"No r.a. in our stuff," Vic said. "Radio-activity," he said under his breath, for Ragle's benefit.
"Yes," Ragle said.
Vic said, "We're -- from a long distance from here. We just got in tonight."
"I see," Mrs. McFee said.
"We've both been ill," Vic said. "What's been happening?"
"What do you mean?" the old woman said, pausing in her task of flipping the pages of her ledger. She had put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses; behind them her eyes, magnified, had a shrewd, alert glint.
"What's been happening?" Ragle demanded. "The war," he said. "Will you tell us?"
Mrs. McFee wet her finger and again turned pages. "Funny you don't know about the war."
"Tell us," Vic said fiercely. "For Christ's sake!"
"Are you enlisters?" Mrs. McFee said.
"No," Ragle said.
"I'm patriotic, but I won't have enlisters living in my house. Causes too much trouble."
We'll never get a straight story from her, Ragle thought. It's hopeless. We might as well give up.
On a table rested an upright frame of tinted photographs, all of a young man in uniform. Ragle bent to examine the photographs. "Who is he?" he said.
"My son," Mrs. McFee said. "He's stationed down at Anvers Missille Station. I haven't seen him in three years. Not since the war began."
That recently, Ragle thought. Perhaps the same time that they built the--
When the contest began. Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? Almost three years...
He said, "Any hits, down there?"
"I don't understand you," Mrs. McFee said.
"Never mind," Ragle said. Aimlessly, he roamed about the room. Through a wide arch of dark-shiny wood he could see a dining room. Solid central table, many chairs, wall shelves, glass cupboards with plates and cups. And, he saw, a piano. Wandering over to the piano he picked up a handful of the sheet music resting on the rack. All cheap popular sentimental tunes, mostly to do with soldiers and girls.
One of the tunes had the title:
LOONIES ON THE RUN MARCH
Carrying the sheet music back with him, he handed it to Vic. "See," he said. "Read the words."
Together, they read the verse under the music staff.
You're a goon, Mister Loon,
One World you'll never sunder.
A buffoon, Mister Loon,
Oh what a dreadful blunder.
The sky you find so cozy;
The future tinted rosy;
But Uncle's gonna spank -- you wait!
So hands ina sky, hands ina sky,
BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!
"Do you play, mister?" the old woman was asking.
Ragle said to her, "The enemy -- they're the lunatics, aren't they?"
The sky, he thought. The Moon. Luna.
It wasn't himself and Vic that the MPs hunted. It was the enemy. The war was being fought between Earth and the Moon. And if the kids upstairs could take him and Vic for lunatics, then lunatics had to be human beings. Not creatures. They were colonists, perhaps.
A civil war.
I know what I do, now. I know what the contest is, and what I am. I'm the savior of this planet. When I solve a puzzle I solve the time and place the next missile will strike. I file one entry after another. And these people, whatever they call themselves, hustle an anti-missile unit to that square on the graph. To that place and at that time. And so everyone stays alive, the kids upstairs with their nose-flutes, the waitress, Ted the driver, my brother-in-law, Bill Black, the Kesselmans, the Keitelbeins.
That's what Mrs. Keitelbein and her son had started telling me. Civil Defense... _nothing but a history of war up to the present_. Models from 1998, to remind me.
_But why have I forgotten?_
To Mrs. McFee he said, "Does the name Ragle Gumm mean anything to you?"
The old woman laughed. "Not a darn thing," she said. "As far as I'm concerned Ragle Gumm can go jump in a hat. There isn't any one person who can do that; it's a whole bunch of people, and they always call them 'Ragle Gumm.' I've known that from the start."
With a deep, unsteady breath, Vic said, "I think you're wrong, Mrs. McFee. I think there is such a person and he really does do that."
She said slyly, "And be right, day in day out?"
"Yes," Ragle said. Beside him, Vic nodded.
"Oh come on," she said, screeching.
"A talent," Ragle said. "An ability to see a pattern."
"Listen," Mrs. McFee said. "I'm a lot older than you boys. I can remember when Ragle Gumm was nothing but a fashion designer, making those hideous Miss Adonis hats."
"Hats," Ragle said.
"In fact I still have one." Grunting, she rose to her feet and lumbered to a closet. "Here." She held up a derby hat. "Nothing but a man's hat. Why, he got them wearing men's hats just to get rid of a lot of old hats when men stopped buying them."
"And he made money in the hat business?" Vic said.
"Those fashion designers make millions," Mrs. McFee said. "They all do; every one of them. He was just lucky. That's it -- luck. Nothing but luck. And later when he got into the synthetic aluminum business." She reflected. "Aluminide. That was luck. One of these fireball lucky men, but they always wind up the same way; their luck runs out on them at the end. His did." Knowingly, she said, "His ran out, but they never told us. That's why nobody sees Gumm any more. His luck ran out, and he committed suicide. It's not a rumor. It's a fact. I know a man whose wife worked for the MPs for a summer, and she told him it's positive; Gumm killed himself two years ago. And they've had one person after another predicting those missiles."
"I see," Ragle said.
Triumphantly, Mrs. McFee told him, "When they made him put up -- when he accepted that offer to come to Denver and do their missile predicting for them, then they saw through him; they saw it was just bluff. And rather than stand the public shame, the disgrace, he--"
Vic interrupted, "We have to leave."
"Yes," Ragle said. "Good night." Both he and Vic started toward the door.
"What about your rooms?" Mrs. McFee demanded, following after them. "I haven't had a chance to show you anything."
"Good night," Ragle said. He and Vic stepped out onto the porch, down the steps to the path, and to the sidewalk.
"Will you be back?" Mrs. McFee called from the porch.
"Later," Vic said.
The two of them walked away from the house.
"I forgot," Ragle said. "I forgot all this." But I kept on predicting, he thought. I did it anyhow. So in a sense it doesn't matter, because I'm still doing my job.
Vic said, "I always believed you couldn't learn anything from popular tune lyrics. I was wrong."
And, Ragle realized, if I'm not sitting in my room working on the puzzle tomorrow, as I always do, our lives may well be snuffed out. No wonder Ted the driver pleaded with me. And no wonder my face was on the cover of _Time_ as Man of the Year.
"I remember," he said, stopping. "That night. The Kesselmans. The photograph of my aluminum plant."
"Aluminide," Vic said. "She said, anyhow."
Do I remember everything? Ragle asked himself. What else is there?
"We can go back," Vic said. "We have to go back. You do, at least. I guess they needed a bunch of people around you, so that it would look natural. Margo, myself, Bill Black. The conditioned responses, when I reached around in the bathroom for the light cord. They must have light cords, here. Or I did, anyhow. And when the people at the market ran as a group. They must have worked in a store here, worked together. Maybe in a grocery store out here, the same job. Everything the same except that it was forty years later."