"Okay," he said.
"Before they ask you anything," she said, "I think I’ll discuss a few aspects of Civil Defense with them, just to get it out of the way." She patted him on the arm. "This is the first time we’ve had a celebrity at our meetings." Smiling, she seated herself at her desk and rapped for order.
The indistinct ladies and gentlemen became quiet. The murmur stilled. They had seated themselves in the first rows of the folding chairs that Walter had set up. Walter himself had taken a chair in the back of the room, near the door. He wore a sweater, slacks, and necktie, and he nodded formally to Ragle.
I should have worn my coat, Ragle decided. He had sauntered down in his shirt-sleeves; now he felt ill-at-ease.
"At our last class," Mrs. Keitelbein said, folding her hands before her on the desk, "somebody raised a question concerning the impossibility of our intercepting all the enemy missiles in the event of a full-scale surprise attack on America. That is quite true. We know that we could not possibly shoot down all the missiles. A percentage of them will get through. This is the dreadful truth, and we have to face it and deal with it accordingly."
The men and women—they responded as a body, images of one another—put on somber expressions.
"If war should break out," Mrs. Keitelbein said, "we would be faced, at best with terrible ruin. Dead and dying in the tens of millions. Cities into rubble, radioactive fallout, contaminated crops, germ-plasm of future generations irretrievably damaged. At best, we would have disaster on a scale never before seen on earth. The funds appropriated by our government for defense, which seem such a burden and drain on us, would be a drop in the bucket compared with this catastrophe."
What she says is true, Ragle thought to himself, As he listened to her, he began to imagine the death and suffering ... dark weeds growing in the ruins of towns, corroded metal and bones scattered across a plain of ash without contour. No life, no sounds ...
And then he experienced, without warning, an awful sense of danger. The near presence of it, the reality, crushed him. As it fell onto him he let out a croak and half-jumped from his chair. Mrs. Keitelbein paused. Simultaneously all of them turned toward him.
Wasting my time, he thought. Newspaper puzzles. How could I escape so far from reality?
"Are you feeling unwell?" Mrs. Keitelbein asked.
"I’m—okay," he said.
One of the class raised her hand.
"Yes, Mrs. F.," Mrs. Keitelbein said.
"If the Soviets send over their missiles in one large group, won’t our anti-missile missiles, by the use of thermonuclear war-heads, be able to get a higher percentage than if they are sent over in small successive waves? From what you said last week—"
"Your point is well made," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "In fact, we might exhaust our anti-missile missiles in the first few hours of the war, and then find that the enemy did not plan to win on the basis of one vast single attack analogous to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but planned rather to win by a sort of hydrogen ’nibbling away,’ over a period of years if necessary."
A hand came up.
"Yes, Miss P.," Mrs. Keitelbein said.
A blurred portion detached itself, a woman saying, "But could the Soviets afford such a prolonged attack? In World War Two, didn’t the Nazis find that their economy wouldn’t support the daily losses of heavy bombers incurred in their round-the-clock raids on London?"
Mrs. Keitelbein turned to Ragle. "Perhaps Mr. Gumm could answer that," she said.
For a moment Ragle did not grasp that she had addressed him. All at once he saw her nodding at him. "What?" he said.
"Tell us the effect losses of heavy bombers had on the Nazis," she said. "From the raids on England."
"I was in the Pacific," he said. "I’m sorry," he said. "I don’t know anything about the European Theater." He could not remember anything about the war in Europe; in his mind nothing but the sense of immediate menace remained. It had driven everything else out, emptied him. Why am I sitting here? he asked himself. I should be—where?
Tripping across a country pasture with Junie Black ... spreading out a blanket on the hot, dry hillside, among the smells of grass and afternoon sun. No, not there. Is that gone, too? Hollow outward form instead of substance; the sun not actually shining, the day not actually warm at all but cold, gray and quietly raining, raining, the god-awful ash filtering down on everything. No grass except charred stumps, broken off. Pools of contaminated water ...
In his mind he chased after her, across a hollow, barren hillside. She dwindled, disappeared. The skeleton of life, white brittle scarecrow support in the shape of a cross. Grinning. Space instead of eyes. The whole world, he thought, can be seen through. I am on the inside looking out. Peeking through a crack and seeing—emptiness. Seeing into its eyes.
"It’s my understanding," Mrs. Keitelbein said, in answer to Miss P., "that the German losses of experienced pilots were more serious than the losses in planes. They could build planes to replace those shot down, but it took months to train a pilot. This illustrates one change in store for us in the next war, the first Hydrogen War; missiles will not be manned, so there will be no experienced pilots to be depleted. Missiles won’t stop coming over simply because nobody exists to fly them. As long as factories exist, the missiles will keep coming."
On her desk, before her, lay a mimeographed sheet. Ragle understood that she had been reading from it. A prepared program made up by the government.
It’s the government that’s talking, he thought to himself. Not simply a middle-aged woman who wants to be doing something useful. These are facts, not the opinions of a single person.
This is reality.
And, he thought, I am in it.
"We have some models to show you," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "My son Walter made them up ... they show various vital installations." She motioned to her son, and he got to his feet and came toward her.
"If this country is to survive the next war," Walter said in his youthful tenor, "it will have to learn a new way to produce. The factory as we know it now will be wiped off the face of the globe. An underground industrial network will have to be brought into being."
For a moment he disappeared from sight; he had gone off into a side room. Everyone watched expectantly. When he returned he carried a large model which he set down before them all, on his mother’s desk.
"This shows a projected factory system," he said. "To be built a mile or so underground, safe from attack."
Everyone stood up to see. Ragle turned his head and saw, on the desk, a square of turrets and spires, replicas of buildings, the minarets of an industrial enterprise. How familiar, he thought. And the two of them, Mrs. Keitelbein and Walter, bending over it ... the scene had occurred before, somewhere in the past.
Getting up he moved closer to look.
A magazine page. Photograph, but not of a model; photograph of the original, of which this was a model.
Did such a factory exist?
Seeing his intensity, Mrs. Keitelbein said, "It’s a very convincing replica, isn’t it, Mr. Gumm?"
"Yes," he said.
"Have you ever seen anything like it before?"
"Yes," he said.
"Where?" Mrs. Keitelbein said.
He almost knew. He almost had an answer.
"What do you suppose a factory like that would turn out?" Miss P. said.
"What do you think, Mr. Gumm?" Mrs. Keitelbein said.
He said, "Possibly—aluminum ingots." It sounded right. "Almost any basic mineral, metal, plastic or fiber," he said.
"I’m proud of that model," Walter said.
"You should be," Mrs. F. said.
Ragle thought, I know every inch of that. Every building and hall. Every office.
I’ve been inside that, he said to himself. Many times.
After the Civil Defense class he did not go home. Instead, he caught a bus and got off downtown, in the main shopping district.
For a time he walked. A
nd then, across from him, he saw a wide parking lot and building with a sign reading: LUCKY PENNY SUPERMARKET. What an immense place, he thought to himself. Everything for sale except ocean-going tugs. He crossed the street and stepped up onto the concrete wall that surrounded the parking lot. Holding his arms out to balance himself, he followed the wall to the rear of the building, to the high steel-plated loading dock.
Four interstate trucks had backed up to the dock. Men wearing cloth aprons loaded up dollies with cardboard cartons of canned goods, mayonnaise bottles, crates of fresh fruits and vegetables, sacks of flour and sugar. A ramp composed of free-spinning rollers permitted smaller cartons, such as cartons of beer cans, to be slid from the truck to the warehouse.
Must be fun, he thought. Tossing cartons on that ramp and seeing them shoot down, across the dock and into the open door. Where somebody no doubt takes them off and stacks them up. Invisible process at the far end ... the receiver, unseen, laboring away.
Lighting a cigarette, he strolled over.
The wheels of the trucks had a diameter equal to his own height, or nearly so. Must give a man a sense of power to drive one of those interstate rigs. He studied the license plates tacked to the rear door of the first truck. Ten plates from ten states. Across the Rockies, the Utah Salt Flat, into the Nevada Desert ... snow in the mountains, hot glaring air in the flatlands. Bugs splattering on the windshield. A thousand drive-ins, motels, gas stations, signboards. Hills constantly in the distance. The dry monotony of the road.
But satisfying to be in motion. The sense of getting somewhere. Physical change of place. A different town each night.
Adventure. Romance with some lonely waitress in a roadside café, some pretty woman yearning to see a big city, have a big time. A blue-eyed lady with nice teeth, nice hair, fed by and created by a stable country scene.
I have my own waitress. Junie Black. My own adventure into the shady deals of wife-stealing romance. In the cramped environment of little houses, with the car parked under the kitchen window, clothes hanging in the yard, countless skimpy errands keeping her involved until nothing else is left, only a preoccupation with things to get done, things to have ready.
Isn’t that enough for me? Aren’t I satisfied?
Maybe that’s why I feel this apprehension. Anxiety that Bill Black will show up with a pistol and plug me for frolicking with his wife. Catch me entwined in the middle of the afternoon, among the washing and the lawn and the shopping. My guilt transformed ... fantasy of doom as a just payment for my transgressions. Trifling as they are.
At least, he thought, that’s what the psychiatrist would say. That’s what all the wives, having read Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney and Karl Menninger, would declare. Or maybe it’s my hostility toward Black. Anxiety is supposed to be a transformation of repressed hostility. My domestic problems projected outward onto a world screen. And Walter’s model. I must want to live in the future. Because the model is a model of a thing in the future. And when I saw it, it looked perfectly natural to me.
Walking around to the front of the supermarket he passed through the electric eye, causing the door to swing wide for him. Past the check-out stands, in the produce department, Vic Nielson could be seen at the onion bin; he busily separated the unsavory onions from the rest and tossed them into a round zinc tub.
"Hi," Ragle said, walking up to him.
"Oh hi," Vic said. He continued with the onions. "Finished with your puzzle for today?"
"Yes," he said. "It’s in the mail."
"How are you feeling today?"
"Better," Ragle said. The store had few customers at the moment so he said, "Can you get off?"
"For a few minutes," Vic said.
"Let’s go somewhere we can talk," Ragle said.
Vic took off his apron and left it with the zinc tub. He and Ragle passed by the check-out stands and Vic told the checkers that he would be back in ten or fifteen minutes. Then the two of them left the store and crossed the parking lot to the sidewalk.
"How about the American Diner Café?" Vic said.
"Fine," Ragle said. He followed Vic out into the street, into the aggressive late-afternoon traffic; as always, Vic showed no hesitation at competing with the two-ton cars for the right-of-way. "Don’t you ever get hit?" he asked, as a Chrysler passed them so close that its tail pipes warmed the calves of his legs.
"Not yet," Vic said, his hands in his pockets.
As they entered the café, Ragle saw an olive-green city service truck parking in one of the slots nearby.
"What’s the matter?" Vic said, as he halted.
Ragle said, "Look." He pointed.
"So what?" Vic said.
"I hate those things," he said. "Those city trucks." Probably the city work crew digging up the street in front of the house had seen him go down to the Keitelbeins’. "Forget the coffee," he said. "Let’s talk in the store."
"Whatever you want," Vic said. "I have to go back there anyhow, sooner or later." As they recrossed the street he said, "What have you got against the city? Anything to do with Bill Black?"
"Possibly," he said.
"Margo says that Junie showed up yesterday after I left for work. All dressed up. And saying something about an attorney."
Without answering, Ragle entered the store. Vic followed him. "Where can we go?" Ragle said.
"In here." With a key, Vic unlocked the check-cashing booth at the far end of the store, by the liquor department. In the booth Ragle found a pair of stools, nothing more. Vic shut the door after them and dropped down on one of the stools. "The window’s shut," he said, indicating the window at which the checks were cashed. "Nobody can hear us. What did you want to say?"
"It has nothing to do with June," Ragle said, on the stool across from his brother-in-law. "I have no sordid tale to tell you."
"That’s good," Vic said. "I don’t feel much in the mood anyhow. You’ve been different since the taxi driver carried you in the door. It’s hard to pin down, but Margo and I talked about it after we went to bed last night."
"What did you decide?"
Vic said, "You seem more subdued."
"I guess so," he said.
"Or calmer."
"No," he said. "I’m not calmer."
"You didn’t get beaten up, did you? In that bar."
"No," he said.
"That was the first thing that occurred to me when Daniels—the taxi driver—dumped you on the couch. But you didn’t have any marks on you. And you’d know it if you had; you’d feel it and you’d see it. I got beaten up, once, years ago. It was months before I got over it. A thing like that lasts."
Ragle said, "I know that I almost got away."
"From what?"
"From here. From them."
Vic raised his head.
"I almost got over the edge and saw things the way they are. Not the way they’ve been arranged to look, for our benefit. But then I was grabbed and now I’m back. And it’s been arranged that I don’t remember enough clearly for it to have done me any good. But—"
"But what?" Vic said. Through the check-cashing window he kept his eyes fixed on the store, the stands and registers and door.
"I know I didn’t spend nine hours in Frank’s Bar-B-Q. I think I was there ... I have an image of the place. But for a long time first I was somewhere else, and afterward I was somewhere up high, in a house. Doing something, with some people. It was in the house that I got my hands on whatever it was. And that’s as well as I can detail it. The rest is lost forever. Today somebody showed me a replica of something, and I think that in the house I saw a photograph of the thing, the same thing. Then the city brought its trucks around—"
He broke off.
Neither of them said anything, then.
Vic said, at last, "Are you sure it’s not just fear of Bill Black finding out about you and Junie?"
"No," he said. "That’s not it."
"Okay," Vic said.
"Those big interstate rigs out back,"
Ragle said. "They go a long distance, don’t they? Farther than almost any other kind of vehicle."
"Not as far as a commercial jet or a steamship or a major train," Vic said. "But sometimes a couple thousand miles."
"That’s far enough," Ragle said. "A lot farther than I got, the other night."
"Would that get you out?"
"I think so," Ragle said.
"What about your contest?"
"I don’t know."
"Shouldn’t you keep it going?"
"Yes," he said.
Vic said, "You have problems."
"Yes," he said. "But I want to try again. Only this time I know that I can’t simply start walking until I walk out. They won’t let me walk out; they’ll turn me back every time."
"What would you do, wrap yourself up in a barrel and have yourself packed with the broken stuff going back to the manufacturer?"
Ragle said, "Maybe you can make a suggestion. You see them loaded and unloaded all the time; I never set eyes on them before today."
"All I know is that they truck the stuff from where it’s made or produced or grown; I don’t know how well it’s inspected or how many times the doors are opened or how long you might be sealed up. You might find yourself parked off somewhere for a month. Or they may clean the trucks out as soon as they leave here."
"Do you know any of the drivers?"
Vic considered. "No," he said finally. "Actually I don’t. I see them, but they’re just names. Bob, Mike, Pete, Joe."
"I can’t think of anything else to do," Ragle said. And I am going to try again, he said to himself. I want to see that factory; not the photograph or the model, but the thing itself. The Ding an sich, as Kant said. "It’s too bad you’re not interested in philosophy," he said to Vic.
"Sometimes I am," Vic said. "Not right now, though. You mean problems such as What are things really like? The other night coming home on the bus I got a look at how things really are. I saw through the illusion. The other people in the bus were nothing but scarecrows propped up in their seats. The bus itself—" He made a sweeping motion with his hands. "A hollow shell, nothing but a few upright supports, plus my seat and the driver’s seat. A real driver, though. Really driving me home. Just me."