Philip K. Dick - Time Out of Joint

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TIME OUT OF JOINT
by PHILIP K. DICK (1959)
[VERSION 1.1 (Apr 04 02). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version
number by 0.1 and redistribute.]
Copyright 1959 by Philip K. Dick.
Reprinted by arrangement with the author's agent.
ISBN 0-8398-2480-7
one
From the cold-storage locker at the rear of the store, Victor Nielson wheeled a cart of
winter potatoes to the vegetable section of the produce department. In the almost empty bin he
began dropping the new spuds, inspecting every tenth one for split skin and rot. One big spud
dropped to the floor and he bent to pick it up; as he did so he saw past the check-out stands, the
registers and displays of cigars and candy bars, through the wide glass doors and on to the
street. A few pedestrians walked along the sidewalk, and along the street itself he caught the
flash of sunlight from the fender of a Volkswagen as it left the store's parking lot.
"Was that my wife?" he asked Liz, the formidable Texas girl who was the checker on duty.
"Not that I know of," Liz said, ringing up two cartons of milk and a package of ground lean
beef. The elderly customer at the check-out stand reached into his coat pocket for his wallet.
"I'm expecting her to drop by," Vic said. "Let me know when she does." Margo was supposed to
take Sammy, their ten-year-old, to the dentist for x-rays. Since this was April -- income tax time
-- the savings account was unusually low, and he dreaded the results of the x-rays.
Unable to endure the waiting, he walked over to the pay phone by the canned-soup shelf,
dropped a dime in, dialed.
"Hello," Margo's voice came.
"Did you take him down?"
Margo said hectically, "I had to phone Dr. Miles and postpone it. About lunchtime I
remembered that this is the day Anne Rubenstein and I have to take that petition over to the Board
of Health; it has to be filed with them today, because the contracts are being let now, according
to what we hear."
"What petition?" he said.
"To force the city to clear away those three empty lots of old house foundations," Margo
said. "Where the kids play after school. It's a hazard. There's rusty wire and broken concrete
slabs and--"
"Couldn't you have mailed it?" he broke in. But secretly he was relieved. Sammy's teeth
wouldn't fall out before next month; there was no urgency about taking him. "How long will you be
there? Does that mean I don't get a ride home?"
"I just don't know," Margo said. "Listen, dear; there's a whole flock of ladies in the living
room -- we're figuring out last-minute items we want to bring up when we present the petition. If
I can't drive you home I'll phone you at five or so. Okay?"
After he had hung up he wandered over to the check-out stand. No customers were in need of
being checked, and Liz had lit a cigarette for a few moments. She smiled at him sympathetically, a
lantern-like effect. "How's your little boy?" she asked.
"Okay," he said. "Probably relieved he's not going."
"I have the sweetest little old dentist I go to," Liz chirruped. "Must be nearly a hundred
years old. He don't hurt me a bit; he just scrapes away and it's done." Holding aside her lip with
her red-enameled thumbnail, she showed him a gold inlay in one of her upper molars. A breath of
cigarette smoke and cinnamon whisked around him as he leaned to see. "See?" she said. "Big as all
get out, and it didn't hurt! No, it never did!" I wonder what Margo would say, he wondered. If she
walked in here through the magic-eye glass door that swings open when you approach it and saw me
gazing into Liz's mouth. Caught in some fashionable new eroticism not yet recorded in the Kinsey
reports.
The store had during the afternoon become almost deserted. Usually a flow of customers passed
through the check-out stands, but not today. The recession, Vic decided. Five million unemployed
as of February of this year. It's getting at our business. Going to the front doors he stood
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watching the sidewalk traffic. No doubt about it. Fewer people than usual. All home counting their
savings.
"We're in for a bad business year," he said to Liz.
"Oh what do you care?" Liz said. "You don't own the store; you just work here, like the rest
of us. Means not so much work." A woman customer had begun unloading items of food onto the
counter; Liz rang them up, still talking over her shoulder to Vic. "Anyhow I don't think there's
going to be any depression; that's just Democratic talk. I'm so tired of those old Democrats
trying to make out like the economy's going to bust down or something."
"Aren't you a Democrat?" he asked. "From the South?"
"Not any more. Not since I moved up here. This is a Republican state, so I'm a Republican."
The cash register clattered and clanged and the cash drawer flew open. Liz packed the groceries
into a paper bag.
Across the street from the store the sign of the American Diner Café started him thinking
about afternoon coffee. Maybe this was the best time. To Liz he said, "I'll be back in ten or so
minutes. You think you can hold the fort alone?"
"Oh sholly," Liz said merrily, her hands making change. "You go ahead on, so I can get out
later and do some shopping I have to do. Go on, now."
Hands in his pockets, he left the store, halting at the curb to seek out a break in the
traffic. He never went down to the crosswalk; he always crossed in the middle of the block,
directly to the café, even if he had to wait at the curb minute after minute. A point of honor was
involved, an element of manliness.
In the booth at the café he sat before his cup of coffee, stirring idly.
"Slow day," Jack Barnes the shoe salesman from Samuel's Men's Apparel said, bringing over his
cup of coffee to join him. As always, Jack had a wilted look, as if he had steamed and baked all
day in his nylon shirt and slacks. "Must be the weather," he said. "A few nice spring days and
everybody starts buying tennis rackets and camp stoves."
In Vic's pocket was the most recent brochure from the Book-of-the-Month Club. He and Margo
had joined several years ago, at the time they had put a down payment on a house and moved into
the kind of neighborhood that set great stock by such things. Producing the brochure he spread it
flat on the table, swiveling it so Jack could read it. The shoe salesman expressed no interest.
"Join a book club," Vic said. "Improve your mind."
"I read books," Jack said.
"Yeah. Those paperback books you get at Becker's Drugs." Jack said, "It's science this
country needs, not novels. You know darn well that those book clubs peddle those sex novels about
small towns in which sex crimes are committed, and all the dirt comes to the surface. I don't call
that helping American science."
"The Book-of-the-Month Club also distributed Toynbee's _History_," Vic said. "You could stand
reading that." He had got that as a dividend; although he hadn't quite finished it he recognized
that it was a major literary and historical work, worth having in his library. "Anyhow," he said,
"bad as some books are, they're not as bad as those teen-age sex elms, those drag-race films that
James Dean and that bunch do."
His lips moving, Jack read the title of the current Book-of-the-Month selection "A historical
novel," he said. "About the South. Civil War times. They always push that stuff. Don't those old
ladies who belong to the club get tired of reading that over and over again?"
As yet, Vic hadn't had a chance to inspect the brochure. "I don't always get what they have,"
he explained. The current book was called _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. By an author he had never heard of:
Harriet Beecher Stowe. The brochure praised the book as a daring exposé of the slave trade in pre-
Civil War Kentucky. An honest document of the sordid, outrageous practices committed against
hapless Negro girls.
"Wow," Jack said. "Hey, maybe I'd like that."
"You can't tell anything by the blurb," Vic said. "Every book that's written these days is
advertised like that."
"True," Jack said. "There's sure no principles left in the world any more. You look back to
before World War Two, and compare it to now. What a difference. There wasn't this dishonesty and
delinquency and smut and dope that's going around. Kids smashing up cars, these freeways and
hydrogen bombs... and prices going up. Like the price you grocery guys charge for coffee. It's
terrible. Who's getting the loot?"
They argued about it. The afternoon wore on, slowly, sleepily, with little or nothing
happening.
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At five, when Margo Nielson snatched up her coat and car keys and started out of the house,
Sammy was nowhere in sight. Off playing, no doubt. But she couldn't take time to round him up; she
had to pick up Vic right away or he'd conclude she wasn't coming and so take the bus home.
She hurried back into the house. In the living room her brother, sipping from his can of
beer, raised his head and murmured, "Back already?"
"I haven't left," she said. "I can't find Sammy. Would you keep your eye open for him while
I'm gone?"
"Certainly," Ragle said. But his face showed such weariness that at once she forgot about
leaving. His eyes, red-rimmed and swollen, fastened on her compellingly; he had taken off his tie,
rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and as he drank his beer his arm trembled. Spread out everywhere in
the living room the papers and notes for his work formed a circle of which he was the center. He
could not even get out; he was surrounded. "Remember, I have to get this in the mail and
postmarked by six," he said.
In front of him his files made up a leaning, creaking stack. He had been collecting material
for years. Reference books, charts, graphs, and all the contest entries that he had mailed in
before, month after month of them... in several ways he had reduced his entries so that he could
study them. At this moment, he was using what he called his "sequence" scanner; it involved opaque
replicas of entries, in which the point admitted light to flash in the form of a dot. By having
the entries fly by in order, he could view the dot in motion. The dot of light bounced in and out,
up and down, and to him its motions formed a pattern. To her it never formed a pattern of any
sort. But that was why he was able to win. She had entered the contest a couple of times and won
nothing.
"How far along are you?" she asked.
Ragle said, "Well, I've got it placed in time. Four o'clock, P.M. Now all I have to do--" he
grimaced, "is get it in space."
Tacked up on the long plywood board was today's entry on the official form supplied by the
newspaper. Hundreds of tiny squares, each of them numbered by rank and file. Ragle had marked off
the file, the time element. It was file 344; she saw the red pin stuck in at that point. But the
_place_. That was harder, apparently.
"Drop out for a few days," she urged. "Rest. You've been going at it too hard the last couple
of months."
"If I drop out," Ragle said, scratching away with his ballpoint pen, "I have to drop back a
flock of notches. I'd lose--" He shrugged. "Lose everything I've won since January 15." Using a
slide rule, he plotted a junction of lines.
Each entry that he submitted became a further datum for his files. And so, he had told her,
his chances of being correct improved each time. The more he had to go on, the easier it was for
him. But instead, it seemed to her, he was having more and more trouble. Why? she had asked him,
one day. "Because I can't afford to lose," he explained. "The more times I'm correct, the more I
have invested." The contest dragged on. Perhaps he had even lost track of his investment, the
mounting plateau of his winnings. He always won. It was a talent, and he had made good use of it.
But it was a vicious burden to him, this daily chore that had started out as a joke, or at best a
way of picking up a couple of dollars for a good guess. And now he couldn't quit.
I guess that's what they want, she thought. They get you involved, and maybe you never live
long enough to collect. But he had collected; the _Gazette_ paid him regularly for his correct
entries. She did not know how much it came to, but apparently it ran close to a hundred dollars a
week. Anyhow it supported him. But he worked as hard -- harder -- than if he had a regular job.
From eight in the morning, when the paper was tossed on the porch, to nine or ten at night. The
constant research. Refining of his methods. And, over everything else, the abiding dread of making
an error. Of turning in a wrong entry and being disqualified.
Sooner or later, they both knew, it had to happen.
"Can I get you some coffee?" Margo said. "I'll fix you a sandwich or something before I go. I
know you didn't have any lunch."
Preoccupied, he nodded.
Putting down her coat and purse, she went into the kitchen and searched in the refrigerator
for something to feed him. While she was carrying the dishes out to the table, the back door flew
open and Sammy and a neighborhood dog appeared, both of them fluffed up and breathless.
"You heard the refrigerator door," she said, "didn't you?"
"I'm real hungry," Sammy said, gasping. "Can I have one of those frozen hamburgers? You don't
have to cook it; I'll eat it like it is. It's better that way -- it lasts longer!"
She said, "You go get into the car. As soon as I've fixed Uncle Ragle a sandwich we're
driving down to the store and pick up Dad. And take that old dog back out; he doesn't live here."
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"Okay," Sammy said. "I bet I can get something to eat at the store." The back door slammed as
he and the dog departed.
"I found him," she said to Ragle when she brought in the sandwich and glass of apple cider.
"So you don't have to worry about what he's doing; I'll take him downtown with me."
Accepting the sandwich, Ragle said, "You know, maybe I'd have been better off if I'd got
mixed up playing the ponies."
She laughed. "You wouldn't have won anything."
"Maybe so." He began reflexively to eat. But he did not touch the apple cider; he preferred
the warm beer from the can that he had been nursing for an hour or so. How can he do that
intricate math and drink warm beer? she asked herself as she found her coat and purse and rushed
out of the house to the car. You'd think it would muddle up his brain. But he's used to it. During
his stint in the service he had got the habit of swilling warm beer day in, day out. For two years
he and a buddy had been stationed on a minuscule atoll in the Pacific, manning a weather station
and radio transmitter.
Late-afternoon traffic, as always, was intense. But the Volkswagen sneaked through the
openings, and she made good time. Larger, clumsier cars seemed bogged down, like stranded land
turtles.
The smartest investment we ever made, she said to herself. Buying a small foreign car. And
it'll never wear out; those Germans build with such precision. Except that they had had minor
clutch trouble, and in only fifteen thousand miles... but nothing was perfect. In all the world.
Certainly not in this day and age, with H-bombs and Russia and rising prices.
Pressed to the window, Sammy said, "Why can't we have one of those Mercs? Why do we have to
have a dinky little car that looks like a beetle?" His disgust was manifest.
Feeling outraged -- her son a traitor right here at her bosom -- she said, "Listen, young
man; you know absolutely nothing about cars. You don't have to make payments or steer through this
darn traffic, or wax them. So you keep your opinions to yourself."
Grumpily, Sammy said, "It's like a kid's car."
"You tell your father that," she said. "When we get down to the store."
"I'm scared to," Sammy said.
She made a left turn against traffic, forgetting to signal, and a bus beeped at her. Damn big
buses, she thought. Ahead was the entrance to the store's parking lot; she shifted down into
second and drove up across the sidewalk, past the vast neon sign that read
LUCKY PENNY SUPERMARKET
"Here we are," she said to Sammy. "I hope we didn't miss him."
"Let' go in," Sammy cried.
"No," she said. "We'll wait here."
They waited. Inside the store, the checkers finished up with a long line of miscellaneous
persons, most of whom pushed the stainless-wire baskets. The automatic doors flew open and shut,
open and shut. In the lot, cars started up.
A lovely shiny red Tucker sedan sailed majestically by her. Both she and Sammy gazed after
it.
"I do envy that woman," she murmured. The Tucker was as radical a car as the VW, and at the
same time wonderfully styled. But of course it was too large to be practical. Still...
Maybe next year, she thought. When it's time to trade in this car. But you don't trade in
VWs; you keep them forever.
At least the trade-in is high on VWs. We can get back our equity. At the street, the red
Tucker steered out into traffic.
"Wow!" Sammy said.
She said nothing.
two
At seven-thirty that evening Ragle Gumm glanced out the living room window and spied their
neighbors, the Blacks, groping through the darkness, up the path, obviously over to visit. The
street light behind them outlined some object that Junie Black carried, a box or a carton. He
groaned.
"What's the matter?" Margo asked. Across the room from him, she and Vic watched Sid Caesar on
television.
"Visitors," Ragle said, standing up. The doorbell rang at that moment. "Our neighbors," he
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said. "I guess we can't pretend we're not here."
Vic said, "Maybe they'll go when they see the TV set on." The Blacks, ambitious to hop up to
the next crotch of the social tree, affected a loathing for TV, for anything that might appear on
the screen, from clowns to the Vienna Opera performance of Beethoven's _Fidelio_. Once Vic had
said that if the Second Coming of Christ were announced in the form of a plug on TV, the Blacks
would not care to be involved. To that, Ragle had said that when World War Three began and the H-
bombs started falling, their first warning would be the conelrad signal on the TV set... to which
the Blacks would respond with jeers and indifference. A law of survival, Ragle had said. Those who
refused to respond to the new stimulus would perish. Adapt or perish... version of a timeless
rule.
"I'll go let them in," Margo said. "Since neither of you are willing to bestir yourselves."
Scrambling up from the couch she hurried to the front door and opened it. "Hello!" Ragle heard her
exclaim. "What's this? What is it? Oh -- it's hot."
Bill Black's youthful, assured voice: "Lasagne. Put on some hot water--"
"I'll fix café espresso," Junie said, passing through the house to the kitchen with the
carton of Italian food.
Hell, Ragle thought. No more work for tonight. Why, when they get on some new kick, do they
have to trot it over here? Don't they know anybody else?
This week it's café espresso. To go with last week's fad: lasagne. Anyhow, it dovetails. In
fact it probably tastes very good... although he had not gotten used to the bitter, heavy Italian
coffee; to him it tasted burned.
Appearing, Bill Black said pleasantly, "Hi, Ragle. Hi, Vic." He had on the ivy-league clothes
customary with him these days. Button-down collar, tight pants... and of course his haircut. The
styleless cropping that reminded Ragle of nothing so much as the army haircuts. Maybe that was it:
an attempt on the part of sedulous young sprinters like Bill Black to appear regimented, part of
some colossal machine. And in a sense they were. They all occupied minor status posts as
functionaries of organizations. Bill Black, a case in point, worked for the city, for its water
department. Every clear day he set off on foot, not in his car, striding optimistically along in
his single-breasted suit, beanpole in shape because the coat and trousers were so unnaturally and
senselessly tight. And, Ragle thought, so obsolete. Brief renaissance of an archaic style in men's
clothing... seeing Bill Black legging it by the house in the morning and evening made him feel as
if he were watching an old movie. And Black's jerky, too-swift stride added to the impression.
Even his voice, Ragle thought. Speeded up. Too high-pitched. Shrill.
But he'll get somewhere, he realized. The odd thing in this world is that an eager-beaver
type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of
necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises. In the banks, in insurance
companies, big electric companies, missile-building firms, universities. He had seen them as
assistant professors teaching some recondite subject -- survey of heretical Christian sects of the
fifth century -- and simultaneously inching their path up with all their might and main.
Everything but sending their wives over to the administration building as bait...
And yet, Ragle rather liked Bill Black. The man -- he seemed young to him; Ragle was forty-
six, Black no more than twenty-five -- had a rational, viable outlook. He learned, took in new
facts and assimilated them. He could be talked to; he had no fixed store of morals, no verities.
He could be affected by what happened.
For instance, Ragle thought, if TV should become acceptable in the top circles, Bill Black
would have a color TV set the next morning. There's something to be said for that. Let's not call
him "non-adaptive," just because he refuses to watch Sid Caesar. When the H-bombs start falling,
conelrad won't save us. We'll all perish alike.
"How's it going, Ragle?" Black asked, seating himself handily on the edge of the couch. Margo
had gone into the kitchen with Junie. At the TV set, Vic was scowling, resentful of the
interruption, trying to catch the last of a scene between Caesar and Carl Reiner.
"Clued to the idiot box," Ragle said to Black, meaning it as a parody of Black's utterances.
But Black chose to accept it on face value.
"The great national pastime," he murmured, sitting so that he did not have to look at the
screen. "I'd think it would bother you, in what you're doing."
"I get my work done," Ragle said. He had got his entry off by six.
On the TV set, the scene ended; a commercial appeared. Vic shut off the set. Now his
resentment turned toward advertisers. "Those miserable ads," he declared. "Why's the volume level
always higher on ads than on the program? You always have to turn it down."
Ragle said, "The ads usually emanate locally. The program's piped in over the co-ax, from the
East."
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"There's one solution to the problem," Black said.
Ragle said, "Black, why do you wear those ridiculous-looking tight pants? Makes you look like
a swabbie."
Black smiled and said, "Don't you ever dip into the _New Yorker_? I didn't invent them, you
know. I don't control men's fashions; don't blame me. Men's fashions have always been ludicrous."
"But you don't have to encourage them," Ragle said.
"When you have to meet the public," Black said, "you're not your own toss. You wear what's
being worn. Isn't that right, Victor? You're out where you meet people; you agree with me."
Vic said, "I wear a plain white shirt as I have for ten years, and an ordinary pair of wool
slacks. It's good enough for the retail-produce business."
"You also wear an apron," Black said.
"Only when I'm stripping lettuce," Vic said.
"Incidentally," Black said, "how's the retail sales index this month? Business still off?"
"Some," Vic said. "Not enough to matter, though. We expect it to pick up in another month or
so. It's cyclic. Seasonal."
To Ragle, his brother-in-law's change of tone was clear; as soon as business was involved --
his business -- he became professional, close-mouthed, tactical in his responses. Business was
never really off, and always on the verge of improving. And no matter how low the national index
dropped, a man's personal individual business was unaffected. Like asking a man how he feels,
Ragle thought. He has to say he feels fine. Ask him how business is, and he either automatically
says terrible or improving. And neither means anything; it's just a phrase.
To Black, Ragle said, "How's the retail sale of water? Market holding firm?"
Black laughed appreciatively. "Yes, people are still bathing and washing dishes."
Entering the living room, Margo said, "Ragle, do you want café espresso? You, darling?"
"None for me," Ragle said. "I had all the coffee I can drink for dinner. Keeps me awake as it
is."
Vic said, "I'll take a cup."
"Lasagne?" Margo asked the three of them.
"No thanks," Ragle said.
"I'll try some," Vic said, and Bill Black wagged his head along with him. "Need any help?"
"No," Margo said, and departed.
"Don't tank up too heavily on that Italian stuff," Ragle said to Vic. "It's rich. A lot of
dough and spices. And you know what that does to you."
Black chimed in, "Yeah, you're getting a little bulgy around the middle, there, Victor."
Jokingly, Ragle said, "Well what do you expect from a bird who works in a grocery store?"
That seemed to nettle Vic. He glared at Ragle and murmured, "At least it's a real job."
"Meaning what?" Ragle said. But he knew what Vic meant. At least it was a salaried job, to
which he set out every morning and returned home from every night. Not something he did in the
living room. Not a puttering about with something in the daily newspaper... like a kid, Vic had
said one day during an argument between them. Mailing in boxtops from cereal packages and a dime
for his Magic Decoder Badge.
Shrugging, Vic said, "I'm not ashamed to work in a supermarket."
"That's not what you meant," Ragle said. For some obscure reason he savored these insults
directed toward his preoccupation with the _Gazette_ contest. Probably because of an inner guilt
at frittering his time and energies away, a wanting to be punished. So he could continue. Better
to have an external source berating him than to feel the deep internal gnawing pangs of doubt and
self-accusation.
And then, too, it gave him a kick that his daily entries earned him a higher net income than
Vic's slavery at the supermarket. And he didn't have to spend time riding downtown on the bus.
Walking over beside him, Bill Black lowered himself, pulled up a chair, and said, "I wondered
if you saw this, Ragle." He unfolded, in a confidential manner, a copy of the day's _Gazette_.
Almost reverently he opened it to page fourteen. There, at the top, was a line of photos of men
and women. In the center was a photo of Ragle Gumm himself, and under it the caption:
_Grand all-time winner in the Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? contest, Ragle Gumm.
National champion leading for two straight years, an all-time record_
The other persons shown were lesser greats. The contest was national, with newspapers
participating in strings. No local paper could afford to pay the tab. Costs ran higher -- he had
figured one day -- than the famous Old Gold contest of the mid-'thirties or the perennial "I use
Oxydol soap _because_ in twenty-five words or less" contests. But evidently it built circulation,
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in these times when the average man read comic books and watched...
I'm getting like Bill Black, Ragle thought. Knocking TV. It's a national pastime in itself.
Think in your mind of all the homes, people sitting around saying, "What's happened to this
country? Where's the level of education gone? The morality? Why rock-and-roll instead of the
lovely Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy _Maytime_ music that we listened to when we were their
age?"
Sitting close by him, Bill Black held on to the paper, jabbing at the picture with his
finger. Obviously he was stirred by the sight of it. By golly, old Ragle Gumm's picture in
newspapers coast to coast! What honor! A celebrity living next door to him.
"Listen, Ragle," Black said. "You're really making a mint out of this 'green man' contest,
aren't you?" Envy was rampant on his face. "Couple of hours at it, and you've got a week's pay
right there."
With irony Ragle said, "A real soft berth."
"No, I know you put in plenty of work at it," Black said. "But it's creative work; you're
your own boss. You can't call that 'work' like working at a desk somewhere."
"I work at a desk," Ragle said.
"But," Black persisted, "it's more like a hobby. I don't mean to knock it. A man can work
harder on a hobby than down at the office. I know when I'm out in the garage using my power saw, I
really sweat at it. But -- there's a difference." Turning to Vic, he said, "You know what I mean.
It's not drudgery. It's what I said; it's creative."
"I never thought of it like that," Vic answered.
"Don't you think what Ragle's doing is creative?" Black demanded.
Vic said, "No. Not necessarily."
"What do you call it, then, when a man carves his own future out by his own efforts?"
"I simply think," Vic said, "that Ragle has an ability to make one good guess after another."
"Guess!" Ragle said, feeling insulted. "You can say that, after watching me doing research?
Going over previous entries?" As far as he was concerned, the last thing to call it was
"guessing." If it were a guess he would merely seat himself at the entry form, close his eyes,
wave his hand around, bring it down to cover one square out of all the squares. Then mark it and
mail it. And wait for the results. "Do you guess when you fill out your income tax return?" That
was his favorite analogy for his work on the contest. "You only have to do it once a year; I do it
every day." To Bill Black he said, "Imagine you had to make out a new return every day. It's the
same thing. You go over all your old forms; you keep records, tons of them -- every day. And no
guessing. It's exact. Figures. Addition and subtraction. Graphs."
There was silence.
"But you enjoy it, don't you?" Black said finally.
"I guess so," he said.
"How about teaching me?" Black said, with tension.
"No," he said. Black had brought it up before, a number of times.
"I don't mean so I can compete with you," Black said.
Ragle laughed.
"I mean just so I can pick up a few bucks now and then. For instance, I'd like to build a
retaining wall in the back, so in the winter that wet dirt doesn't keep slopping down into our
yard. It would cost me about sixty dollars for the materials. Suppose I won -- how many times?
Four times?"
"Four times," Ragle said. "You'd get a flat twenty bucks. And your name would go on the
board. You'd be competing."
Vic spoke up. "Competing with the Charles Van Doren of the newspaper contests."
"I consider that a compliment," Ragle said. But the enmity made him uncomfortable.
The lasagne did not last long. They all dipped into it. Because of Bill Black's and Ragle's
remarks, Vic felt impelled to eat as much as possible. His wife watched him critically as he
finished.
"You never eat what I cook the way you ate that," Margo said.
Now he wished he hadn't eaten so much. "It was good," he said gamely.
With a giggle, Junie Black said, "Maybe he'd like to live with us for a while." Her pert,
miniature face took on a familiar knowing expression, one that was sure to annoy Margo. For a
woman who wore glasses, Vic thought, Junie Black could look astonishingly depraved. Actually, she
was not unattractive. But her hair, black, hung down in two twisted thick braids, and he did not
like that. In fact he was not drawn to her at all. He did not like tiny, dark, active women,
especially those who giggled, and, like Junie, who insisted on pressing against other women's
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husbands on the strength of a single gulp of sherry.
It was his brother-in-law who responded to Junie Black, according to Margo's gossip. Both
Ragle and Junie, being home all day, had plenty of free time on their hands. That was a bad
business, Margo said now and again. A man being home all day in a residential neighborhood, where
all the other husbands were away at the office and only the wives remained behind. So to speak.
Bill Black said, "To confess, Margo -- she didn't whip this stuff up. We got it on the way
home. At some catering place on Plum Street."
"I see," Margo said. "Well, how nice."
Junie Black, not embarrassed, laughed.
After the two women had cleared the table, Bill suggested a few hands of poker. They haggled
for a while, and then the chips were brought out, and the deck of cards, and presently they were
playing for a penny a chip, all colors worth the same. It was a twice-weekly matter between them.
Nobody could remember how it had gotten started. The women, most likely, had originated it; both
Junie and Margo loved to play.
While they were playing, Sammy appeared. "Dad," he said, "can I show you something?"
"I wondered where you were," Vic said. "You've been pretty quiet this evening." Having folded
for the round, he could take a moment off. "What is it?" he asked. His son wanted advice most
likely.
"Now keep your voice down," Margo warned Sammy. "You can see we're playing cards." The
intense look on her face and the tremor in her voice indicated that she held a reasonably good
hand.
Sammy said, "Dad, I can't figure out how to wire up the antenna." Beside Vic's stack of chips
he set down a metal frame with wires and electronic-looking parts visible on it.
"What's this?" Vic said, puzzled.
"My crystal set," Sammy said.
"What's a crystal set?" he said.
Ragle spoke up. "It's something I got him doing," he explained. "One afternoon I was telling
him about World War Two and I got to talking about the radio rig we operated."
"Radio," Margo said. "Doesn't that take you back?"
Junie Black said, "Is that what he's got there, a radio?"
"A primitive form of radio," Ragle said. "The earliest."
"There's no danger he'll get a shock, is there?" Margo said.
"None whatever," Ragle said. "It doesn't use any power."
"Let's have a look at it," Vic said. Hoisting the metal frame he examined it, wishing he knew
enough to assist his son. But the plain truth was that he knew nothing at all about electronics,
and it certainly was obvious. "Well," he said haltingly, "maybe you have a short-circuit
somewhere."
Junie said, "Remember those radio programs we used to listen to before World War Two? 'The
Road of Life.' Those soap operas. 'Mary Martin.'"
"'Mary Marlin,'" Margo corrected. "That was -- good lord. Twenty years ago! I blush."
Humming _Clair de Lune_, the theme for "Mary Marlin," Junie met the last round of raises.
"Sometimes I miss radio," she said.
"You've got radio plus vision," Bill Black said. "Radio was just the sound part of TV."
"What would you get on your crystal set?" Vic asked his son. "Are there any stations still
transmitting?" It had been his impression that radio stations had folded up several years ago.
Ragle said, "He can probably monitor ship-to-shore signals. Aircraft landing instructions."
"Police calls," Sammy declared.
"That's right," Ragle said. "The police still use radio for their cars." Holding out his hand
he accepted the crystal set from Vic. "I can trace the circuit later, Sammy," he said. "But I've
got too good a hand right now. How about tomorrow?"
Junie said, "Maybe he can pick up flying saucers."
"Yes," Marge agreed. "That's what you ought to aim for."
"I never thought of that," Sammy said.
"There's no such thing as flying saucers," Bill Black said testily. He fiddled with his
cards.
"Oh no?" Junie said. "Don't kid yourself. Too many people have seen them for you to dismiss
it. Or don't you accept their documented testimony?"
"Weather balloons," Bill Blake said. Vic was inclined to agree with him, and he saw Ragle
nodding. "Meteors. Meteorological phenomena."
"Absolutely," Ragle said.
"But I read that people had actually ridden in them," Margo said.
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They all laughed, except Junie.
"It's true," Margo said. "I heard it over TV."
Vic said, "I'll go as far as admitting that there seems to be some sort of odd-ball stuff
going on up there." He remembered one experience of his own. The summer before, during a camping
trip, he had watched a bright object flash across the sky at such velocity that no plane, even a
jet-propelled plane, could have matched it. The thing had more the manner of a projectile. In an
instant it had whisked off over the horizon. And occasionally, at night, he had heard rumblings,
as if heavy vehicles were passing at reduced velocity across the sky. Windows had vibrated, so it
had not been head-noises, as Margo had decided. In an article in a digest medical magazine she had
read that head-noises indicate high blood pressure, and after that she had wanted him to visit
their health-plan doctor for a checkup.
He gave the half-finished radio back to his son and resumed playing cards; the next hand had
already been dealt and it was time for him to ante up.
"We're going to install this crystal set as our official club equipment," Sammy informed him.
"It'll be locked up in the clubhouse, and nobody can use it but authorized personnel." In the back
yard the neighborhood kids, banding together in response to the herd instinct, had built a sturdy
but ugly building out of boards and chickenwire and tarpaper. Mighty doings were conducted several
times a week.
"Fine," Vic said, studying his hand.
"When he says 'fine,'" Ragle said, "it means he's got nothing.
"I've noticed that," Junie said. "And when he throws down his cards and walks away from the
table, it means he's got four of a kind."
At the moment he felt a little like leaving the table; the lasagne and café espresso had been
too much for him, and inside him the compound -- that and his dinner -- had begun to act up.
"Maybe I have four of a kind now," he said.
"You look pale," Margo said. To Ragle she said, "Maybe he does have something."
"More like the Asian flu," Vic said. Pushing his chair back he got to his feet. "I'll be
right back. I'm not out. Just getting something to calm my stomach."
"Oh dear," Junie said. "He did eat too much; you were right, Margo. If he dies it's my
fault."
"I won't die," Vic said. "What'll I take?" he asked his wife. As mother of the household she
was in charge of the medicines.
"There's some Dramamine in the medicine cabinet," she answered, preoccupied, discarding two
cards. "In the bathroom."
"You don't take tranquilizers for _indigestion_, do you?" Bill Black demanded, as he left the
room and started down the hall. "Boy, that is carrying it too far."
"Dramamine isn't a tranquilizer," Vic answered, half to himself. "It's an anti-motion pill."
"Same thing," Black's voice came to him, along the hall, following after him as he entered
the bathroom.
"Same thing hell," Vic said, his indigestion making him surly. He groped above him for the
light cord.
Margo called, "Hurry on back, dear. How many cards for you? We want to play; you're holding
us up."
"All right," he muttered, still groping for the light cord. "I want three cards," he called.
"It's the top three on my hand."
"No," Ragle called. "You come back and pick them. Otherwise you'll claim we got the wrong
ones."
He still had not found the light cord that dangled in the darkness of the bathroom. His
nausea and irritation grew, and he began thrashing around in the dark, holding up both arms, hands
together with thumbs extended and touching; he rotated his hands in a wide circle. His head
smacked against the corner of the medicine cabinet and he cursed.
"Are you okay?" Margo called. "What happened?"
"I can't find the light cord," he said, furious now, wanting to get his pill and get back to
play his hand. The innate propensity of objects to be evasive... and then suddenly it came to him
that there was no light cord. There was a switch on the wall, at shoulder level, by the door. At
once he found it, snapped it on, and got his bottle of pills from the cabinet. A second later he
had filled a tumbler with water, taken the pill, and come hurrying out of the bathroom.
Why did I remember a light cord? he asked himself. A specific cord, hanging a specific
distance down, at a specific place.
I wasn't groping around randomly. As I would in a strange bathroom. I was hunting for a light
cord I had pulled many times. Pulled enough to set up a reflex response in my involuntary nervous
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system.
"Ever had that happen to you?" he said, as he seated himself at the table.
"Play," Margo said.
He drew three new cards, bet, met the raises that went around, lost, and then leaned back
lighting a cigarette. Junie Black raked in the winnings, smiling in her inane fashion.
"Ever had what happen?" Bill Black said.
"Reached for a switch that didn't exist."
"Is that what you were doing that took so long?" Margo said, irked at having lost the hand.
"Where would I be used to a light cord hanging from above?" he said to her.
"I don't know," she said.
In his mind he chronicled all the lights he could think of. In his house, at the store, at
friends' houses. All were wall switches.
"You hardly ever run into a cord hanging down any more," he said aloud. "That suggests an old-
fashioned overhead light with a string."
"Easy enough," Junie said. "When you were a child. Many, many years ago. Back in the
'thirties when everybody lived in old-fashioned houses that weren't old-fashioned yet."
"But why should it crop up now?" he said.
Bill said, "That is interesting."
"Yes," he agreed.
They all seemed interested.
"What about this?" Bill said. He had an interest in psychoanalysis; Freudian jargon cropped
up in his conversation, a sign of his being familiar with cultural questions. "A reversion to
infancy due to stress. Your feeling ill. The tension of the subconscious impulses to your brain
warning you that something was amiss internally. Many adults revert to infancy during illness."
"What rubbish," Vic said.
"There's just some light switch you don't remember consciously," Junie said. "Some gas
station where you used to go when you had that old Dodge that used so much gas. Or some place you
visit a few times a week, year after year, like a laundry or a bar, but outside your important
visits, like your home and store."
"It bothers me," he said. He did not feel like going on with the poker playing, and he
remained away from the table.
"How does your innard feel?" Margo asked.
"I'll live," he said.
They all seemed to have lost interest in his experience. All except Ragle, perhaps. Ragle
eyed him with what might have been cautious curiosity. As if he wanted to ask Vic more, but for
some obscure reason refrained from doing so.
"Play," Junie urged. "Whose deal is it?"
Bill Black dealt. The money was tossed into the pot. In the other room the TV set gave off
dance music, its screen turned down to dark.
Upstairs, in his room, Sammy labored over his crystal set.
The house was warm and peaceful.
_What's wrong?_ Vic wondered. _What did I stumble on, in there? Where have I been that I
don't remember?_
three
THUMP!
Shaving himself before the bathroom mirror, Ragle Gumm heard the morning paper land on the
porch. A muscular spasm shook his arm; at his chin his safety razor burred across his flesh and he
drew it away. Then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and, opening his eyes,
continued shaving.
"Are you almost done in there?" his sister called through the closed door.
"Yes," he said. He washed his face, patted on after-shave lotion, dried his neck and arms,
and opened the bathroom door.
In her bathrobe, Margo materialized and went immediately past him into the bathroom. "I think
I heard your paper," she said over her shoulder as she shut the door. "I have to drive Vic down to
the store; could you push Sammy out the front door? He's in the kitchen--" Her voice was cut off
by the sound of water in the washbowl.
Entering his bedroom, Ragle finished buttoning his shirt. He passed judgment on his various
ties, discriminated from the group a dark green knit tie, put it on, put his coat on, and then
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摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Philip%20K%20Dick%20-%20Time%20Out%20of%2\0Joint%20v1.1.txtTIMEOUTOFJOINTbyPHILIPK.DICK(1959)[VERSION1.1(Apr0402).Ifyoufindandcorrecterrorsinthetext,\pleaseupdatetheversionnumberby0.1andredistribute.]Copyright1959byPhilipK.Dick.Reprintedbyarrangementwiththeauthor'sagen...

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