"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.