Time Out of Joint (10 page)

The hollow men, he thought. We should have looked up poetry.

He was the only person on the bus, outside of the driver.

The bus actually moved. It moved through town, from the business section to the residential section. The driver was driving him home.

When he opened his eyes wide again, all the nodding people had returned. The shoppers. The clerks. The school children. The noise and smells and chatter.

Nothing works right, he thought to himself.

The bus honked at a car pulling from a parking slot. All had become normal.

Experiments, he thought. Suppose I had fallen through to the street? With fear he thought, Suppose I had ceased to exist, too?

Is this what Ragle saw?

SEVEN

When he got home, there was not a soul in the house.

For an instant he was overcome by panic. No, he thought.

"Margo!" he called.

All the rooms were deserted. He wandered about, trying to keep control of himself.

And then he noticed that the back door was open.

Going out into the back yard he looked around. Still no sign of them. Ragle or Margo or Sammy; none of them.

He walked down the path, past the clothesline, past the rose arbor, to Sammy’s clubhouse built against the back fence.

As soon as he rapped on the door a peep-slot slid open and his son’s eye appeared. "Oh, hello, Dad," Sammy said. At once the door was unbolted and held open for him.

Inside the clubhouse, Ragle sat at the table, the earphones on his head. Margo sat beside him, at a great sheaf of paper. Both of them had been writing; sheet after sheet was covered with rapid jottings.

"What’s going on?" Vic said.

Margo said, "We’re monitoring."

"So I see," he said. "But what are you bringing in?"

Ragle, with the earphones still on his head, turned and with a gleam in his eye said, "We’re picking them up."

"Who?" Vic said. "Who’s ’them’?"

"Ragle says it may take years to find out," Margo said, her face animated, her eyes bright. Sammy stood stock-still, in a trance of ecstasy; the three of them were in a state he had never witnessed before. "But we have a way of overhearing them," she said. "And we’ve already started keeping notes. Look." She pushed the sheaf of paper at him. "Everything they say; we’re writing it all down."

"Ham operators?" Vic said.

"That," Ragle said. "And communication between ships and their field; evidently there’s a field very close to here."

"Ships," Vic echoed. "You mean ocean ships?"

Ragle pointed up.

Christ, Vic thought. And he felt then, the same tension and wildness. The frenzy.

"When they go over," Margo said, "they come in strong and clear. For about a minute. Then they fade out. We can hear them talking, not just signals but conversation. They kid a lot."

"Great kidders," Ragle said. "Jokes all the time."

"Let me listen," Vic said.

When he had seated himself at the table, Ragle passed the earphones to him and fitted them over his head. "You want me to tune it?" Ragle said. "I’ll tune, and you just listen. When a signal comes in good and clear, tell me. I’ll leave the bead at that point."

A signal came in presently. Some man giving information about some industrial process. He listened, and then he said, "Tell me what you’ve figured out." He felt too impatient to listen; the voice droned on. "What can you tell?"

"Nothing yet," Ragle said, with no loss of satisfaction. "But don’t you see? We know they’re there."

"We knew that already," Vic said. "Every time they flew over."

Both Ragle and Margo—and Sammy, too—seemed a little taken aback. After a pause, Margo glanced at her brother. Ragle said, "It’s a hard concept to explain."

From outside the clubhouse a voice called, "... hayfeloz. Whirya."

Margo raised her hand warningly. They listened.

Someone, in the yard, was looking for them. Vic heard footsteps on the path. And then the voice again, this time closer:

"People?"

Softly, Margo said, "It’s Bill Black."

Sammy slid back a peep-slot. "Yeah," he whispered. "It’s Mr. Black."

Lifting his son aside, Vic got down and peeped through the peep-slot. Bill Black stood in the center of the walk, obviously searching for them. On his face was an expression of aggravation and puzzlement. No doubt he had gone inside the house, finding it unlocked and nobody there.

"I wonder what he wants," Margo said. "Maybe if we keep quiet he’ll go away. Probably wants us all to have dinner with them, or go out somewhere."

They waited.

Bill Black strolled about aimlessly, kicking at the grass. "Hey fellows!" he called. "Where the heck are you?"

Silence.

"I’d sure feel silly if he caught us hiding in here," Margo said with a nervous laugh. "It’s as if we were children or something. He certainly looks funny, craning his neck like that, trying to spot us. As if he thought we were hiding in the tall grass."

Mounted on the wall of the clubhouse was a toy gun that Vic had given his son one Christmas. It had fins and coils sticking up from it, and the box had described it as a "Robot Rocket Blaster from the 23rd Century, Capable of Destroying Mountains." Sammy had scampered about clicking it for a few weeks, and then the spring had broken and the gun had gone up on the wall, trophy-like, to scare by its presence alone.

Vic lifted the gun down. He unlocked the clubhouse door, pushed it open, and stepped out.

Standing with his back to him, Bill Black called. "Hey, people! Where are you?"

Vic crouched down and held the gun up, pointed at Black. "You’re a dead man," he said.

Spinning to face him, Black saw the gun. He blanched and half-raised his arms. Then he noticed the clubhouse, Ragle and Margo and Sammy peeping out, and the fins and coils and bright enamel of the gun. His hands dropped and he said, "Ha-ha."

"Ha-ha," Vic said.

"What were you doing?" Black said. From inside the Nielsons’ house, Junie Black appeared. She descended the porch steps, slowly, to join her husband; both she and Bill frowned and drew together. She put her arm around his waist. Black said nothing, then.

"Hi," Junie said.

Margo stepped from the clubhouse. "What were you doing?" she asked Junie in a voice that any woman would shrink at. "Just making yourself at home in our house?"

The Blacks gazed at them.

"Oh come on," Margo said, standing with her arms folded. "Just make yourself at home."

"Take it easy," Vic said.

To him, his wife said, "Yes, they just walked right in. Into every room, I imagine. How did you find it?" she asked June. "Beds made properly? Any dust on the curtains? Find anything you liked?"

Ragle and Sammy came out of the clubhouse and joined Vic and his wife. The four of them faced Bill and Junie Black.

At last Black said, "I apologize for trespassing on your property. We wondered if you’d like to go bowling with us tonight."

Beside her husband, Junie smiled idiotically. Vic felt a little sorry for her. She had clearly no idea that she would offend anyone; probably she had not even been conscious of transgression. In her sweater and blue cotton trousers, her hair tied up with a ribbon, she looked very cute and childlike.

"I’m sorry," Margo said. "But you shouldn’t barge into other people’s houses, you know that, Junie."

Junie drew back, flinching and unhinged. "I—" she murmured.

"I said I apologize," Black said. "What do you want, for Christ’s sake?" He seemed equally perturbed.

Vic put out his hand and they shook hands. All was over.

"You stay if you want," Vic said to Ragle, indicating the clubhouse. "We’ll go on inside and see about dinner."

"What do you have in there?" Black said. "I mean if it’s none of my business, tell me. But you’re sure in a serious mood."

Sammy spoke up, "You can’t come in the clubhouse."

"Why not?" Junie said.

"You’re not members," Sammy said.

"Can we join?" Junie said.

"No," Sammy said.

"Why not?"

"You just can’t," Sammy said, glancing at his father.

"That’s right," Vic said. "I’m sorry."

He and Margo and the Blacks walked up the steps, onto the the back porch of the house. "We haven’t had dinner," Margo said, still tense with hostility.

"We didn’t mean go bowling now," Junie protested. "We just wanted to catch you before you made plans. Look, kids, if you haven’t started dinner, why don’t you come over and eat with us? We’ve got a leg of lamb, and there’s plenty of frozen peas and Bill picked up a quart of ice cream on the way home from work." She appealed to Margo with tremulous urgency. "What say?"

"Thanks," Margo said, "but maybe some other time."

Bill Black did not seem to have quite calmed down: he kept aloof from them, dignified and somewhat cool. "You know you’re always welcome in our house," he said. He led his wife in the direction of the front door. "If you feel like going bowling with us, drop over about eight. If not—" He shrugged. "Well, no harm done."

"We’ll see you," Junie called, as Bill led her out of the house. "I hope you’ll come." She smiled yearningly at them, and then the door shut after them.

"What a pill," Margo said. Opening the hot-water tap she ran water into a kettle.

Vic said, "A whole psychological technique could be erected on how people act when they’re startled, before they have time to think."

As she fixed dinner, Margo said, "Bill Black just seems rational. He put up his hands until he saw it was only a toy gun and then he put them down again."

Vic said, "What are the chances of his wandering over at that particular moment?"

"One of them is always over here. You know how they are."

"True," he said.

In the locked clubhouse, Ragle Gumm sat with the earphones on, monitoring a strong signal and making occasional notes. Over the years, in his contest work he had learned excellent systems of quick notation, all his own; as he listened he not only made a permanent record of what he heard but he also jotted down comments and the ideas and reactions of his own. His ballpoint pen—one that Bill Black had given him—flew.

Watching him, Sammy said, "You sure write fast, Uncle Ragle. Can you read it when you get finished?"

"Yes," he said.

The signal, beyond a doubt, emanated from the nearby landing field. He had got so he recognized the voice of the operator. What he wanted to find out was the nature of the traffic coming into and leaving the field. Where did they go? They shot overhead at terrific speed. How fast? Why did nobody in town know about the flights? Was it a secret military installation, some new experimental ships that the public was ignorant of? Reconnaissance missiles ... tracking devices ...

Sammy said, "I’ll bet you helped crack the Japanese code during World War Two."

Hearing the boy say that, Ragle once again had a sudden and complete sensation of futility. Shut up in a child’s clubhouse, an earphone pressed to his head, listening for hours to a crystal set built by a grammar-school child ... listening to ham operators and traffic instructions like a school child himself.

I must be crazy, he said to himself.

I’m the man who’s supposed to have fought in a war. I’m forty-six years old, supposedly an adult.

Yes, he thought. And I’m a man who lies around the house scrounging a living by filling out Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? Puzzles in a newspaper contest. While other adults have jobs, wives, homes of their own.

I’m a retarded—psychotic. Hallucinations. Yes, he thought. Insane. Infantile and lunatic. What am I doing, sitting here? Daydreams, at best. Fantasies about rocket ships shooting by overhead, armies and conspiracies. Paranoia.

A paranoiac psychosis. Imagining that I’m the center of a vast effort by millions of men and women, involving billions of dollars and infinite work ... a universe revolving around me. Every molecule acting with me in mind. An outward radiation of importance ... to the stars. Ragle Gumm the object of the whole cosmic process, from the inception to final entropy. All matter and spirit, in order to wheel about me.

Sammy said, "Uncle Ragle, do you think you can crack their code, like the Japanese code?"

Rousing himself he said, "There’s no code. They’re just talking like anybody. It’s some man sitting in a control tower watching military aircraft land." He turned toward the boy, who was watching him with fixed intensity. "Some fellow in his thirties who shoots pool once a week and enjoys TV. Like we do."

"One of the enemy," Sammy said.

With anger, Ragle said, "Forget that kind of talk. Why do you say that? It’s all in your mind." My fault, he realized. I put it there.

In his earphones the voice said, "... all right, LF-3488. I have it down in corrected form. You can go ahead. Yes, you should be practically overhead."

The clubhouse shook.

"There one goes," Sammy said excitedly.

The voice continued, "... entirely clear. No, it’s fine. You’re passing over him now."

Him, Ragle thought.

"... down there," the voice said. "Yes, you’re looking down at Ragle Gumm himself. Okay, we have you. Let go."

The vibrations subsided.

"It’s gone," Sammy said. "Maybe it landed."

Setting down the earphones, Ragle Gumm got to his feet. "You listen for a while," he said.

"Where are you going?" Sammy asked.

"For a walk," Ragle said. He unlocked the door of the club-house and stepped outside, into the fresh, brisk, evening air.

The kitchen light of the house ... his sister and brother-in-law in the kitchen. Fixing dinner.

I’m leaving, Ragle said to himself. I’m getting out of here. I meant to before. Now I can’t wait.

Walking carefully down the path around the side of the house, he reached the front porch; he entered the house and got into his room without either Vic or Margo hearing him. There, he gathered up all the money he could find in his assorted dresser drawers, clothes, unopened envelopes, change from a jar. Putting on a coat he left the house by the front door and walked rapidly off down the sidewalk.

A block or so away, a cab approached. He waved his arms and the cab stopped.

"Take me to the Greyhound bus station," he told the driver.

"Yes, Mr. Gumm," the driver said.

"You recognize me?" Here it was again, the projection of the paranoiac infantile personality: the infinite ego. Everyone aware of me, thinking about me.

"Sure," the driver said, as he started up his cab. "You’re that contest winner. I saw your picture in the paper and I remarked, Why, that guy lives right here in town. Maybe one day I’ll pick him up in my cab."

So it was legitimate, Ragle thought. The odd blurring of reality and his insanity. Genuine fame, plus the fantasy fame.

When cab drivers recognize me, he decided, it’s probably not in my mind. But when the heavens open and God speaks to me by name ... that’s when the psychosis takes over.