Ragle left the dining room. First he inspected the living room. Nothing seemed out of order. What did he intend to find? The same old problem... he wouldn't know until he found it. And perhaps even then he wouldn't be sure.
On the wall, beyond a small spinet piano, hung a telephone, a bright pink plastic phone with a curly plastic cord. And upright, in the bookcase, the phone book. He lifted the book out.
It was the same phone book as the one Sammy had found in the vacant lot. He opened it. Written, in pencil, red crayon, ball-point pen and fountain pen, were numbers and names on the blank first page. Addresses, jotted notations of dates, times, events... the current phone book, in use in this house by these people. Walnut, Sherman, Kentfield, Devonshire numbers.
The number on the wall phone itself was a Kentfield number.
So that settled that.
Carrying the book he strode back through the house, into the dining room. He got out the key and unlocked the closet door, swinging it wide.
The closet was empty. A large hole had been neatly cut in the rear wall, a still-warm rim of wood and plaster through which showed one of the bedrooms. They had cut a passage out in a matter of minutes. On the floor, by the hole, lay two tiny drill-like points; one had been bent, damaged and scored. The wrong size. Too small. And the other, probably not tried; they had found the right size and finished the job, scrambled out in such haste that they had forgotten these parts of the cutting-tool.
Holding the drill-like points in the palm of his hand he saw that they were like nothing he had ever seen before. In all his life.
While they had talked reasonably and rationally, they had been cutting through the back wall.
I'm hopelessly outclassed, he said to himself. I might as well give up.
He made a cursory tour of the house. No sign of them. The back door banged open and shut in the late-evening wind. They had gone outside. Left the house entirely. He sensed the emptiness of the house. Only he and the dog. Not even the dog; there was no sign of it, now. The dog had gone with them.
He could plunge out onto the road; possibly somewhere in the house was a flashlight he could take. There might even be a heavy coat he could wear. With luck, he could march a good distance before the Kesselmans had time to return with support. He could hide in the woods, wait until daylight. Try to reach the highway... try to hike all the way to the bottom of the hill, however many miles it was.
What a dismal prospect. He shrank from it; he needed rest and sleep, not more walking.
Or -- he could stay in the house, and in the time left to him explore it as fully as possible. Learn as much as he could before they got him in tow again.
The latter appealed to him, if it had to be one or the other. He returned to the living room. This time he opened drawers and cupboards and poked into the ordinary objects, such as the television set in the corner.
On top of the television set, mounted in a mahogany frame, was a tape recorder. He snapped the switch, and a reel of tape, already on the mechanism, began to move. After a moment or so the screen of the television set lit up. The tape, he realized, was for video use, as well as audio. Standing back, he watched the screen.
On the television screen appeared Ragle Gumm, first a front view and then a side view. Ragle Gumm strolled along a treelined residential street, past parked cars, lawns. Then a close-up of him, full-face.
From the speaker of the TV set a voice said, "This is Ragle Gumm."
On the screen Ragle Gumm now sat in a deck-chair in the back yard of a house, wearing a Hawaiian sports shirt and shorts.
"YOU will hear an excerpt of his conversational manner," the voice from the speaker said. And then Ragle heard his own voice. "..._get home ahead of you I'll do it_," Ragle Gumm said. "_Otherwise you can do it tomorrow. Is that okay?_"
They have me down in black and white, Ragle thought. In color, as a matter of fact.
He stopped the tape. The image remained, inert. Then he clicked the switch off, and the image dwindled to a spot of brightness and at last vanished entirely.
No wonder everybody recognizes me. They've been trained.
When I start to imagine I'm crazy I'll remember this tape machine. This training-program of identification with me as the topic.
I wonder how many tapes like this are sitting in how many machines in how many homes. Over how large an area. Every house that I ever passed. Every street. Every town, perhaps.
The entire earth?
He heard, from far off, the noise of an engine. It started him into motion.
Not long, he realized. He opened the front door, and the noise increased. In the darkness below him, twin lights flashed and then were temporarily broken off.
But what is it for? he wondered. Who are they?
_What are things really like?_ I've got to see...
Running through the house he passed one object after another, from one room to the next. Furnishings, books, food in the kitchen, personal articles in drawers, clothes hanging in closets... what would tell him the most?
At the back porch he stopped. He had reached the end of the house. A washing machine, mop hanging from a rack, package of Dash soap, a stack of magazines and newspapers.
Reaching into the stack he dragged out a handful, dropping them, opening them at random.
The date on a newspaper made him stop searching; he stood holding it.
May 10, 1997.
Almost forty years in the future.
His eyes took in the headlines. Meaningless jumble of isolated trivia: a murder, bond issue to raise funds for parking lots, death of famous scientist, revolt in Argentina.
And, near the bottom, the headline:
VENUSIAN ORE DEPOSITS OBJECT OF DISPUTE
Litigation in the International system of courts concerning the ownership of property on Venus... he read as rapidly as he could, and then he tossed the newspaper down and pawed through the magazines.
A copy of _Time_, dated April 7, 1997. Rolling it up he stuck it in his trouser pocket. More copies of _Time_; he rooted through them, opening them and trying to devour the articles all at once, trying to grasp and retain something. Fashions, bridges, paintings, medicine, ice hockey -- everything, the world of the future laid out in careful prose. Concise summaries of each branch of the society that had not yet come into existence....
That _had_ come into existence. That existed now.
This was a current magazine. This was the year 1997. Not 1959.
From the road outside, the noise of a vehicle stopping caused him to grab up the rest of the magazines. An armload... he started to open the back door, to the yard outside.
Voices. In the yard men moved; a light flashed. His armload of magazines struck the door and most of them tumbled to the porch. Kneeling down, he gathered them up.
"There he is," a voice said, and the light flicked in his direction, dazzling him. He swung so that his back was to it; lifting up one of the copies of _Time_ he stared at the cover.
On the cover of _Time_, dated January 14, 1996, was his picture. A painting, in color. With the words underneath it:
RAGLE GUMM -- MAN OF THE YEAR
Sitting down on the porch he opened the magazine and found the article. Photographs of him as a baby. His mother and father. Him as a child in grammar school. He turned the pages frantically. Him as he was now, after World War Two or whatever war it had been that he had fought in... military uniform, himself smiling back at the camera.
A woman who was his first wife.
And then a scenic sprawl, the sharp city-like spires and minarets of an industrial installation.
The magazine was plucked from his hands. He looked up and saw, to his amazement, that the men lifting him up and away from the porch had on familiar drab coveralls.
"Watch out for that gate," one of them said.
He glimpsed dark trees, men stepping on flower beds, crushing plants under their shoes. Flashlights swinging across the stone path out of the yard, to the road. And, in the road, trucks parked with their motors noisily running, headlights on. Olivegreen service trucks, ton and a half. Familiar, too. Like the drab coveralls.