Time Out of Joint Read online

  "Hey, Mom," Walter said excitedly. "I got a real good idea; what about Mr. Gumm talking to the class about his military experiences? He could give them a sense of participation; you know, the immediacy of the danger and all that. He probably remembers a whole bunch of training they gave the GIs about safety and what to do under fire and emergency situations."

  Ragle said, "That’s about all there is; what IQ told you."

  "But you remember stories the other guys swapped, about air-raids and bombing," Walter persisted. "They don’t have to actually have happened to you."

  Kids are all about the same, Ragle thought. This boy talked along the lines Sammy talked. Sammy was ten; this boy was say, sixteen. But he liked both of them. And he took it as a compliment.

  Fame, he thought. This is my reward for being the greatest—or longest—winner in the history of puzzle contests. Boys between the ages of ten and sixteen think I’m somebody.

  It amused him. And he said, "I’ll wear my full general’s uniform when I show up Tuesday."

  The boy’s eyes widened; then he tried to stiffen and appear blasé. "No kidding?" he said. "A full general? Four star?"

  "Absolutely," he said, as solemnly as possible. Mrs. Keitelbein smiled, and he smiled across at her.

  At five-thirty, when the store had been closed and locked up, Vic Nielson called the three or four checkers over together.

  "Listen," he said. All day he had been planning this out. The window shades were down; the customers had left. At the registers one of the store’s assistant managers had started counting the money and setting the tapes for tomorrow. "I want you people to do me a favor. It’s a psychological experiment. It’ll only take thirty seconds. Okay?" Especially he appealed to Liz; she was the power among the checkers, and if she said okay the others probably would.

  "Can’t it be done tomorrow!" Liz said. She already had her coat on, and she had changed from low heels to high heels. In them she seemed like some majestic three-dimensional pineapple juice display poster.

  Vic said, "My wife’s parked out in the lot waiting. If I don’t get out there in a minute or so, she’ll start honking. So you know this won’t take long."

  The other checkers, male, small, watched Liz for her reaction. They still had on their white aprons, and their pencils behind their ears.

  "All right," she said. Waggling her finger at him she said, "But you better be telling the truth; we better be right out of here."

  He walked over to the produce department, shook a paper bag loose from one of the bins, and began blowing it up. Liz and the other checkers gazed at him dully.

  "What I want you to do is this," he said, throttling the full bag of air. "I’m going to pop this bag and then I’m going to yell a command at you. I want you to do exactly what I say; don’t think about it—just do it when you hear me yell it. I want you to react without giving it any time. You understand what I mean?"

  Chewing on a piece of gum that she had pilfered from the candy and gum rack, Liz said, "Yeah, we understand. Go on, pop and yell."

  "Face me," he said. The four of them stood with their backs to the wide glass exit door. It was the only door through which any of them passed to get into and out of the store. "Okay," he said, and, lifting up the bag, yelled, "Run!" And then he popped it. As he yelled, the four of them jumped slightly, startled. When the bag popped—its noise in the empty store was terrific—the four of them bolted like hares.

  None of them ran toward the door. As a group they ran directly left, toward an upright support pillar. Six, seven, eight steps at it ... and then they halted, wheezing and disconcerted.

  "Now what’s this?" Liz demanded. "What’s this about? You said you were going to pop the bag first, and then you went ahead and you yelled first."

  "Thanks, Liz," he said. "That’s fine. You can go meet your boy friend."

  As they filed out of the store, the checkers gave him a look of scorn.

  The assistant manager, counting money and setting tape, said to him, "Did you mean for me to run, too?"

  "No," he said, only half-hearing him; his mind was on his experiment.

  "I tried to duck down under the register," the assistant manager said.

  "Thanks," he said. Going out of the store, he locked the door after him, and then he crossed the lot toward the Volkswagen.

  But in the Volkswagen was a heavy-set, black German shepherd which eyed him as he approached. And the front bumper of the car had a deep dent in it. And the car needed a wash.

  Talk about psychological experiments, he said to himself. It wasn’t his car. It wasn’t Margo. He had glimpsed the VW drive onto the lot at about the time she usually came for him. The rest had been supplied by his mind.

  He started back in the direction of the store. As he got near, the glass door opened and the assistant manager stuck his head out and said, "Victor, your wife’s on the phone. She wants you."

  "Thanks," he said, catching the door and passing on inside and over to the wall phone.

  "Honey," Margo said, when he said hello, "I’m sorry I didn’t get down to pick you up; do you still want me to come, or do you want to go ahead on the bus? If you’re tired I can get you, but probably it would be faster just to catch the bus."

  "I’ll catch the bus," he said.

  Margo said, "I’ve been out in Sammy’s clubhouse, listening on his crystal set. It’s fascinating!"

  "Fine," he said, starting to hang up. "I’ll see you later."

  "We listened to all sorts of broadcasts."

  After saying good night to the assistant manager he walked down to the corner and caught a bus. Soon he was riding home, along with shoppers and employees, old ladies and school children.

  A city ordinance forbade smoking in a public conveyance, but he felt disturbed enough to light a cigarette. By opening the window next to him he managed to get the smoke to go out, and not into the face of the woman next to him.

  My experiment was a whizzer, he said to himself. It worked better than I wanted.

  He had assumed that the checkers would scatter in various directions, one toward the door, one toward the wall, one away from the door. That would have supported his theory that this situation, in which they found themselves, was in some manner episodic. That a good part of their lives had been spent elsewhere, and in an elsewhere that none of them remembered.

  But—each should have had his own reflexes. Not the same for all four of them. They had all bolted in the same direction. It had been the wrong direction, but it had been uniform. They had acted as a group, not as individuals.

  That meant, simply, that the prior and substantial experiences of the four had been similar.

  How could that be?

  His theory didn’t cover that.

  And, smoking his cigarette and maneuvering the smoke out the bus window, he could not immediately concoct another theory.

  Except, he realized, some mediocre explanation; for instance, that the four checkers had attended some sort of function together. They might have lived in a boardinghouse together, or eaten in the same café over a period of years, been in school together....

  We have a hodge-podge of leaks in our reality, he said to himself. A drop here, a couple of drops over in that corner. A moist spot forming on the ceiling. But where’s it getting in? What’s it mean?

  He put his mind into rational order. Let’s see how I came across it, he said to himself. I ate too much lasagne, and I hurried away from a poker game, in which I held a medium-fair hand, to take a pill in a dark bathroom.

  Is there anything previous to that?

  No, he decided. Previous to that it’s a sunny universe. Kids romping, cows mooing, dogs wagging. Men clipping lawns on Sunday afternoon, while listening to the ball game on TV. We could have gone on forever. Noticed nothing.

  Except, he realized, Ragle’s hallucination.

  And what, he wondered, is the hallucination? Ragle had never quite got around to telling him.

  But it goes something alo
ng the lines of my experience, he said to himself. Somehow, in some manner, Ragle found himself poking through reality. Enlarg ing the hole. Or been faced with its enlargement, perhaps a splitting rent opening up, a great gash.

  We can put everything we know together, he realized, but it doesn’t tell us anything, except that something is wrong. And we knew that to start with. The clues we are getting don’t give us a solution; they only show us how far-reaching the wrongness is.

  I think, though, he thought, we made a mistake in letting Bill Black walk off with that phone book.

  And what should we do now? he asked himself. Conduct more psychological experiments?

  No. One told him enough. The one he had conducted involuntarily in his bathroom. Even this last one had done more harm than good, had introduced confusion rather than verification.

  Don’t confuse me any more, he thought. I’m bewildered enough now to last me the rest of my life. What do I know for sure? Maybe Ragle is right: we ought to pull out the big philosophy books and start boning up on Bishop Berkeley and whoever the rest of them are—he did not remember any philosophy well enough even to know the names.

  Maybe, he thought, if I squeeze my eyes darn near shut, so just a crack of light shows, and I concentrate like hell on this bus, on the weary, hefty old women shoppers with their bulging shopping bags, and the chattering schoolgirls, and the clerks reading the evening paper, and the red-necked driver, maybe they’ll all go away. The squeaking seat under me. The smelly fumes every time the bus starts up. The jolting. The swaying. The ads over the windows. Maybe it’ll just fade away....

  Squeezing his eyes together he tried to dislodge the presence of the bus and passengers. For ten minutes he tried. His mind fell into a stupor. The navel, he thought blearily. Concentration on one point. He picked out the buzzer on the side of the bus opposite him. The round, white buzzer. Go, he thought. Fade away.

  Fade away.

  Fade

  Fa

  F

  With a start, he awoke. He had drifted off.

  Self-hypnosis, he declared. Nodding off into a doze, like the other passengers around him. Heads lolling together, in time to the motion of the bus. Left, right. Forward. Sideways. Right. Left. The bus stopped at a light. The heads remained on an even angle.

  Back, as the bus started.

  Forward, as the bus stopped.

  Fade away.

  Fade

  Fa

  And then, through his half-closed eyes, he saw the passengers fade away.

  Lo and behold! he thought. How pleasant it was.

  No. It wasn’t fading at all.

  The bus and its passengers hadn’t faded a bit. Throughout the bus a deep change had begun taking place, and like his experiment in the store it did not fit; it was not what he wanted.

  Damn you, he thought. Fade away!

  The sides of the bus became transparent. He saw out into the street, the sidewalk and stores. Thin support struts, the skeleton of the bus. Metal girders, an empty hollow box. No other seats. Only a strip, a length of planking, on which upright featureless shapes like scarecrows had been propped. They were not alive. The scarecrows lolled forward, back, forward, back. Ahead of him he saw the driver; the driver had not changed. The red neck. Strong, wide back. Driving a hollow bus.

  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?"