Time Out of Joint

six

The next day, after he arrived home from school, Sammy Nielson carried his still-malfunctioning crystal set from the house, through the back yard, to the locked clubhouse.

Over the door of the clubhouse was a sign his dad had got for him down at the store. The man who did the lettering for the store had made it.

NO FASCISTS, NAZIS, COMMUNISTS,

FALANGISTS, PERONISTS, FOLLOWERS

OF HLINKA AND/OR BELA KUN ALLOWED

Both his father and his uncle insisted that it was the best sign to have, so he had nailed it up.

With his key he unlocked the padlock on the door and carried the crystal set inside. After he was in he bolted the door after him, and, with a match, lit the kerosene lantern. Then he removed the plugs from the peep-slots in the walls and watched for a time to see if any of the enemy was sneaking up on him.

Nobody could be seen. Only the empty back yard. Washing hanging from the line next door. Dull gray smoke from an incinerator.

He placed himself at the table, strapped the set of earphones over his head, and began dipping the cat's whisker against the crystal. Each time, he heard static. Again and again he dipped it, and at last he heard -- or imagined he heard -- faint tinny scratchy voices. So he left the cat's whisker where it was and began slowly running the bead along the tuning coil. One voice separated itself from the others, a man's voice, but too faint for the words to be made out.

Maybe I need more antenna, he thought.

More wire.

Leaving the clubhouse -- locked -- he roamed about the yard, searching for wire. He poked his head into the garage. At the far end was his dad's workbench. He started at one end of the bench, and by the time he reached the other he had found a great roll of uninsulated steelish-looking wire that probably was for hanging up pictures or for a wire clothesline if his dad ever got around to putting it up.

They won't mind, he decided.

He carried the picture wire to the clubhouse, climbed the side of the clubhouse to the roof, and attached the wire to the antenna that came up from the crystal set. Out of the two wires he made one vast antenna which trailed the length of the yard.

Maybe it ought to be high, he decided.

Finding a heavy spike he tied the free end of the antenna to it, got his throwing arm limbered up, and then heaved the spike up on to the roof of the house. The antenna drooped. That won't do, he thought. It should be tight.

Returning to the house he climbed the stairs to the top floor. One window opened on to the flat part of the roof; he unlatched that window and in a moment he was scrambling out onto the roof.

From downstairs his mother called, "Sammy, you're not going out on the roof, are you?"

"No," he yelled back. I _am_ out, he told himself, making in his mind a fine distinction. The spike with the antenna dangling from it lay on the sloping part of the roof, but by lying flat and inching along he was able to grab hold of it. Where to tie it?

Only place was the TV antenna.

He tied the end of his antenna to the metal pipe of the TV mast, and that was that. Quickly he crawled back inside the house, through the window, and ran downstairs and out into the yard to the clubhouse.

Shortly he had seated himself at the table, before the crystal set, and was running the bead along the tuning coil.

This time, in his earphones, the man's voice could be heard clearly. And a whole raft of other voices babbled in; his hands shook with excitement as he tuned them apart. From them he picked the loudest.

A conversation of some kind was in progress. He had got it part way through.

"...those long kind that look like sticks of bread. Practically break your front teeth when you bite on them. I don't know what they're for. Weddings maybe, where there's a lot of people you don't know and you want the refreshments to last..."

The man talked leisurely, the words spaced far apart.

"...not the hardness but the anise. It's in everything, even in the chocolate ones. There's one kind, white, with walnuts. Always makes me think of those bleached skulls you find out on the desert... rattlesnake skulls, jackrabbit skulls... small mammals. What a picture, right? Sink your teeth into a fifty-year-old rattlesnake skull..." The man laughed, still leisurely, almost an actual ha-ha-ha-ha. "Well, that's about all, Leon. Oh, one more thing. You know that thing your brother Jim said about ants going faster on hot days? I looked that up and I can't find anything about that. You ask him if he's sure, because I went out back and looked at ants for a couple of hours since I talked to you last, and when it got good and hot they looked to be walking around at about the same speed." I don't get it, Sammy thought.

He tuned the coil to another voice. This one talked briskly.

"...CQ, calling CQ; this is W3840-Y calling CQ; calling CQ; this is W3840-Y asking is there a CQ; is there a CQ anybody; W3840-Y asking for a CQ; CQ; CQ; this is W3840-Y calling CQ; CQ; come in CQ; is there a CQ; this is W3840-Y calling CQ; CQ..." It continued on and on. So he tuned further.

The next voice droned so slowly that he gave up almost at once.

"...no... no... again... what?... to... the... no, I don't believe so..."

This is just crud, he thought in disappointment. But anyhow he had gotten it to work.

He tried further.

Squeaks and hissing made him wince. Then frantic dot-dot noises. Code, he knew. Morse code. Probably from a sinking ship in the Atlantic, with the crew trying to row through the flaming oil.

The next one was better.

"...at 3:36 exactly. I'll track it for you." A long silence.

"Yes, I'll track it from this end. You just sit tight." Silence. "Yes, you sit tight. Got me?" Silence. "Okay, wait for it. What?" Long, long silence. "No, more like 2.8. 2.8. You got that? North East. Okay, Okay. Right."

He looked at his Mickey Mouse wristwatch. The time was just about 8:36; his watch ran a little off, so he couldn't be sure.

Just then, in the sky above the clubhouse, a remote rumble made the objects around him shudder. And at the same time the voice in his earphones said,

"Did you get it? Yes, I see it changing direction. Okay, that's all for this afternoon. Up to full, now. Yes. Okay. Signing off."

The voice ceased.

Hot dog, Sammy said to himself. Wait'll Dad and Uncle Ragle hear this.

Removing his earphones he ran from the clubhouse, across the yard, into the house.

"Mom!" he shouted, "where's Uncle Ragle? Is he in the living room working?"

His mother was in the kitchen scrubbing the drainboard. "Ragle went to mail off his entry," she said. "He finished up early."

"Oh stunk!" Sammy shouted, devastated.

"All right, young man," his mother said.

"Aw," he muttered. "I got a rocket ship or something on my crystal set; I wanted him to hear it." He whirled about in a circle, not knowing what to do.

"Do you want me to listen?" his mother said.

"Okay," he said grudgingly. He started from the house and his mother followed along with him.

"I can only listen for a couple of minutes," she said. "And then I have to get back in the house; I have a lot to do before dinner."

At four o'clock Ragle Gumm mailed his registered package of entries at the main post office. Two hours ahead of the deadline, he told himself. Shows what I can do when I have to.

He took a cab back to the block in which he lived, but he did not get off in front of the house; he got off at the corner, by the rather old two-story house, painted gray, with a leaning front porch.

No chance of Margo stumbling in on us, he realized. It's all she can do to run next door.

Climbing the steep flight of steps to the porch he rang one of the three brass doorbells. Far off, past the lace curtains on the door, down the long, high-ceiling corridor, a chime rang.

A shape approached. The door opened.

"Oh, Mr. Gumm," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "I forgot to tell you what day the class meets."

"That's right," he said. "I was walking by and I thought I'd go up the steps and ask you."

Mrs. Keitelbein said, "The class meets twice a week. At two on Tuesday and three on Thursday. That's easy to remember."

With caution, he said, "Have you had good luck signing people up?"

"Not too awfully good," she said, with a wry smile. Today she did not seem so tired; she wore a blue-gray smock, flat heels, and she lacked the frailness, the aura of the aging spinster lady who kept an altered cat and read detective novels. Today she reminded him more of active churchwomen who put on charity bazaars. The size of the house, the number of doorbells and mailboxes, suggested that she earned at least part of her livelihood as a landlady. Apparently she had divided up her old house into separate apartments.

"Offhand," he said, "can you recall anybody I might know who's signed up? It would give me confidence if I knew somebody in the class."

"I'd have to look in my book," she said. "Do you want to step inside and wait while I look?"

"Surely," he said.

Mrs. Keitelbein passed down the corridor, into the room at the end. When she did not reappear he followed.

The size of the room surprised him; it was a great drafty empty auditorium-like place, with a fireplace that had been converted to a gas heater, an overhead chandelier, chairs pushed together in a group at one end, and a number of yellow-painted doors on one side and high wide windows on the other. At a bookshelf, Mrs. Keitelbein stood holding a ledger, the kind bookkeepers usually used.

"I can't find it," she said disarmingly, closing the ledger. "I have it written down, but in all the confusion--" She gestured at the disorderly room. "We're trying to get it set up for the first meeting. Chairs, for instance. We're short on chairs. And we need a blackboard... but the grammar school has promised us one." Suddenly she caught hold of his arm. "Listen, Mr. Gumm," she said. "There's a heavy oak desk I want to get upstairs from the basement. I've been trying to get somebody all day long to come in and help Walter -- my son -- get it upstairs. Do you think you could take one end? Walter thinks that two men could get it up here in a few minutes. I tried to lift one end, but I couldn't."

"I'd be glad to," he said. He took off his coat and laid it over the back of a chair.

A gangling, grinning teen-ager ambled into the room; he wore a white cheer-leader sweater, blue jeans, and shiny black oxfords. "Hi," he said shyly.

After she had introduced them, Mrs. Keitelbein herded them down a flight of dishearteningly steep, narrow stairs, to a basement of damp concrete and exposed wiring, empty fruit jars matted with cobwebs, discarded furniture and mattresses, and an old-fashioned washtub.

The oak desk had been dragged almost to the stairs.

"It's a wonderful old desk," Mrs. Keitelbein said, hovering critically about. "I want to sit at it when I'm not at the blackboard. This was my father's desk -- Walter's grandfather."

Walter said, in a croaking tenor voice, "It weighs around one-fifty. Pretty evenly distributed, except the back's heavier, I think. We can probably tip it, so we can clear the overhead. We can get our hands under it okay; I'll get hold first with my back to it, and then when I get my end up, you can get your hands under it. Okay?" He already had knelt down at his end, reaching behind him to take hold. "Then when it's up, I'll get my grip."

From his years of active military life, Ragle prided himself on his physical agility. But by the time he had raised his end of the desk waist-high, he was red-faced and panting. The desk swayed as Walter got his grip. At once Walter set off for the stairs; the desk twisted in Ragle's hands as Walter climbed the stairs.

Three times they had to set the desk down on the stairs, once for Ragle to rest, twice because the desk failed to clear the top and had to be taken in a different grip. At last they had it up and into the big drafty room; with a thump the desk dropped from their stiff fingers, and that was that.

"I certainly do appreciate your kindness," Mrs. Keitelbein said, emerging from the basement and switching off the stairlight. "I hope you didn't hurt yourself or anything. It's heavier than I thought."

Her son was contemplating him with the same shyness as before. "You're the Mr. Gumm who's the contest winner?" he asked.

"Yes," Ragle said.

The boy's kindly face clouded over with embarrassment. "Maybe I shouldn't ask you this, but I always wanted to ask some guy who wins a lot of money in a contest... do you think of it as luck, or do you think of it like earning a big fee, the way a lawyer gets a big fee if he's got something on the ball no other lawyer has? Or like some old painters whose paintings are worth millions."

"It's a lot of hard work," Ragle said. "That's how I think of it. I put in eight to ten hours a day."

The boy nodded. "Oh yeah. I see what you mean."

"How did you get started?" Mrs. Keitelbein asked him.

Ragle said, "I don't know. I saw it in the paper and I sent in an entry. That was close to three years ago. I just drifted into it. My entries won right from the start."

"Mine didn't," Walter said. "I never won once; I entered around fifteen times."

Mrs. Keitelbein said, "Mr. Gumm, before you go I have something I want to give you. You wait here." She hurried off into a side room. "For helping."

He thought, Probably a cookie or two.

But when she returned she had a brightly-colored decal. "For your car," she said, holding it out to him. "It goes on the back window. A CD sticker; you dip it in warm water, and then the paper slides off and you slide the emblem on the car window." She beamed at him.

"I don't currently have a car," he said.

Her face showed dismay. "Oh," she said.

With a braying, but good-natured, laugh, Walter said, "Hey, maybe he could paste it onto the back of his coat."

"I'm so sorry," Mrs. Keitelbein said, in confusion. "Well, thank you anyhow; I wish I could reward you, but I can't think how. I'll try to make the classes as interesting as I can; how's that?"

"Swell," he said. Picking up his coat he moved toward the hall. "I have to be going," he said. "I'll see you Tuesday, then. At two."

In a corner of the room, on a window seat, somebody had built a model of some sort. Ragle stopped to inspect it.

"We'll be using that," Mrs. Keitelbein said.

"What is it?" he said. It appeared to be a representation of a military fort: a hollow square in which tiny soldiers could be viewed at their duties. The colors were greenish brown and gray. Touching the miniature gun-barrel that stuck up from the top of it, he discovered that it was carved wood. "Quite real," he said.

Walter said, "We built a bunch of those. The earlier classes, I mean. CD classes last year, when we lived in Cleveland. Mom brought them along; I guess nobody else wanted them." He laughed his braying laugh again. It was more nervous than unkind.

"That's a replica of a Mormon fort," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "I'll be darned," Ragle said. "I'm interested in this. You know, I was in World War Two; I was over in the Pacific."

"I dimly remember reading that about you," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "You being such a celebrity... every once in a while I come across a little article about you in one of the magazines. Don't you hold some sort of record as the longest contest winner of any of the newspaper or TV contests?"

"I suppose so," he said.

Walter said, "Did you see heavy fighting in the Pacific?"

"No," he said candidly. "Another fellow and I were stuck on a hunk of dirt with a few palm trees and a corrugated-iron shack and a radio transmitter and weather-measuring instruments. He measured the weather and I transmitted the information to a Navy installation a couple hundred miles to the south of us. That took about an hour a day. The rest of the day I lay around trying to figure out the weather. I used to try to predict what it would be like. That wasn't our job; all we did was send them the readings and they did the predicting. But I got pretty good. I could look up at the sky and that plus the readings gave me enough to go on, so my guesses worked out more times than not."

"I imagine weather conditions were of prime importance to the Navy and Army," Mrs. Keitelbein said.

He answered, "A storm could wreck a landing operation, scatter a convoy of supply carriers. Change the course of the war."

"Maybe that's where you got your practice," Walter said. "For the contest. Making book on the weather."

At that, Ragle laughed. "Yes," he said. "That's what he and I did; we made book on it. I'd say it was going to rain at ten o'clock and he'd bet me it wouldn't. We managed to fritter away a couple of years doing that. That, and drinking beer. When they brought in our supplies once a month they left off a standard ration of beer -- standard, we figured, for a platoon. Only trouble was, we had no way to cool it. Warm beer, day after day." How it took him back to remember all that. Twelve, thirteen years ago... He had been thirty-three years old. An employee in a steam laundry when the draft-notice showed up in the mailbox.

"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 I told you."

"But you remember stories the other guys swapped, about air-raids and bombings," 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 along the lines of my experience, he said to himself. Somehow, in some manner, Ragle found himself poking through reality. Enlarging 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?_