One of the tunes had the title:
LOONIES ON THE RUN MARCH
Carrying the sheet music back with him, he handed it to Vic. "See," he said. "Read the words."
Together, they read the verse under the music staff.
You're a goon, Mister Loon,
One World you'll never sunder.
A buffoon, Mister Loon,
Oh what a dreadful blunder.
The sky you find so cozy;
The future tinted rosy;
But Uncle's gonna spank -- you wait!
So hands ina sky, hands ina sky,
BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!
"Do you play, mister?" the old woman was asking.
Ragle said to her, "The enemy -- they're the lunatics, aren't they?"
The sky, he thought. The Moon. Luna.
It wasn't himself and Vic that the MPs hunted. It was the enemy. The war was being fought between Earth and the Moon. And if the kids upstairs could take him and Vic for lunatics, then lunatics had to be human beings. Not creatures. They were colonists, perhaps.
A civil war.
I know what I do, now. I know what the contest is, and what I am. I'm the savior of this planet. When I solve a puzzle I solve the time and place the next missile will strike. I file one entry after another. And these people, whatever they call themselves, hustle an anti-missile unit to that square on the graph. To that place and at that time. And so everyone stays alive, the kids upstairs with their nose-flutes, the waitress, Ted the driver, my brother-in-law, Bill Black, the Kesselmans, the Keitelbeins.
That's what Mrs. Keitelbein and her son had started telling me. Civil Defense... _nothing but a history of war up to the present_. Models from 1998, to remind me.
_But why have I forgotten?_
To Mrs. McFee he said, "Does the name Ragle Gumm mean anything to you?"
The old woman laughed. "Not a darn thing," she said. "As far as I'm concerned Ragle Gumm can go jump in a hat. There isn't any one person who can do that; it's a whole bunch of people, and they always call them 'Ragle Gumm.' I've known that from the start."
With a deep, unsteady breath, Vic said, "I think you're wrong, Mrs. McFee. I think there is such a person and he really does do that."
She said slyly, "And be right, day in day out?"
"Yes," Ragle said. Beside him, Vic nodded.
"Oh come on," she said, screeching.
"A talent," Ragle said. "An ability to see a pattern."
"Listen," Mrs. McFee said. "I'm a lot older than you boys. I can remember when Ragle Gumm was nothing but a fashion designer, making those hideous Miss Adonis hats."
"Hats," Ragle said.
"In fact I still have one." Grunting, she rose to her feet and lumbered to a closet. "Here." She held up a derby hat. "Nothing but a man's hat. Why, he got them wearing men's hats just to get rid of a lot of old hats when men stopped buying them."
"And he made money in the hat business?" Vic said.
"Those fashion designers make millions," Mrs. McFee said. "They all do; every one of them. He was just lucky. That's it -- luck. Nothing but luck. And later when he got into the synthetic aluminum business." She reflected. "Aluminide. That was luck. One of these fireball lucky men, but they always wind up the same way; their luck runs out on them at the end. His did." Knowingly, she said, "His ran out, but they never told us. That's why nobody sees Gumm any more. His luck ran out, and he committed suicide. It's not a rumor. It's a fact. I know a man whose wife worked for the MPs for a summer, and she told him it's positive; Gumm killed himself two years ago. And they've had one person after another predicting those missiles."
"I see," Ragle said.
Triumphantly, Mrs. McFee told him, "When they made him put up -- when he accepted that offer to come to Denver and do their missile predicting for them, then they saw through him; they saw it was just bluff. And rather than stand the public shame, the disgrace, he--"
Vic interrupted, "We have to leave."
"Yes," Ragle said. "Good night." Both he and Vic started toward the door.
"What about your rooms?" Mrs. McFee demanded, following after them. "I haven't had a chance to show you anything."
"Good night," Ragle said. He and Vic stepped out onto the porch, down the steps to the path, and to the sidewalk.
"Will you be back?" Mrs. McFee called from the porch.
"Later," Vic said.
The two of them walked away from the house.
"I forgot," Ragle said. "I forgot all this." But I kept on predicting, he thought. I did it anyhow. So in a sense it doesn't matter, because I'm still doing my job.
Vic said, "I always believed you couldn't learn anything from popular tune lyrics. I was wrong."
And, Ragle realized, if I'm not sitting in my room working on the puzzle tomorrow, as I always do, our lives may well be snuffed out. No wonder Ted the driver pleaded with me. And no wonder my face was on the cover of _Time_ as Man of the Year.
"I remember," he said, stopping. "That night. The Kesselmans. The photograph of my aluminum plant."
"Aluminide," Vic said. "She said, anyhow."
Do I remember everything? Ragle asked himself. What else is there?
"We can go back," Vic said. "We have to go back. You do, at least. I guess they needed a bunch of people around you, so that it would look natural. Margo, myself, Bill Black. The conditioned responses, when I reached around in the bathroom for the light cord. They must have light cords, here. Or I did, anyhow. And when the people at the market ran as a group. They must have worked in a store here, worked together. Maybe in a grocery store out here, the same job. Everything the same except that it was forty years later."
Ahead of them a cluster of lights burned.
"We'll try there," Ragle said, increasing his pace. He still had the card Ted had given him. The number probably got him in touch with the military people, or whoever it was who had arranged the town in the first place. Back again... but why?
"Why is it necessary?" he asked. "Why can't I do it here? Why do I have to live there, imagining I'm back in 1959, working on a newspaper contest?"
"Don't ask me," Vic said. "I can't tell you."
The lights transformed themselves into words. A neon sign in several colors, burning in the darkness:
WESTERN DRUG AND PHARMACY
"A drugstore," Vic said. "We can phone from there."
They entered the drugstore, an astonishingly tiny, narrow, brilliantly lit place with high shelves and displays. No customers could be seen, nor a clerk; Ragle stopped at the counter and looked around for the public phones. Do they still have them? he wondered.
"May I help you?" a woman's voice sounded nearby.
"Yes," he said. "We want to make a phone call. It's urgent."
"You better show us how to operate the phone," Vic said. "Or maybe you could get the number for us."
"Certainly," the clerk said, sliding around from behind the counter in her white smock. She smiled at them, a middle-aged woman wearing low-heeled shoes. "Good evening, Mr. Gumm."
He recognized her.
Mrs. Keitelbein.
Nodding to him, Mrs. Keitelbein passed him on her way to the door. She closed and locked the door, pulled down the shade, and then turned to face him. "What's the phone number?" she said.
He handed her the card.
"Oh," she said, reading the number. "I see. That's the switchboard for the Armed Services, at Denver. And the extension is 62. That--" She began to frown. "That probably would be somebody in the missile-defense establishment. If they'd be there this late they must virtually live there. So that would make them somebody high up." She returned the card. "How much do you remember?" she said.
Ragle said, "I remember a great deal."