Ahead of them a cluster of lights burned.
"We'll try there," Ragle said, increasing his pace. He still had the card Ted had given him. The number probably got him in touch with the military people, or whoever it was who had arranged the town in the first place. Back again... but why?
"Why is it necessary?" he asked. "Why can't I do it here? Why do I have to live there, imagining I'm back in 1959, working on a newspaper contest?"
"Don't ask me," Vic said. "I can't tell you."
The lights transformed themselves into words. A neon sign in several colors, burning in the darkness:
WESTERN DRUG AND PHARMACY
"A drugstore," Vic said. "We can phone from there."
They entered the drugstore, an astonishingly tiny, narrow, brilliantly lit place with high shelves and displays. No customers could be seen, nor a clerk; Ragle stopped at the counter and looked around for the public phones. Do they still have them? he wondered.
"May I help you?" a woman's voice sounded nearby.
"Yes," he said. "We want to make a phone call. It's urgent."
"You better show us how to operate the phone," Vic said. "Or maybe you could get the number for us."
"Certainly," the clerk said, sliding around from behind the counter in her white smock. She smiled at them, a middle-aged woman wearing low-heeled shoes. "Good evening, Mr. Gumm."
He recognized her.
Mrs. Keitelbein.
Nodding to him, Mrs. Keitelbein passed him on her way to the door. She closed and locked the door, pulled down the shade, and then turned to face him. "What's the phone number?" she said.
He handed her the card.
"Oh," she said, reading the number. "I see. That's the switchboard for the Armed Services, at Denver. And the extension is 62. That--" She began to frown. "That probably would be somebody in the missile-defense establishment. If they'd be there this late they must virtually live there. So that would make them somebody high up." She returned the card. "How much do you remember?" she said.
Ragle said, "I remember a great deal."
"Did my showing you the model of your factory help you?"
"Yes," he said. It certainly had. After seeing it, he had gotten onto the bus and ridden downtown to the supermarket.
"Then I'm glad," she said.
"You're hanging around," he said, "to give me systematic doses of memory. Then you must represent the Armed Services.
"I do," she said. "In a sense."
"Why did I forget in the first place?"
Mrs. Keitelbein said, "You forgot because you were made to forget. The same way you were made to forget what happened to you that night when you got up as far as the top of the hill and ran into the Kesselmans."
"But it was city trucks. City employees. They grabbed me. They worked me over. The next morning they started ripping out the street. Keeping an eye on me." That meant the same people who ran the town. The people who had built it. "Did they make me forget in the first place?"
"Yes," she said.
"But you want me to remember."
She said, "That's because I'm a lunatic. Not the kind you are, but the kind the MPs want to round up. You had made up your mind to come over to us, Mr. Gumm. In fact, you had packed your briefcase. But something went wrong and you never got over to us. They didn't want to put an end to you, because they needed you. So they put you to work solving puzzles in a newspaper. That way you could use your talent for them... without ethical qualms." She continued to smile her merry, professional smile; in her white clerk's smock she could have been a nurse, perhaps a dental nurse advocating some new technique for oral hygiene. Efficient and practical. And, he thought, dedicated.
He said, "Why had I made up my mind to come over to you?"
"Don't you remember?"
"No," he said.
"Then I have things for you to read. A sort of reorientation kit." Stooping, she reached behind the counter and brought out a flat manila envelope; she opened it on the counter. "First," she said, "the January 14, 1996 copy of _Time_, with your picture on the cover and your biography inside. Complete, in so far as public knowledge about you goes."
"What have they been told?" he said, thinking of Mrs. McFee and her garble of suspicions and rumors.
"That you have a respiratory condition that requires you to live in seclusion in South America. In a back-country town in Peru called Ayacucho. It's all in the biography." She held out a small book. "A grammar school text on current history. Used as the official text in One Happy World schools."
Ragle said, "Explain the 'One Happy World' slogan to me."
"It's not a slogan. It's the official nomenclature for the group that believes there's no future in interplanetary travel. One Happy World is good enough, better in fact than a lot of arid wastes that the Lord never intended man to occupy. You know of course what 'lunatics' means."
"Yes," he said. "Lunar colonists."
"Not quite. But it's there in the book, along with an account of the origins of the war. And there's one more thing." From the folder she brought out a pamphlet with the title:
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST TYRANNY
"What's this?" Ragle said, accepting it. The pamphlet gave him an eerie feeling, the strong shock of familiarity, long association.
Mrs. Keitelbein said, "It's a pamphlet circulated among the thousands of workers at Ragle Gumm, Inc. In your various plants. You haven't given up your economic holdings, you understand. You volunteered to serve the government for a nominal sum -- a gesture of patriotism. Your talent to be put to work saving people from lunatic bombings. But after you had worked for the government -- the One Happy World Government -- for a few months, you had an important change of heart. You always did see patterns sooner than anyone else."
"Can I take these back to town?" he said. He wanted to be ready for tomorrow's puzzle; it was in his bones.
"No," she said. "They know you got out. If you go back they'll make another try at wiping out your memories. I'd rather you stayed here and read them. It's about eleven o'clock. There's time. I know you're thinking about tomorrow. You can't help it."
"Are we safe here?" Vic said.
"Yes," she said.
"No MPs will come by and look in?" Vic said.
"Look out the window," Mrs. Keitelbein said.
Both Vic and Ragle went to the drugstore window and peered out at the street.
The street had gone. They faced dark, empty fields.
"We're between towns," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "Since you set foot in here we've been in motion. We're in motion now. For a month now we've been able to penetrate Old Town, as the Seabees call it. They built it, so they named it." Pausing, she said, "Didn't it ever occur to you to wonder where you lived? The name of your town? The county? State?"
"No," Ragle said, feeling foolish.
"Do you know where it is now?"
"No," he admitted.
Mrs. Keitelbein said, "It's in Wyoming. We're in western Wyoming, near the Idaho border. Your town was built up as a reconstruction of several old towns which got blown away in the early days of the war. The Seabees recreated the environment fairly well, based on texts and records. The ruins that Margo wants the city to clear for the health of the children, the ruins in which we planted the phone book and word-slips and magazines, is a bit of the genuine old town of Kemmerer. An archaic county armory."