Time Out of Joint

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 Lunar 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 e.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 -- hydroponies, 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 fullsize 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 mixup 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."

"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 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 e.e. 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 cents 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 wandering, 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, tinfolded 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."_

_"Luck," his father said. "Now, I know fellows that can walk along and spot money on the pavement any day of the week. I never can. I bet I never found a dime in the gutter all my life."_

_"I can do that," Ragle Gumm chanted. "I can figure it out; I know how."_

_Later, his father relaxing on the couch in the living room, relating tales about World War Two, his part in the Pacific phase. His mother washing dishes in the kitchen. The tranquillity of the house..._

_"What are you going to do with your dollar?" his father asked._

_"Invest it," Ragle Gumm said. "So I'll have more."_

_"Big businessman, eh?" his father said. "Don't forget about corporation taxes."_

_"I'll have plenty left over," he said confidently, leaning back the way his father did, hands behind his head, elbows stuck out._

He savored this happiest of all moments of life.

"But why so inaccurate?" he asked Mrs. Keitelbein. "The Tucker car. It was a terrific car, but--"

Mrs. Keitelbein said, "You did ride in one, once."

"Yes," he said. "Or at least I think so. When I was a kid." And, at that point remembering, he could feel the presence of the car. "In Los Angeles," he said. "A friend of my dad's owned one of the prototypes."

"You see, that would explain it," she said.

"But it never was put into production. It never got beyond the hand-built stage."

"But you needed it," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "It was for you." Eagle Gumm said, "_Uncle Tom's Cabin_." It had seemed perfectly natural to him, at the time, when Vic had shown them all the brochure from the Book-of-the-Month Club. "That thing was written a century before my time. That's a really ancient book."

Picking up the magazine article, Mrs. Keitelbein held it out to him. "A childhood verity," she said. "Try to remember."

There, in the article, a line about the book. He had owned a copy, read the book over and over again. Battered yellow and black covers, charcoal-like illustrations as lurid as the book itself. Again he felt the weight of the thing in his hands, the dusty, rough pressure of the fabric and paper. Himself, off in the quiet and shadows of the yard, nose down, eyes fixed on the text. Keeping it with him in his room, rereading it because it was a stable element; it did not change. It gave him a sense of certainty. A sense that he could count on it to be there, exactly as it had always been. Even the crayon markings on the first page that he had made, his scrawled initials.

"Everything in terms of your requirements," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "What you needed, for your security and comfort. Why should it be accurate? If _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was a necessity of your childhood, it was included."

Like a daydream, he thought. Keeping in the good. Excluding the undesirable.

"If radios infringed, then there were no radios," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "Or at least there weren't supposed to be."

But such a natural thing, he realized. They overlooked a radio every now and then. They kept forgetting that in the illusion the radio did not exist; they kept slipping up in just such trifles. Typical difficulty in maintaining daydreams, they failed to be consistent. Sitting at the table playing poker with us, Bill Black saw the crystal set and did not remember. It was too commonplace. It did not register; he had his mind on more important matters.

In her patient way, Mrs. Keitelbein went on, "So you recognize that they built for you -- and placed you in -- a safe, controlled, environment in which you could do your job without doubt or distractions. Or the realization that you were on the wrong side."

Vic said savagely, "The _wrong_ side? -- the side that was attacked!"

"In a civil war," Ragle said, "every side is wrong. It's hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim."

In his lucid periods, before they had taken him from his office and established him in Old Town, he had evolved a plan. He had carefully assembled his notes and papers, packed his possessions, and prepared to leave. In a roundabout manner he had managed to make contact with a group of California lunatics at one of the concentration camps in the Midwest; doses of reorientation training had not yet affected them or their loyalties, and from them he had gotten instructions. He was to meet with a free, undetected lunatic in St. Louis, at a particular time, on a particular day. But he had never arrived there. The day before, they had picked up his contact, gotten the information from him. And that was that.

In the concentration camps, the captured lunatics underwent a systematic brainwashing, but of course it was never called that. This was education along new lines, a freeing of the individual from prejudices, malformed convictions, from neurotic obsessions and fixed ideas. It helped him mature. It was knowledge. He came forth a better man.

When Old Town had been built, the people who entered it and became part of its life underwent the technique used in the camps. They volunteered. All but Ragle Gumm. And on him the camp technique fastened the last elements of his withdrawal into the past.

_They made it work_, he realized. _I withdrew and they followed right along after me. They kept me in sight_.

Vic said, "You better think this out. It's a big thing, to go over to the other side."

"He already has made up his mind," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "He did that three years ago."

"I'm not going with you," Vic said.

"I know that," Ragle said.

"Are you going to walk out on Margo, your own sister?"

"Yes," he said.

"You're going to walk out on everybody."

"Yes," he said.

"So they can bomb us and kill us all."

"No," he said. Because after he had volunteered, left his private business and gone to work at Denver, he had learned something that the top officials of the government knew that had never been made public. It was a well-guarded secret. The lunatics, the colonists on Luna, had agreed to come to terms in the first weeks of the war. They insisted only that a sizable effort be maintained toward further colonization, and that lunatics not be subjected to punitive action after hostilities had ceased. Without Eagle Gumm the government at Denver would yield on those points. The threat of missile attacks would be enough. Public feeling against the Lunar colonists did not go that far; three years of fighting and suffering for both sides had made a difference.

Vic said, "You're a traitor." He stared at his brother-in-law. Except, Eagle thought, I'm not his brother-in-law. We're not related. I did not know him before Old Town.

Yes, he thought. I did know him. When I lived in Bend, Oregon. He operated a grocery store, there. I used to buy my fresh fruit and vegetables from him. He was always puttering about the potato bins in his white apron, smiling at the customers, worrying about spoilage. That was the extent to which we knew each other.

Nor have I got a sister.

But, he thought, I will consider them my family, because in the two years and a half at Old Town they have been a genuine family, along with Sammy. And June and Bill Black are my neighbors. I _am_ walking out on them, family and relatives, neighbors and friends. That is what civil war means. In a sense it's the most idealistic kind of war. The most heroic. It means the most sacrifices, the fewest practical advantages.

_I'm doing it because I know it is right_. It comes first, my duty. Everyone else, Bill Black and Victor Nielson and Margo and Lowery and Mrs. Keitelbein and Mrs. Kesselman -- they all have done their duty; they have been loyal to what they believe in. I intend to do the same.

Sticking out his hand he said to Vic, "Good-bye."

Vic, his face wooden, ignored him.

"Are you going back to Old Town?" Ragle said.

Vic nodded.

"Maybe I'll see you all again," Ragle said. "After the war." He did not believe that it would last much longer. "I wonder if they'll keep up Old Town," he said. "Without me in the center."

Turning, Vic walked off, away from him, to the door of the drugstore. "Any way to get out of here?" he said loudly, his back to the two of them.

"You'll be let out," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "We'll drop you off on the highway and you can arrange for a ride back to Old Town."

Vic remained by the door.

It's a shame, Ragle Gumm thought. But it has been that way for some time, now. This is nothing new.

"Would you kill me?" he said to Vic. "If you could?"

"No," Vic said. "There's always the chance you'll switch back again, to this side."

To Mrs. Keitelbein, Ragle said, "Let's go."

"Your second trip," she said. "You'll be leaving Earth again."

"That's right," Ragle said. Another lunatic joining the group already there.

Beyond the windows of the drugstore a shape tilted on its end, to launching position. Vapors boiled up from its bottom. The loading platform coasted over to it and locked in place. Halfway up the side of the ship a door opened. A man stuck his head out, blinked, strained to see in the night darkness. Then he lit a colored light.

The man with the colored light resembled Walter Keitelbein to a striking degree. As a matter of fact, he _was_ Walter Keitelbein.