His theory didn't cover that.
And, smoking his cigarette and maneuvering the smoke out the bus window, he could not immediately concoct another theory.
Except, he realized, some mediocre explanation; for instance, that the four checkers had attended some sort of function together. They might have lived in a boardinghouse together, or eaten in the same café over a period of years, been in school together.
We have a hodge-podge of leaks in our reality, he said to himself. A drop here, a couple of drops over in that corner. A moist spot forming on the ceiling. But where's it getting in? What's it mean?
He put his mind into rational order. Let's see how I came across it, he said to himself. I ate too much lasagne, and I hurried away from a poker game, in which I held a medium-fair hand, to take a pill in a dark bathroom.
Is there anything previous to that?
No, he decided. Previous to that it's a sunny universe. Kids romping, cows mooing, dogs wagging. Men clipping lawns on Sunday afternoon, while listening to the ball game on TV. We could have gone on forever. Noticed nothing.
Except, he realized, Ragle's hallucination.
And what, he wondered, is the hallucination? Ragle had never quite got around to telling him.
But it goes something along the lines of my experience, he said to himself. Somehow, in some manner, Ragle found himself poking through reality. Enlarging the hole. Or been faced with its enlargement, perhaps a splitting rent opening up, a great gash.
We can put everything we know together, he realized, but it doesn't tell us anything, except that something is wrong. And we knew that to start with. The clues we are getting don't give us a solution; they only show us how far-reaching the wrongness is.
I think, though, he thought, we made a mistake in letting Bill Black walk off with that phone book.
And what should we do now? he asked himself. Conduct more psychological experiments?
No. One told him enough. The one he had conducted involuntarily in his bathroom. Even this last one had done more harm than good, had introduced confusion rather than verification.
Don't confuse me any more, he thought. I'm bewildered enough now to last me the rest of my life. What do I know for sure? Maybe Ragle is right; we ought to pull out the big philosophy books and start boning up on Bishop Berkeley and whoever the rest of them are -- he did not remember any philosophy well enough even to know the names.
Maybe, he thought, if I squeeze my eyes darn near shut, so just a crack of light shows, and I concentrate like hell on this bus, on the weary, hefty old women shoppers with their bulging shopping bags, and the chattering schoolgirls, and the clerks reading the evening paper, and the red-necked driver, maybe they'll all go away. The squeaking seat under me. The smelly fumes every time the bus starts up. The jolting. The swaying. The ads over the windows. Maybe it'll just fade away....
Squeezing his eyes together he tried to dislodge the presence of the bus and passengers. For ten minutes he tried. His mind fell into a stupor. The navel, he thought blearily. Concentration on one point. He picked out the buzzer on the side of the bus opposite him. The round, white buzzer. Go, he thought. Fade away.
Fade away.
Fade
Fa
F
...
With a start, he awoke. He had drifted off.
Self-hypnosis, he declared. Nodding off into a doze, like the other passengers around him. Heads lolling together, in time to the motion of the bus. Left, right. Forward. Sideways. Right. Left. The bus stopped at a light. The heads remained on an even angle.
Back, as the bus started.
Forward, as the bus stopped.
Fade away.
Fade
Fa
And then, through his half-closed eyes, he saw the passengers fade away.
Lo and behold! he thought. How pleasant it was.
No. It wasn't fading at all.
The bus and its passengers hadn't faded a bit. Throughout the bus a deep change had begun taking place, and like his experiment in the store it did not fit; it was not what he wanted.
Damn you, he thought. Fade away!
The sides of the bus became transparent. He saw out into the street, the sidewalk and stores. Thin support struts, the skeleton of the bus. Metal girders, an empty hollow box. No other seats. Only a strip, a length of planking, on which upright featureless shapes like scarecrows had been propped. They were not alive. The scarecrows lolled forward, back, forward, back. Ahead of him he saw the driver; the driver had not changed. The red neck. Strong, wide back. Driving a hollow bus.
The hollow men, he thought. We should have looked up poetry.
He was the only person on the bus, outside of the driver. The bus actually moved. It moved through town, from the business section to the residential section. The driver was driving him home.
When he opened his eyes wide again, all the nodding people had returned. The shoppers. The clerks. The school children. The noise and smells and chatter.
Nothing works right, he thought to himself.
The bus honked at a car pulling from a parking slot. All had become normal.
Experiments, he thought. Suppose I had fallen through to the street? With fear he thought, Suppose I had ceased to exist, too?
_Is this what Ragle saw?_
seven
When he got home, there was not a soul in the house.
For an instant he was overcome by panic. No, he thought.
"Margo!" he called.
All the rooms were deserted. He wandered about, trying to keep control of himself.
And then he noticed that the back door was open. Going out into the back yard he looked around. Still no sign of them. Ragle or Margo or Sammy; none of them.
He walked down the path, past the clothesline, past the rose arbor, to Sammy's clubhouse built against the back fence.
As soon as he rapped on the door a peep-slot slid open and his son's eye appeared. "Oh, hello, Dad," Sammy said. At once the door was unbolted and held open for him.
Inside the clubhouse, Ragle sat at the table, the earphones on his head. Margo sat beside him, at a great sheaf of paper. Both of them had been writing; sheet after sheet was covered with rapid jottings.
"What's going on?" Vic said.
Margo said, "We're monitoring."
"So I see," he said. "But what are you bringing in?"
Ragle, with the earphones still on his head, turned and with a gleam in his eye said, "We're picking them up."
"Who?" Vic said. "Who's 'them'?"
"Ragle says it may take years to find out," Margo said, her face animated, her eyes bright. Sammy stood stock-still, in a trance of ecstasy; the three of them were in a state he had never witnessed before. "But we have a way of overhearing them," she said. "And we've already started keeping notes. Look." She pushed the sheaf of paper at him. "Everything they say; we're writing it all down."
"Ham operators?" Vic said.
"That," Ragle said. "And communication between ships and their field; evidently there's a field very close to here."
"Ships," Vic echoed. "You mean ocean ships?"
Ragle pointed up.
Christ, Vic thought. And he felt, then, the same tension and wildness. The frenzy.
"When they go over," Margo said, "they come in strong and clear. For about a minute. Then they fade out. We can hear them talking, not just signals but conversation. They kid a lot."
"Great kidders," Ragle said. "Jokes all the time."
"Let me listen," Vic said.
When he had seated himself at the table, Ragle passed the earphones to him and fitted them over his head. "You want me to tune it?" Ragle said. "I'll tune, and you just listen. When a signal comes in good and clear, tell me. I'll leave the bead at that point."
A signal came in presently. Some man giving information about some industrial process. He listened, and then he said, "Tell me what you've figured out." He felt too impatient to listen; the voice droned on. "What can you tell?"