_"So there's nothing to fear," the woman said. "No need to feel anxiety. You can relax. Find peace, here."_
_"That's right," he said, with a measure of resentment at her, at the questioning. He looked once more at the tray of food._
_"Which department are you in now?" the woman asked._
_He looked around him and saw that he was in the pharmacy department. Among the tubes of toothpaste and magazines and sun-glasses and jars of hand lotion. But I was in the food part, he thought with surprise. Where the samples of food are, the free food. Are there free samples of gum and candy here? That would be okay._
"You see," the woman said, "they didn't do anything to you, to your mind. You slipped back yourself. You've slipped back now, just reading about it. You keep wanting to go back." Now she did not have a tray of cheese samples. "Do you know who I am?" she asked in a considerate voice.
"You're familiar," he said, stalling because he could not recall.
"I'm Mrs. Keitelbein," the woman said.
"That's so," he agreed. He moved away from her. "You've done a lot to help me," he said to her, feeling grateful.
"You're getting out of it," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "But it'll take time. The pull on you is strong. The tug back into the past."
_The Saturday-afternoon crowd swarmed on all sides of him. How nice, he thought. This is the Golden Age. The finest time to be alive. I hope I can live like this always._
_His father, beckoning to him from the Volkswagen. Armload of parcels. "Let's go," his father called._
_"Okay," he said, still wandering, still seeing everything, unwilling to let it all go by him. In the corner of the parking lot heaps of colorful paper that had blown there, wrappers and cartons and paper bags. His mind made out the patterns, the cigarette packages crumpled up, the lids to milkshake cartons. And in the debris lay something of value. A dollar bill, folded. It had blown there with the rest. Bending, he sorted it out, tinfolded it. Yes, a dollar bill. Lost by someone, probably a long, long time ago._
_"Hey, look what I found," he called to his father and mother, running toward them and the car._
_Conference, ending in, "Can he keep it? Would it be right?" His mother, concerned._
_"Never be able to locate the owner," his father said. "Sure, keep it." He tousled the boy's hair._
_"But he didn't earn it," his mother said._
_"I found it," Ragle Gumm chanted, clutching the bill. "I figured out where it was; I knew it was there with all that other junk."_
_"Luck," his father said. "Now, I know fellows that can walk along and spot money on the pavement any day of the week. I never can. I bet I never found a dime in the gutter all my life."_
_"I can do that," Ragle Gumm chanted. "I can figure it out; I know how."_
_Later, his father relaxing on the couch in the living room, relating tales about World War Two, his part in the Pacific phase. His mother washing dishes in the kitchen. The tranquillity of the house..._
_"What are you going to do with your dollar?" his father asked._
_"Invest it," Ragle Gumm said. "So I'll have more."_
_"Big businessman, eh?" his father said. "Don't forget about corporation taxes."_
_"I'll have plenty left over," he said confidently, leaning back the way his father did, hands behind his head, elbows stuck out._
He savored this happiest of all moments of life.
"But why so inaccurate?" he asked Mrs. Keitelbein. "The Tucker car. It was a terrific car, but--"
Mrs. Keitelbein said, "You did ride in one, once."
"Yes," he said. "Or at least I think so. When I was a kid." And, at that point remembering, he could feel the presence of the car. "In Los Angeles," he said. "A friend of my dad's owned one of the prototypes."
"You see, that would explain it," she said.
"But it never was put into production. It never got beyond the hand-built stage."
"But you needed it," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "It was for you." Eagle Gumm said, "_Uncle Tom's Cabin_." It had seemed perfectly natural to him, at the time, when Vic had shown them all the brochure from the Book-of-the-Month Club. "That thing was written a century before my time. That's a really ancient book."
Picking up the magazine article, Mrs. Keitelbein held it out to him. "A childhood verity," she said. "Try to remember."
There, in the article, a line about the book. He had owned a copy, read the book over and over again. Battered yellow and black covers, charcoal-like illustrations as lurid as the book itself. Again he felt the weight of the thing in his hands, the dusty, rough pressure of the fabric and paper. Himself, off in the quiet and shadows of the yard, nose down, eyes fixed on the text. Keeping it with him in his room, rereading it because it was a stable element; it did not change. It gave him a sense of certainty. A sense that he could count on it to be there, exactly as it had always been. Even the crayon markings on the first page that he had made, his scrawled initials.
"Everything in terms of your requirements," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "What you needed, for your security and comfort. Why should it be accurate? If _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was a necessity of your childhood, it was included."
Like a daydream, he thought. Keeping in the good. Excluding the undesirable.
"If radios infringed, then there were no radios," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "Or at least there weren't supposed to be."
But such a natural thing, he realized. They overlooked a radio every now and then. They kept forgetting that in the illusion the radio did not exist; they kept slipping up in just such trifles. Typical difficulty in maintaining daydreams, they failed to be consistent. Sitting at the table playing poker with us, Bill Black saw the crystal set and did not remember. It was too commonplace. It did not register; he had his mind on more important matters.
In her patient way, Mrs. Keitelbein went on, "So you recognize that they built for you -- and placed you in -- a safe, controlled, environment in which you could do your job without doubt or distractions. Or the realization that you were on the wrong side."
Vic said savagely, "The _wrong_ side? -- the side that was attacked!"
"In a civil war," Ragle said, "every side is wrong. It's hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim."
In his lucid periods, before they had taken him from his office and established him in Old Town, he had evolved a plan. He had carefully assembled his notes and papers, packed his possessions, and prepared to leave. In a roundabout manner he had managed to make contact with a group of California lunatics at one of the concentration camps in the Midwest; doses of reorientation training had not yet affected them or their loyalties, and from them he had gotten instructions. He was to meet with a free, undetected lunatic in St. Louis, at a particular time, on a particular day. But he had never arrived there. The day before, they had picked up his contact, gotten the information from him. And that was that.
In the concentration camps, the captured lunatics underwent a systematic brainwashing, but of course it was never called that. This was education along new lines, a freeing of the individual from prejudices, malformed convictions, from neurotic obsessions and fixed ideas. It helped him mature. It was knowledge. He came forth a better man.
When Old Town had been built, the people who entered it and became part of its life underwent the technique used in the camps. They volunteered. All but Ragle Gumm. And on him the camp technique fastened the last elements of his withdrawal into the past.
_They made it work_, he realized. _I withdrew and they followed right along after me. They kept me in sight_.
Vic said, "You better think this out. It's a big thing, to go over to the other side."
"He already has made up his mind," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "He did that three years ago."