On her desk, before her, lay a mimeographed sheet. Ragle understood that she had been reading from it. A prepared program made up by the government.
It's the government that's talking, he thought to himself. Not simply a middle-aged woman who wants to be doing something useful. These are facts, not the opinions of a single person.
_This is reality_.
And, he thought, I am in it.
"We have some models to show you," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "My son Walter made them up... they show various vital installations." She motioned to her son, and he got to his feet and came toward her.
"If this country is to survive the next war," Walter said in his youthful tenor, "it will have to learn a new way to produce. The factory as we know it now will be wiped off the face of the globe. An underground industrial network will have to be brought into being."
For a moment he disappeared from sight; he had gone off into a side room. Everyone watched expectantly. When he returned he carried a large model which he set down before them all, on his mother's desk.
"This shows a projected factory system," he said. "To be built a mile or so underground, safe from attack."
Everyone stood up to see. Ragle turned his head and saw, on the desk, a square of turrets and spires, replicas of buildings, the minarets of an industrial enterprise. How familiar, he thought. And the two of them, Mrs. Keitelbein and Walter, bending over it... the scene had occurred before, somewhere in the past.
Getting up he moved closer to look.
A magazine page. Photograph, but not of a model; phototraph of the original, of which this was a model.
Did such a factory exist?
Seeing his intensity, Mrs. Keitelbein said, "It's a very convincing replica, isn't it, Mr. Gumm?"
"Yes," he said.
"Have you ever seen anything like it before?"
The room became silent. The shapes of people listened.
"Yes," he said.
"Where?" Mrs. Keitelbein said.
He almost knew. He almost had an answer.
"What do you suppose a factory like that would turn out?" Miss P. said.
"What do you think, Mr. Gumm?" Mrs. Keitelbein said.
He said, "Possibly -- aluminum ingots." It sounded right. "Almost any basic mineral, metal, plastic or fiber," he said.
"I'm proud of that model," Walter said.
"You should be," Mrs. F. said.
Ragle thought, I know every inch of that. Every building and hall. Every office.
I've been inside that, he said to himself. Many times.
After the Civil Defense class he did not go home. Instead, he caught a bus and got off downtown, in the main shopping district.
For a time he walked. And then, across from him, he saw a wide parking lot and building with a sign reading: LUCKY PENNY SUPERMARKET. What an immense place, he thought to himself. Everything for sale except ocean-going tugs. He crossed the street and stepped up onto the concrete wall that surrounded the parking lot. Holding his arms out to balance himself, he followed the wall to the rear of the building, to the high steel-plated loading dock.
Four interstate trucks had backed up to the dock. Men wearing cloth aprons loaded up dollies with cardboard cartons of canned goods, mayonnaise bottles, crates of fresh fruits and vegetables, sacks of flour and sugar. A ramp composed of free-spinning rollers permitted smaller cartons, such as cartons of beer cans, to be slid from the truck to the warehouse.
Must be fun, he thought. Tossing cartons on that ramp and seeing them shoot down, across the dock and into the open door. Where somebody no doubt takes them off and stacks them up. Invisible process at the far end... the receiver, unseen, laboring away.
Lighting a cigarette, he strolled over.
The wheels of the trucks had a diameter equal to his own height, or nearly so. Must give a man a sense of power to drive one of those interstate rigs. He studied the license plates tacked to the rear door of the first truck. Ten plates from ten states. Across the Rockies, the Utah Salt Flat, into the Nevada Desert... snow in the mountains, hot glaring air in the flatlands. Bugs splattering on the windshield. A thousand drive-ins, motels, gas stations, signboards. Hills constantly in the distance. The dry monotony of the road.
But satisfying to be in motion. The sense of getting somewhere. Physical change of place. A different town each night.
Adventure. Romance with some lonely waitress in a roadside café, some pretty woman yearning to see a big city, have a big time. A blue-eyed lady with nice teeth, nice hair, fed by and created by a stable country scene.
I have my own waitress. Junie Black. My own adventure into the shady deals of wife-stealing romance. In the cramped environment of little houses, with the car parked under the kitchen window, clothes hanging in the yard, countless skimpy errands keeping her involved until nothing else is left, only a preoccupation with things to get done, things to have ready.
Isn't that enough for me? Aren't I satisfied?
Maybe that's why I feel this apprehension. Anxiety that Bill Black will show up with a pistol and plug me for frolicking with his wife. Catch me entwined in the middle of the afternoon, among the washing and the lawn and the shopping. My guilt transformed... fantasy of doom as a just payment for my transgressions. Trifling as they are.
At least, he thought, that's what the psychiatrist would say. That's what all the wives, having read Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Homey and Karl Menninger, would declare. Or maybe it's my hostility toward Black. Anxiety is supposed to be a transformation of repressed hostility. My domestic problems projected outward onto a world screen. And Walter's model. I must want to live in the future. Because the model is a model of a thing in the future. And when I saw it, it looked perfectly natural to me.
Walking around to the front of the supermarket he passed through the electric eye, causing the door to swing wide for him. Past the check-out stands, in the produce department, Vic Nielson could be seen at the onion bin; he busily separated the unsavory onions from the rest and tossed them into a round zinc tub.
"Hi," Ragle said, walking up to him.
"Oh hi," Vic said. He continued with the onions. "Finished with your puzzle for today?"
"Yes," he said. "It's in the mail."
"How are you feeling today?"
"Better," Ragle said. The store had few customers at the moment so he said, "Can you get off?"
"For a few minutes," Vic said.
"Let's go somewhere we can talk," Ragle said.
Vic took off his apron and left it with the zinc tub. He and Ragle passed by the check-out stands and Vic told the checkers that he would be back in ten or fifteen minutes. Then the two of them left the store and crossed the parking lot to the sidewalk.
"How about the American Diner Café?" Vic said.
"Fine," Ragle said. He followed Vic out into the street, into the aggressive late-afternoon traffic; as always, Vic showed no hesitation at competing with the two-ton cars for the right-ofway. "Don't you ever get hit?" he asked, as a Chrysler passed them so close that its tail pipes warmed the calves of his legs.
"Not yet," Vic said, his hands in his pockets.
As they entered the café, Ragle saw an olive-green city service truck parking in one of the slots nearby.
"What's the matter?" Vic said, as he halted.
Ragle said, "Look." He pointed.
"So what?" Vic said.
"I hate those things," he said. "Those city trucks." Probably the city work crew digging up the street in front of the house had seen him go down to the Keitelbeins'. "Forget the coffee," he said. "Let's talk in the store."