Time Out of Joint

In an apparently ordinary 1950s American town, Ragle Gumm lives with his sister Margo Nielson, Margo's husband Vic Nielson, and their son Sammy. Ragle earns his living by winning a daily newspaper contest in the local Gazette called "Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?" Each day, he must select the correct square from over 1,200 possibilities on a grid, using charts, graphs, and a homemade scanning device to identify patterns in previous entries. The work consumes him from morning to night, and although his winnings rival a regular salary, the pressure of maintaining his streak has become an oppressive burden he cannot quit. Vic works in the produce department of the Lucky Penny Supermarket, and Margo occupies herself with civic efforts, including a petition to clear three lots of dangerous old foundations where children play.

Their neighbors, Bill and Junie Black, visit frequently. Bill works for the city water department, while Junie has quietly drawn Ragle's romantic attention. During a poker evening at the Nielsons', Vic excuses himself to take medicine and, in the dark bathroom, gropes for a pull-cord ceiling light that does not exist. The bathroom has a wall switch, yet his muscle memory insists on a specific cord in a specific location, as if from a place he cannot consciously recall.

Ragle experiences something far more disturbing. One afternoon, he watches a soft-drink stand in the park disintegrate into molecules and vanish, leaving behind only a slip of paper reading "SOFT-DRINK STAND." He places it in a small metal box already containing five similar slips from previous episodes, labeled "DOOR," "FACTORY BUILDING," "HIGHWAY," "DRINKING FOUNTAIN," and "BOWL OF FLOWERS."

Several discoveries accelerate the growing sense that something is wrong. Sammy digs up a soggy phone book and rain-soaked magazines from the old lots. The phone book contains unfamiliar telephone exchanges, and every number Ragle dials has been disconnected. The magazines yield a picture-story about Marilyn Monroe, whom none of them have ever heard of despite the article describing her as world-famous. Margo suggests they are being "duped," a word that resonates deeply with Ragle.

The narrative shifts to reveal Bill Black's secret role. At his office in the Municipal Utility District, Black finds a note reporting that someone in the Nielson household tried calling the disconnected numbers. He consults with Stuart Lowery, a Gazette representative who manages Ragle's contest participation. Their conversation reveals that the town and its inhabitants are part of an elaborate construct maintained around Ragle. Black's deepest fear is that Ragle is "becoming sane again." He manages to take the phone book from the Nielsons and later reads Lowery its listing for "Ragle Gumm Inc., Branch 25," with multiple departmental phone numbers, proving that Ragle's real identity is that of a major industrial figure.

Sammy completes a crystal set radio and picks up voice transmissions coordinating overhead flights. Ragle monitors the set himself and hears a voice confirming that someone is "looking down at Ragle Gumm himself," proving he is under aerial surveillance. Shaken, Ragle secretly flees town. After a series of misadventures, he reaches a hilltop house where he discovers newspapers dated 1997 and a copy of Time magazine from January 1996 with his picture on the cover as "Man of the Year." Before he can absorb more, city maintenance men subdue him with chemical fumes and return him to town.

Ragle wakes in his own bed with fragmented memories and resumes his contest work. He attends a Civil Defense class run by Mrs. Keitelbein, a local organizer. Her son Walter presents a model of an underground factory that Ragle recognizes with uncanny familiarity. Vic pursues his own investigation: He pops a paper bag and shouts "Run!" at the store's checkers, and all four bolt toward an interior pillar rather than the exit, suggesting shared spatial conditioning from a different environment. On the bus home, Vic briefly perceives the bus as a hollow metal shell with scarecrow-like props for passengers, a stark vision of their world's constructed nature.

Ragle and Vic plan a second escape, reasoning that the interstate trucks at the supermarket loading dock must connect their fabricated town to the real world outside. They lock the driver in the cargo section and drive the rig out of town, passing a fake agricultural inspection station. Beyond the checkpoint, the highway changes to unfamiliar material, advertising signs vanish, and only truck traffic remains. The driver warns through the doors that they will be destroyed without a mandatory bumper strip reading "ONE HAPPY WORLD."

They reach a town where two teenage boys wear togas, filed teeth, and tattooed cheeks, speaking a pidgin-English dialect. One boy calls them "lunatic," a hostile slur they later learn refers to people from Luna, the Moon. They rent a room from Mrs. McFee, an elderly landlady who mentions radioactive crop contamination and a war that began about three years ago. Ragle finds sheet music for a propaganda march mocking "Loonies" and pieces together the full truth: The war is between Earth's One Happy World government and Lunar colonists. His newspaper contest is actually his work predicting the time and location of incoming Lunar missile strikes, with each entry directing anti-missile defense units to intercept attacks.

At a drugstore, Ragle and Vic encounter Mrs. Keitelbein, who reveals herself as a Lunar partisan agent. She explains that the drugstore is mobile and is carrying them across western Wyoming. She provides Ragle with a re-orientation kit: the Time biography, a history textbook, and a pamphlet from his own industrial company. Reading, Ragle remembers everything. In 1993, President John Moraga signed a law terminating American economic development on Luna. The policy's reversal during Moraga's illness provoked insurrection, and by February 1994, full-scale civil war had erupted.

Ragle recalls that after volunteering his pattern-prediction talent to the government, the crushing weight of responsibility caused him to retreat into a withdrawal psychosis, fantasizing about the peaceful late 1950s of his childhood. The military exploited his breakdown: They built "Old Town" to match his fantasy, conditioned 1,600 people using techniques developed in concentration camps, and reframed his missile-prediction work as a harmless newspaper contest. Before his breakdown, however, Ragle had already decided to defect to the Lunar colonists. A trip to Venus for medical treatment had awakened in him a recognition that space colonization represented humanity's next great migration, one the Earth government was wrong to suppress. He had arranged contact with a Lunar agent but was intercepted the day before the meeting.

Back in Old Town, Bill Black, revealed as Major William Black of the US Board of Strategic Planning, confesses the full scope of the fabrication to Margo. She is not Ragle's sister; Vic is not her husband; Black himself is Margo's real husband. Sammy is Vic's son from another marriage. Every relationship in the community has been manufactured.

At the mobile drugstore, Ragle tells Vic he is defecting to the Lunar colonists. Vic, loyal to the One Happy World cause, calls him a traitor. Ragle believes the war will end soon: Without his missile predictions, the government will be forced to accept the colonists' early peace terms, which asked only for continued colonization and no punitive action. Vic refuses to shake Ragle's hand but admits he would not kill him. Mrs. Keitelbein directs Ragle outside, where Walter Keitelbein signals from a launching ship with a colored light. Ragle prepares to leave Earth for the second time, joining the colonists on the Moon.