Time Out of Joint (22 page)

"It’s awful," she said.

"Oh, I don’t know. There are worse things. It’s an attempt to save your lives."

"Is Ragle conditioned, too? Like the rest of us?"

"No," Black said, as he laid out his pajamas on the couch. Margo noticed the loud colors, the flowers and leaves of bright red. "Ragle is in a little different shape. He gave us the idea for all this. He got himself into a dilemma, and the only way he could solve it was to go into a withdrawal psychosis."

She thought, Then he really is insane.

"He withdrew into a fantasy of tranquillity," Black said, winding the clock that Junie had brought over. "Back to a period before the war. To his childhood. To the late ’fifties, when he was an infant."

"I don’t believe a thing you’re saying," she said, resisting it. But she still heard it.

"So we found a system by which we could let him live in his stress-free world. Relatively stress-free, I mean. And still plot our missile intercepts for us. He could do it without the sense of load on his shoulders. The lives of all mankind. He could make it into a game, a newspaper contest. That was our tip-off, originally. One day, when we dropped into his headquarters at Denver, he greeted us by saying, ’I’ve almost got today’s puzzle finished.’ A week or so later he had gotten a full-scale retreat fantasy going."

"Is he really my brother?" she said.

Black hesitated. "No," he said.

"Is he any relation to me?"

"No," Black said, with reluctance.

"Is Vic my husband?"

"N-no."

"Is anybody any relation to anybody?" she demanded.

Scowling, Black said, "I—" Then he bit his lip and said, "It so happens that you and I are married. But your personality-type fitted in better as a member of Ragle’s household. It had to be arranged on a practical basis."

After that, neither of them said anything. Margo walked unsteadily into the kitchen and reflexively seated herself at the table there.

Bill Black my husband, she thought. Major Bill Black.

In the living room, her husband unrolled a blanket on the couch, tossed a pillow at one end, and prepared to retire for the night.

Going to the living room door, she said, "Can I ask you something?"

He nodded.

"Do you know where the light cord is that Vic reached for, that night in the bathroom?"

Black said, "Vic managed a grocery store in Oregon. The light cord might have been there. Or in his apartment there."

"How long have you and I been married?"

"Six years."

She said, "Any children?"

"Two girls. Ages four and five."

"What about Sammy?" In his room, Sammy slept on, his door shut. "He’s no relation to anybody? Just a child recruited somewhere along the line, like a movie actor to fill a part?"

"He’s Vic’s boy. Vic and his wife."

"What’s his wife’s name?"

"You’ve never met her."

"Not that big Texas girl down at the store."

Black laughed. "No. A girl named Betty or Barbara; I never met her, either."

"What a mess," she said.

"It is," he said.

She returned to the kitchen and reseated herself. Later, she heard him switch on the television set. He listened to concert music for an hour or so, and then she heard him switch the set off, and then the living room light, and then get under the blanket on the couch. Later on, at the kitchen table, she involuntarily dozed.

The telephone woke her up. She could hear Bill Black flailing about in the living room, trying to find it.

"In the hall," she said groggily.

"Hello," Black said.

The clock on the wall above the kitchen sink told her that the time was three-thirty. Lord, she thought.

"Okay," Black said. He hung up the phone and padded back into the living room. Listening, she heard him dress, stuff his things away in the suitcase, and then the front door opened and shut. He had left. He had gone.

Not waiting, she thought, rubbing her eyes and trying to wake up. She felt stiff and cold; shivering, she got to her feet and stood before the oven, trying to get warm.

They’re not coming back, she thought. At least, Ragle isn’t coming back. Or Black would wait.

From his bedroom, Sammy called, "Mommy! Mommy!"

She opened the door. "What’s the matter?" she said.

Sitting up in bed, Sammy said, "Who was that on the phone?"

"Nobody," she said. She entered the room and bent down to tuck the covers over the boy. "Go back to sleep."

"Did Dad get home yet?"

"Not yet," she said.

"Wow," Sammy said, settling back down and already drifting back into sleep. "Maybe they stole something... left town."

She remained in the bedroom, seated on the edge of the boy’s bed, smoking a cigarette and forcing herself to stay awake.

I don’t think they’ll be back, she thought. But I’ll wait up anyhow. Just in case.

"What do you mean they’re right?" Vic said. "You mean it’s right to bomb towns and hospitals and churches?"

Ragle Gumm remembered the day he had first heard about the Lunar colonists, already called lunatics, firing on Federal troops. Nobody had been very much surprised. The lunatics, for the most part, consisted of discontented people, unestablished young couples, ambitious young men and their wives, few with children, none with property or responsibility. His first reaction was to wish that he could fight. But his age forbade that. And he had something much more valuable to volunteer.

They had put him to work plotting the missile strikes, making his graphs and patterns of prediction, doing his statistical research, he and his staff. Major Black had been his executive officer, a bright individual eager to learn how the plotting was done. For the first year it had gone properly, and then the weight of responsibility had gotten him down. The sense that all their lives depended on him. And at that point the army people had decided to take him off Earth. To put him aboard a ship and transport him to one of the health resorts on Venus to which high government officials went, and at which they wasted much time. The climate on Venus, or perhaps the minerals in the water, or the gravity—no one could be sure—had done much to cure cancer and heart trouble.

For the first time in his life he found himself leaving Earth. Journeying out into space, between planets. Free of gravity. The greatest tie had ceased to hold him. The fundamental force that kept the universe of matter behaving as it did. The Heisenberg Unified Field Theory had connected all energy, all phenomena into a single experience. Now, as his ship left Earth, he passed from that experience to another, the experience of pure freedom.

It answered, for him, a need that he had never been aware of. A deep restless yearning under the surface, always there in him, throughout his life, but not articulated. The need to travel on. To migrate.

His ancestors had migrated. They had appeared, nomads, not farmers but food-gatherers, entering the West from Asia. When they had reached the Mediterranean they had settled down, because they had reached the edge of the world; there was no place left to go. And then later, hundreds of years later, reports had arrived that other places existed. Lands beyond the sea. They had never gotten out onto the sea much, except perhaps for their abortive migration to North Africa. That migration out onto the water in boats was a terrifying thing for them. They had no idea where they were going, but after a while they had made that migration, from one continent to another. And that held them for a time, because again they had reached the edge of the world.

No migration had ever been like this. For any species, any race. From one planet to another. How could it be surpassed? They made now, in these ships, the final leap. Every variety of life made its migration, traveled on. It was a universal need, a universal experience. But these people had found the ultimate stage, and as far as they knew, no other species or race had found that.

It had nothing to do with minerals, resources, scientific measurement. Nor even exploration and profit. Those were excuses. The actual reason lay outside their conscious minds. If he were required to, he could not formulate the need, even as he experienced it fully. No one could. An instinct, the most primitive drive, as well as the most noble and complex. It was both at once.

And the ironic thing, he thought, is that people say God never meant for us to travel in space.

The lunatics are right, he thought, because they know it has nothing to do with how profitable the ore concessions can be made to be. We’re only pretending to mine ore on Luna. It’s not a political question, or even an ethical one. But you have to answer something when someone asks you. You have to pretend that you know.

For a week he bathed in the warm mineral waters at the Roosevelt Hot Springs on Venus. Then they shipped him back to Earth. And, shortly after that, he started spending his time thinking back to his childhood. To the peaceful days when his father had sat around the living room reading the newspaper and the kids had watched Captain Kangaroo on TV. When his mother had driven their new Volkswagen, and the news on the radio hadn’t been about war but about the first Earth satellites and the initial hopes for thermonuclear power. For infinite sources of energy.

Before the great strikes and depressions and civil discord that came later.

That was his last memory. Spending his time meditating about the ’fifties. And then, one day, he found himself back in the ’fifties. It had seemed a marvelous event to him. A breath-taking wonder. All at once the sirens, the c.c. buildings, the conflict and hate, the bumper strips reading ONE HAPPY WORLD, vanished. The soldiers in their uniforms hanging around him all day long, the dread of the next missile attack, the pressure and tension, and above all the doubt that they all felt. The terrible guilt of a civil war, masked over by greater and greater ferocity. Brother against brother. Family against itself.

A Volkswagen rolled up and parked. A woman, very pretty and smiling, stepped out and said,

"Almost ready to go home?"

That’s a darn sensible little car they’ve got, he thought. They made a good buy. High resale value.

"Just about," he said to his mother.

"I want to get a few things in the drugstore," his father said, closing the car door after them.

Trade-in on electric razors, he thought as he watched his mother and father go off toward the drug department of Ernie’s Shopping Center. Seven-fifty for your old razor, regardless of make. No ominous preoccupation: the pleasure of buying. Above his head the shiny signs. Colors of shifting ads. The brightness, the splendor. He wandered about the parking lot, among the long pastel cars, gazing up at the signs, reading the words in the window displays. Schilling drip coffee 69¢ a pound. Gosh, he thought. What a buy.

His eyes took in the sight of merchandise, cars, people, counters; he thought, What a lot to look at. What a lot to examine. A fair, practically. In the grocery department a woman giving away free samples of cheese. He wandered that way. Bits of yellow cheese on a tray. The woman holding the tray out to anyone. Something for nothing. The excitement. Hum and murmur. He entered the store and reached out for his free sample, trembling. The woman, smiling down at him, said,

"What do you say?"

"Thank you," he said.

"Do you enjoy this?" the woman asked. "Roaming around here in the different stores while your parents are shopping?"

"Sure," he said, munching on the cheese.

The woman said, "Is it because you feel that everything you might need is available here? A big store, a supermarket, is a complete world in itself?"

"I guess so," he admitted.

"So there’s nothing to fear," the woman said. "No need to feel anxiety. You can relax. Find peace, here."

"That’s right," he said, with a measure of resentment at her, at the questioning. He looked once more at the tray of food.

"Which department are you in now?" the woman asked.

He looked around him and saw that he was in the pharmacy department. Among the tubes of toothpaste and magazines and sun-glasses and jars of hand lotion. But I was in the food part, he thought with surprise. Where the samples of food are, the free food. Are there free samples of gum and candy here? That would be okay.

"You see," the woman said, "they didn’t do anything to you, to your mind. You slipped back yourself. You’ve slipped back now, just reading about it. You keep wanting to go back." Now she did not have a tray of cheese samples. "Do you know who I am?" she asked in a considerate voice.

"You’re familiar," he said, stalling because he could not recall.

"I’m Mrs. Keitelbein," the woman said.

"That’s so," he agreed. He moved away from her. "You’ve done a lot to help me," he said to her, feeling grateful.

"You’re getting out of it," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "But it’ll take time. The pull on you is strong. The tug back into the past."

The Saturday-afternoon crowd swarmed on all sides of him. How nice, he thought. This is the Golden Age. The finest time to be alive. I hope I can live like this always.

His father, beckoning to him from the Volkswagen. Armload of parcels. "Let’s go," his father called.

"Okay," he said, still wondering, still seeing everything, unwilling to let it all go by him. In the corner of the parking lot heaps of colorful paper that had blown there, wrappers and cartons and paper bags. His mind made out the patterns, the cigarette packages crumpled up, the lids to milkshake cartons. And in the debris lay something of value. A dollar bill, folded. It had blown there with the rest. Bending, he sorted it out, unfolded it. Yes, a dollar bill. Lost by someone, probably a long, long time ago.

"Hey, look what I found," he called to his father and mother, running toward them and the car.

Conference, ending in, "Can he keep it? Would it be right?" His mother, concerned.

"Never be able to locate the owner," his father said. "Sure, keep it." He tousled the boy’s hair.

"But he didn’t earn it," his mother said.

"I found it," Ragle Gumm chanted, clutching the bill. "I figured out where it was; I knew it was there with all that other junk."