Philip Dick - Time Out of Joint

"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."

Ragle reached into his pocket and brought out the small metal box that he carried with him. Opening it he presented it to Vic.

"What's this?" Vic said.

"Reality," Ragle said. "I give you the real."

Vic took one of the slips of paper out and read it. "This says 'drinking fountain,'" he said. "What's it mean?"

"Under everything else," Ragle said. "The word. Maybe it's the word of God. The logos. 'In the beginning was the Word.' I can't figure it out. All I know is what I see and what happens to me. I think we're living in some other world than what we see, and I think for a while I knew exactly what that other world is. But I've lost it since then. Since that night. The future, maybe."

Handing him back the box of words, Vic said, "I want you to look at something." He pointed out the check-cashing window, and Ragle looked. "At the check-out stands," Vic said. "The big tall girl in the black sweater. The girl with the chest."

"I've seen her before," Ragle said. "She's a knockout." He watched as the girl rang up items on the register; as she worked she smiled merrily, a wide beaming smile of smooth white teeth. "I think you even introduced me to her, once."

Vic said, "Very seriously, I want to ask you something. This may sound like a nasty remark, but I mean it in the most important sense. Don't you think you could solve your problems better in that direction than by anything else? Liz is intelligent -- at least she's got more on the ball than Junie Black. She's certainly attractive. And she's not married. You've got enough money and you're famous enough to interest her. The rest is up to you. Take her out a couple of times and then we'll talk about all this business again."

"I don't think it would help," Ragle said.

"You're seriously giving it a tumble, though, aren't you?"

"I always give it a tumble," he said. "That particular thing."

"Okay," Vic said. "If you're sure, I guess that's that. What do you want to do, try to get hold of one of the trucks?"

"Could we?"

"We could try."

"You want to come along?" Ragle said.

"All right," Vic said. "I'd like to see; sure, I'd like to have a look outside."

"You tell me then," Ragle said, "how we should go about getting one of the trucks. This is your store; I'll leave it up to you."

At five o'clock Bill Black heard the service trucks parking in the lot outside his office window. Presently his intercom buzzed and his secretary said,

"Mr. Neroni to see you, Mr. Black."

"I want to talk to him," he said. He opened the door of his office. After a moment a large muscular dark-haired man appeared, still in his drab coveralls and work shoes. "Come on in," Black said to him. "Tell me what happened today."

"I made notes," Neroni said, setting down a reel of tape on the desk. "For a permanent record. And there's some video tape, but it hasn't come through. The phone crew says he got a call from your wife at about ten o'clock. Nothing in it, except that he apparently thought he'd run into her at his Civil Defense class. She told him she had a date to meet a girl friend downtown. Then the woman who runs the Civil Defense class called to remind him that it was at two o'clock this afternoon. Mrs. Keitelbein."

"No," Black said. "Mrs. Kesselman."

"A middle-aged woman with a teen-age son."

"That's right," Black said. He remembered meeting the Kesselmans several years ago, when the whole situation had been dreamed up. And Mrs. Kesselman had dropped by recently with her Civil Defense clipboard and literature. "Did he go for his Civil Defense class?"

"Yes. He mailed off his entries and then he dropped by their house."

Black had not been told about the Civil Defense class; he had no idea what its purpose was. But the Kesselmans did not get their instructions from anyone in his department.