Both the Kesselmans were silent.

"Had you called?" Ragle asked them.

Garret quivered with embarrassment. Mrs. Kesselman seemed shaken, but she continued to feed the dog.

"Can I look through the house?" Ragle said.

"Surely," Mrs. Kesselman said, straightening up. "Look, Mr. Gumm. We're doing the best we can to accommodate you. But--" With a wild gesture she burst out, "Honestly, you've got us both so upset we hardly know what we're doing. We never saw you before in our lives. Are you crazy -- is that it? Maybe you are; you certainly are acting as if you are. I wish now you hadn't come here; I wish--" She hesitated. "Well, I started to say I wished you'd gone off the road with your car. It isn't fair to us to cause us all this trouble."

"That's right," Garret murmured.

Am I making a mistake? Ragle asked himself.

"Explain the radio," he said aloud.

"There's nothing to explain," Mrs. Kesselman said. "It's an ordinary five-tube radio that we got right after World War Two. It's been down there for years. I don't even know if it works." Now she seemed angry. Her hands trembled and her face had become strained, pinched with fatigue. "Everybody owns a radio. Two or three of them."

Ragle opened each of the doors that led off the dining room. One of them opened onto a storage closet, with shelves and bins. He said, "I want to look around the house. Get in here, so I won't have to worry about what you're doing while I look." In the lock there was a key.

"Please," Mrs. Kesselman began, glaring at him and almost inarticulate.

"Just for a few minutes," he said.

They glanced at each other. Mrs. Kesselman made a sign of resignation, and then they walked wordlessly into the closet. Ragle closed it and threw the bolt. He put the key in his pocket.

Now he felt better.

At its dish, the black dog watched him intently. Why is it watching me? he wondered. And then he noticed that the dog had finished its food and was hoping that he would give it more. The package remained on the long dinner table where Mrs. Kesselman had left it; he sprinkled a few more dog biscuits into the dish and the dog fell to eating again.

From within the closet Garret's voice was distinctly audible.

"...face it -- he's a nut."

Ragle said, "I'm not a nut. I've watched this thing grow step by step. At least, I've become aware of it step by step."

Mrs. Kesselman said to him through the closet door, "Look, Mr. Gumm. It's clear to us that you believe what you say. But don't you see what you're doing? Because you believe everyone's against you, you force everyone to be against you."

"Like ourselves," Garret said.

There was a lot in what they said. Ragle, uncertainly, said, "I can't take any chances."

"You have to take a chance with someone," Mrs. Kesselman said. "Or you can't live."

Ragle said, "I'll look through the house and then I'll make up my mind."

The woman's voice, controlled and civilized, went on, "At least call your family and tell them you're all right. So they won't worry about you. They're probably quite upset."

"You should let us call them," Garret said. "So they wouldn't phone the police or something."

Ragle left the dining room. First he inspected the living room. Nothing seemed out of order. What did he intend to find? The same old problem... he wouldn't know until he found it. And perhaps even then he wouldn't be sure.

On the wall, beyond a small spinet piano, hung a telephone, a bright pink plastic phone with a curly plastic cord. And upright, in the bookcase, the phone book. He lifted the book out.

It was the same phone book as the one Sammy had found in the vacant lot. He opened it. Written, in pencil, red crayon, ball-point pen and fountain pen, were numbers and names on the blank first page. Addresses, jotted notations of dates, times, events... the current phone book, in use in this house by these people. Walnut, Sherman, Kentfield, Devonshire numbers.

The number on the wall phone itself was a Kentfield number.

So that settled that.

Carrying the book he strode back through the house, into the dining room. He got out the key and unlocked the closet door, swinging it wide.

The closet was empty. A large hole had been neatly cut in the rear wall, a still-warm rim of wood and plaster through which showed one of the bedrooms. They had cut a passage out in a matter of minutes. On the floor, by the hole, lay two tiny drill-like points; one had been bent, damaged and scored. The wrong size. Too small. And the other, probably not tried; they had found the right size and finished the job, scrambled out in such haste that they had forgotten these parts of the cutting-tool.

Holding the drill-like points in the palm of his hand he saw that they were like nothing he had ever seen before. In all his life.

While they had talked reasonably and rationally, they had been cutting through the back wall.

I'm hopelessly outclassed, he said to himself. I might as well give up.

He made a cursory tour of the house. No sign of them. The back door banged open and shut in the late-evening wind. They had gone outside. Left the house entirely. He sensed the emptiness of the house. Only he and the dog. Not even the dog; there was no sign of it, now. The dog had gone with them.

He could plunge out onto the road; possibly somewhere in the house was a flashlight he could take. There might even be a heavy coat he could wear. With luck, he could march a good distance before the Kesselmans had time to return with support. He could hide in the woods, wait until daylight. Try to reach the highway... try to hike all the way to the bottom of the hill, however many miles it was.

What a dismal prospect. He shrank from it; he needed rest and sleep, not more walking.

Or -- he could stay in the house, and in the time left to him explore it as fully as possible. Learn as much as he could before they got him in tow again.

The latter appealed to him, if it had to be one or the other. He returned to the living room. This time he opened drawers and cupboards and poked into the ordinary objects, such as the television set in the corner.

On top of the television set, mounted in a mahogany frame, was a tape recorder. He snapped the switch, and a reel of tape, already on the mechanism, began to move. After a moment or so the screen of the television set lit up. The tape, he realized, was for video use, as well as audio. Standing back, he watched the screen.

On the television screen appeared Ragle Gumm, first a front view and then a side view. Ragle Gumm strolled along a treelined residential street, past parked cars, lawns. Then a close-up of him, full-face.

From the speaker of the TV set a voice said, "This is Ragle Gumm."

On the screen Ragle Gumm now sat in a deck-chair in the back yard of a house, wearing a Hawaiian sports shirt and shorts.

"YOU will hear an excerpt of his conversational manner," the voice from the speaker said. And then Ragle heard his own voice. "..._get home ahead of you I'll do it_," Ragle Gumm said. "_Otherwise you can do it tomorrow. Is that okay?_"

They have me down in black and white, Ragle thought. In color, as a matter of fact.

He stopped the tape. The image remained, inert. Then he clicked the switch off, and the image dwindled to a spot of brightness and at last vanished entirely.

No wonder everybody recognizes me. They've been trained.

When I start to imagine I'm crazy I'll remember this tape machine. This training-program of identification with me as the topic.

I wonder how many tapes like this are sitting in how many machines in how many homes. Over how large an area. Every house that I ever passed. Every street. Every town, perhaps.

The entire earth?

He heard, from far off, the noise of an engine. It started him into motion.