the bathroom for the light cord. They must have light cords, here. Or I did, anyhow. And when the people at the market ran as a group. They must have worked in a store here, worked together. Maybe in a grocery store out here, the same job. Everything the same except that it was forty years later."

Ahead of them a cluster of lights burned.

"We’ll try there," Ragle said, increasing his pace. He still had the card Ted had given him. The number probably got him in touch with the military people, or whoever it was who had arranged the town in the first place. Back again ... but why?

"Why is it necessary?" he asked. "Why can’t I do it here? Why do I have to live there, imagining I’m back in 1959, working on a newspaper contest?"

"Don’t ask me," Vic said. "I can’t tell you."

The lights transformed themselves into words. A neon sign in several colors, burning in the darkness:

WESTERN DRUG AND PHARMACY

"A drugstore," Vic said. "We can phone from there."

They entered the drugstore, an astonishingly tiny, narrow, brilliantly lit place with high shelves and displays. No customers could be seen, nor a clerk; Ragle stopped at the counter and looked around for the public phones. Do they still have them? he wondered.

"May I help you?" a woman’s voice sounded nearby.

"Yes," he said. "We want to make a phone call. It’s urgent."

"You better show us how to operate the phone," Vic said. "Or maybe you could get the number for us."

"Certainly," the clerk said, sliding around from behind the counter in her white smock. She smiled at them, a middle-aged woman wearing low-heeled shoes. "Good evening, Mr. Gumm."

He recognized her.

Mrs. Keitelbein.

Nodding to him, Mrs. Keitelbein passed him on her way to the door. She closed and locked the door, pulled down the shade, and then turned to face him. "What’s the phone number?" she said.

He handed her the card.

"Oh," she said, reading the number. "I see. That’s the switchboard for the Armed Services, at Denver. And the extension is 62. That—" She began to frown. "That probably would be somebody in the missile-defense establishment. If they’d be there this late they must virtually live there. So that would make them somebody high up." She returned the card. "How much do you remember?" she said.

Ragle said, "I remember a great deal."

"Did my showing you the model of your factory help you?"

"Yes," he said. It certainly had. After seeing it, he had gotten onto the bus and ridden downtown to the supermarket.

"Then I’m glad," she said.

"You’re hanging around," he said, "to give me systematic doses of memory. Then you must represent the Armed Services."

"I do," she said. "In a sense."

"Why did I forget in the first place?"

Mrs. Keitelbein said, "You forgot because you were made to forget. The same way you were made to forget what happened to you that night when you got up as far as the top of the hill and ran into the Kesselmans."

"But it was city trucks. City employees. They grabbed me. They worked me over. The next morning they started ripping out the street. Keeping an eye on me." That meant the same people who ran the town. The people who had built it. "Did they make me forget in the first place?"

"Yes," she said.

"But you want me to remember."

She said, "That’s because I’m a lunatic. Not the kind you are, but the kind the MPs want to round up. You had made up your mind to come over to us, Mr. Gumm. In fact, you had packed your briefcase. But something went wrong and you never got over to us. They didn’t want to put an end to you, because they needed you. So they put you to work solving puzzles in a newspaper. That way you could use your talent for them... without ethical qualms." She continued to smile her merry, professional smile; in her white clerk’s smock she could have been a nurse, perhaps a dental nurse advocating some new technique for oral hygiene. Efficient and practical. And, he thought, dedicated.

He said, "Why had I made up my mind to come over to you?"

"Don’t you remember?"

"No," he said.

"Then I have things for you to read. A sort of reorientation kit." Stooping, she reached behind the counter and brought out a flat manila envelope; she opened it on the counter. "First," she said, "the January 14, 1996 copy of Time, with your picture on the cover and your biography inside. Complete, in so far as public knowledge about you goes."

"What have they been told?" he said, thinking of Mrs. McFee and her garble of suspicions and rumors.

"That you have a respiratory condition that requires you to live in seclusion in South America. In a back-country town in Peru called Ayacucho. It’s all in the biography." She held out a small book. "A grammar school text on current history. Used as the official text in One Happy World schools."

Ragle said, "Explain the ’One Happy World’ slogan to me."

"It’s not a slogan. It’s the official nomenclature for the group that believes there’s no future in interplanetary travel. One Happy World is good enough, better in fact than a lot of arid wastes that the Lord never intended man to occupy. You know of course what ’lunatics’ means."

"Yes," he said. "Luna colonists."

"Not quite. But it’s there in the book, along with an account of the origins of the war. And there’s one more thing." From the folder she brought out a pamphlet with the title:

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST TYRANNY

"What’s this?" Ragle said, accepting it. The pamphlet gave him an eerie feeling, the strong shock of familiarity, long association.

Mrs. Keitelbein said, "It’s a pamphlet circulated among the thousands of workers at Ragle Gumm, Inc. In your various plants. You haven’t given up your economic holdings, you understand. You volunteered to serve the government for a nominal sum—a gesture of patriotism. Your talent to be put to work saving people from lunatic bombings. But after you had worked for the government—the One Happy World Government—for a few months, you had an important change of heart. You always did see patterns sooner than anyone else."

"Can I take these back to town?" he said. He wanted to be ready for tomorrow’s puzzle; it was in his bones.

"No," she said. "They know you got out. If you go back they’ll make another try at wiping out your memories. I’d rather you stayed here and read them. It’s about eleven o’clock. There’s time. I know you’re thinking about tomorrow. You can’t help it."

"Are we safe here?" Vic said.

"Yes," she said.

"No MPs will come by and look in?" Vic said.

"Look out the window," Mrs. Keitelbein said.

Both Vic and Ragle went to the drugstore window and peered out at the street.

The street had gone. They faced dark, empty fields.

"We’re between towns," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "Since you set foot in here we’ve been in motion. We’re in motion now. For a month now we’ve been able to penetrate Old Town, as the Seabees call it. They built it, so they named it." Pausing, she said, "Didn’t it ever occur to you to wonder where you lived? The name of your town? The county? State?"

"No," Ragle said, feeling foolish.

"Do you know where it is now?"

"No," he admitted.

Mrs. Keitelbein said, "It’s in Wyoming. We’re in western Wyoming, near the Idaho border. Your town was built up as a reconstruction of several old towns which got blown away in the early days of the war. The Seabees recreated the environment fairly well, based on texts and records. The ruins that Margo wants the city to clear for the health of the children, the ruins in which we planted the phone book and word-slips and magazines, is a bit of the genuine old town of Kemmerer. An archaic county armory."

Seating himself at the counter, Ragle began to read his biography in Time.

FOURTEEN

In his hands the pages of the magazine opened, spread out, presented him with the world of reality. Names, faces, experiences drifted up at him and resumed their existences. And no men in overalls came slipping in at him from the outside darkness; no one disturbed him. This time he was allowed to sit by himself, gripping the magazine, bent over it and absorbed in it.

More with Moraga, he thought. The old campaign, the 1987 presidential elections. And, he thought, win with Wolfe. The winning team. In front of him the lean, bumbling shape of the Harvard law professor, and then his Vice President. What a contrast, he thought. Disparity responsible for a civil war. And on the same ticket, too. Try to capture everybody’s vote. Wrap it all up ... but can it be done? Law professor from Harvard and ex-railroad foreman. Roman and English law, and then a man who jotted down the weight of sacks of salt.

"Remember John Moraga?" he asked Vic.

Confusion stirred on Vic’s face. "Naturally," he muttered.

"Funny that an educated man could turn out to be so gullible," Ragle said. "Cat’s paw for the economic interests. Too naïve, probably. Too cloistered." Too much theory and too little experience, he thought.

"I don’t agree with you," Vic said in a voice that grew abruptly hard with conviction. "A man dedicated to seeing his principles carried out in practice, despite all odds."

Ragle glanced up at him in astonishment. The tight expression of certitude. Partisanship, he thought. Debates in the bars at night: I wouldn’t be caught dead using a salad bowl made out of Luna Ore. Don’t buy Lunar. The boycott. And all in the name of principles.

Ragle said, "Buy Ant-Ore."

"Buy at home," Vic agreed, without hesitation.

"Why?" Ragle said. "What’s the difference? Do you think of the Antarctic continent as home?" He was puzzled. "Lun-Ore or Ant-Ore. Ore is ore." The great foreign policy debate. The Moon will never be worth anything to us economically, he thought to himself. Forget about it. But suppose it is worth something? What then?

In 1993 President Moraga signed into law the bill that terminated American economic development on Luna. Hurray! Zeeeeep! Zeeeeep!

Fifth Avenue ticker-tape parade.

And then the insurrection. The wolves, he thought.

" ’Win with Wolfe,’ " he said aloud.

Vic said fiercely, "In my opinion a bunch of traitors."

Standing apart from the two of them, Mrs. Keitelbein listened and watched.

"The law clearly states that in case of presidential disability the Vice President becomes full and acting President," Ragle said. "So how can you start talking about traitors?"

"Acting President isn’t the same as President. He was just supposed to see that the real President’s wishes were carried out. He wasn’t supposed to distort and destroy the President’s foreign policies. He took advantage of the President’s illness. Restoring funds to the Lunar projects to please a bunch of California liberals with a lot of starry-eyed dreamy notions and no practical sense—" Vic gasped with indignation. "Mentality of teen-agers yearning to drive fast and far in souped-up cars. See beyond the next range of mountains."

Ragle said, "You got that from some newspaper column. Those aren’t your ideas."

"Freudian explanation, something to do with vague sexual promptings. Why else go to the Moon? All that talk about ’ultimate goal of life.’ Phony nonsense." Vic jabbed his finger at him. "And it isn’t legal."

"If it isn’t legal," Ragle said, "it doesn’t matter if it’s vague sexual promptings or not." You’re getting your logic muddled, he thought. Having it both ways. It’s immature and it’s against the law. Say anything against it, whatever comes to your mind. Why are you so set against Lunar exploration? Smell of the alien? Contamination? The unfamiliar seeping in through the chinks in the walls...

The radio shouted, "... desperately ill with a kidney disorder, President John Moraga at his villa in South Carolina declares that only with painstaking scrutiny and the most solemn attention to the best interests of the nation will he consider—"

Painstaking, Ragle thought. Kidney disorders always painstaking, or rather painsgiving. The poor man.

"He was a hell of a fine President," Vic said.

Ragle said, "He was an idiot."

Mrs. Keitelbein nodded.

The group of Lunar colonists declared that they would not return funds they had received and which the Federal agencies had begun billing them for. Accordingly, the FBI arrested them qua group for violation of statutes dealing with misuse of Federal funds, and, where machinery rather than funds were involved, for unauthorized possession of Federal property et cetera.

Pretext, Ragle Gumm thought.

In the dim evening the lights of the car radio illuminated the dashboard, his knee, the knee of the girl beside him as both he and she lay back together, intwined, warm, perspiring, reaching now and then into a bag of potato chips resting on the folds of her skirt. He leaned forward once to sip beer.

"Why would people want to live on the Moon?" the girl murmured.

"Chronic malcontents," he said sleepily. "Normal people don’t need to. Normal people would be satisfied with life as it is." He closed his eyes and listened to the dance music on the radio.

"Is it pretty on the Moon?" the girl asked.

"Oh Christ, it’s awful," he said. "Nothing but rock and dust."

The girl said, "When we get married I’d rather live down around Mexico City. Prices are high, but it’s very cosmopolitan."

On the magazine pages between Ragle Gumm’s hands, the article reminded him that he was now forty-six years old. It had been a long time since he had lounged with the girl in the car, listening to dance music on the radio. That was a very sweet girl, he thought. Why isn’t there a picture of her here in the article? Maybe they don’t know about her. Part of my life that didn’t count. Didn’t affect mankind....

In February of 1994 a battle broke out at Base One, the nominal capital of the Lunar colonies. Soldiers from the nearby missile base were set upon by colonists, and a five-hour pitched encounter was fought. That night, special troop-transporting ships left Earth for Luna.

Hurray, he thought. Zeeeeep! Zeeeeep!

Within a month a full-scale war was under way.

"I see," Ragle Gumm said. He closed the magazine.

Mrs. Keitelbein said, "A civil war is the worst kind possible. Family against family. Father against son."

"The expansionists—" With difficulty, he said, "The lunatics on Earth didn’t do very well."

"They fought a while, in California and New York and in a few large inland cities. But by the end of the first year the One Happy Worlders had control here on Earth." Mrs. Keitelbein smiled at him with her fixed, professional smile; she leaned back against a counter, her arms folded. "Now and then at night, lunatic partisans cut phone lines and blow up bridges. But most of those who survived are getting a dose of c.c. Concentration camps, in Nevada and Arizona."

Ragle said, "But you have the Moon."

"Oh yes," she said. "And now we’re fairly self-sufficient. We have the resources, the equipment. The trained men."

"Don’t they bomb you?"

She said, "Well, you see, Luna keeps one side away from the Earth."

Yes, he thought. Of course. The ideal military base. Earth did not have that advantage. Eventually, every part of Earth swam into the sights of the watchers on the Moon.

Mrs. Keitelbein said, "All our crops are grown hydro—hydroponics, in tanks under the surface. No way they can be contaminated by fallout. And we have no atmosphere to pick up and carry the dust. The lesser gravity permits much of the dust to leave completely ...it just drifts away, into space. Our installations are underground, too. Our houses and schools. And—" she smiled—"we breathe canned air. So no bacteriological material affects us. We’re completely contained. Even if there’re fewer of us. Only a few thousand, in fact."

"And you’ve been bombing Earth," he said.

"We have an attack program. Aggressive approach. We put warheads into what used to be transports and fire them at Earth. One or two a week ... plus smaller strikes, research rockets which we have in quantity. And communication and supply rockets, small stuff good for a few farmhouses or a factory. It worries them because they can never tell if it’s a full-size transport with a full-size H-warhead, or only a little fellow. It disrupts their lives."

Ragle said, "And that’s what I’ve been predicting."

"Yes," she said.

"How well have I done?"

"Not as well as they’ve told you. Lowery, I mean."

"I see," he said.

"But not badly, either. We’ve succeeded in randomizing our pattern more or less ... you get some of them, especially the full-size transports. I think we tend to fuss with them to a greater degree because we have only a limited number. We tend to unrandomize them. So you sense the pattern, you and your talent. Women’s hats. What they’ll be wearing next year. Occult."

"Yes," he said. "Or artistic."

"But why’d you go over to them?" Vic demanded. "They’ve been bombing us, killing women and children—"

"He knows why now," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "I saw it on his face as he read. He remembers."

"Yes," Ragle said. "I remember."

"Why did you go over to them?" Vic said.

"Because they’re right," Ragle said. "And the isolationists are wrong."

Mrs. Keitelbein said, "That’s why."

When Margo opened the front door and saw it was Bill Black outside on the dark porch, she said,

"They’re not here. They’re down at the store, taking a rush inventory. Something about a surprise audit."

"Can I come in anyhow?" Black said.

She let him in. He shut the door after him. "I know they’re not here." He had a listless, despondent manner. "But they’re not down at the store."

"That’s where I saw them last," she said, not enjoying telling a lie. "And that’s what they told me." Told me to say, she thought to herself.

Black said, "They got out. We picked up the driver of the truck. They let him off a hundred or so miles along the road."

"How do you know?" she said, and then she felt rage at him. An almost hysterical resentment. She did not understand, but she had a deep intuition. "You and your lasagne," she said chokingly. "Coming over here and spying, hanging around him all the time. Sending that tail-switching wife of yours over to rub up against him."

"She’s not my wife," he said. "They assigned her because I had to be set up in a residential context."

Her head swam. "Does—she know?"

"No."

"That’s something," Margo said. "Now what?" she said. "You can stand there smirking because you know what it’s all about."

"I’m not smirking," Black said. "I’m just thinking that at the moment I had my chance to get him back I thought to myself, That must be the Kesselmans. It’s the same people. Simple mix-up on the names. I wonder who conjured up that. I never was too good on names. Maybe they found that out. But with sixteen hundred names to keep track of and deal with—"

"Sixteen hundred," she said. "What do you mean?" And her intuition, then, grew. A sense of the finiteness of the world around her. The streets and houses and shops and cars and people. Sixteen hundred people, standing in the center of a stage. Surrounded by props, by furniture to sit in, kitchens to cook in, cars to drive, food to fix. And then, behind the props, the flat, painted scenery. Painted houses set farther back. Painted people. Painted streets. Sounds from speakers set in the wall. Sammy sitting alone in a classroom, the only pupil. And even the teacher not real. Only a series of tapes being played for him.

"Do we get to know what it’s for?" she said.

"He knows. Ragle knows."

She said, "That’s why we don’t have radios."

"You’d have picked things up on a radio," Black said.

"We did," she said. "We picked you up."

He grimaced. "It was a question of time. Sooner or later. But we expected him to keep sinking back into it, in spite of that."

"But someone came along," Margo said.

"Yes. Two more people. Tonight we sent a work crew to the house—that big old two-story house on the corner—but they’re gone. Nobody there. Left all their models. They gave him a course in Civil Defense. Leading up to the present."

She said, "If you have nothing else to say, I wish you’d leave."

"I’m going to stay here," Black told her. "All night. He might decide to come back. I thought you’d prefer it if Junie didn’t come with me. I can sleep here in the living room; that way I’ll see him if he does show up." Opening the front door he lifted a small suitcase into the house. "My toothbrush, pajamas, a few personal things," he said, in the same dulled, spiritless voice.

"You’re in trouble," she said. "Aren’t you?"

"So are you," Black said. Setting the suitcase down on a chair he opened it and began to lay out his possessions.

"Who are you?" she said. "If you’re not ’Bill Black.’ "

"I am Bill Black. Major William Black, United States Board of Strategic Planning, Western Theater. Originally I worked with Ragle, plotting out missile strikes. In some respects I was his pupil."

"So you don’t work for the city. For the water company."

The front door opened and there stood Junie Black, in a coat, holding a clock. Her face was puffy and red; obviously she had been crying. "You forgot your clock," she said to Bill Black, holding it out to him. "Why are you staying here tonight?" she said in a quavering voice. "Is it something I did?" She glanced from him to Margo. "Are you two having an affair? Is that it? Was that it all the time?"

Neither of them said anything.

"Please explain it to me," Junie said.

Bill said, "For god’s sake, will you beat it. Go on home."

Sniffling, she said, "Okay. Whatever you say. Will you be home tomorrow, or is this permanent?"

"It’s just for tonight," he said.

The door shut after her.

"What a pest," Bill Black said.

"She still believes it," Margo said. "That she’s your wife."

"She’ll believe it until she’s been reconstructed," Bill said. "So will you. You’ll keep on seeing what you’ve been seeing. The training is all there, on a nonrational level. Impressed on your systems."