I was scared rigid but, even then, I was being subtley worked on. The unseen proprietors of this place were inside my head doing whatever it is they do. I felt nothing, suspected nothing, but soon began to feel somewhat familiar with the place which didn’t really make any sense. And yet, I didn’t for a moment question it.
I had as yet seen no living creature and remained fearful of what they would be like. Then, as if to allay my fears, a Blue Jay winged in to rest on the long-fallen tree off to my right and moments later it was joined by another. There was my answer! Something familiar. If there were any Doctor-Seuss monsters lurking in the long grass, the Jays would know of their presence. I think at this distance in time that the Jays were deliberately sent to give me that assurance that I might get out.
I waited by the road for perhaps an hour. Clearly it was a road that didn’t see much traffic and, unfortunately, the gnats were definitely the same as at home. Every bit as persistent. I spent the time slapping armies. At last, when I was fully convinced that no-one was ever going to come, there was a distant dust cloud that resolved itself into a closed-body Reo Speedwagon and I, who had had never so much as heard of a Reo Speedwagon, recognised it as such at a distance and knew to whom it belonged. Frank and Wendal Berry. Frank and Wendal are butchers, one of the two such firms in the town, and have their shop three doors down from my own. One or the other delivers to outlying areas on Tuesdays and Fridays. This time it was Frank.
As I said, I was already being worked on. I was confused and could see nothing strange in recognising the Reo and knowing Frank, and had also somehow come to accept that this was 1928.
Frank came back to the Cirrus with me. “You’re lucky that I came this way,” he said. “I don’t usually. And I’m not sure what made me come today. It’s not a good road.”
He’d not seen a sailplane before, as might be expected, and walked around it several times in some amazement, hat in hand and scratching his head. The look on his face was almost comical. He had rope on the Reo, a wise precaution on many of the local dirt roads, and we used it to secure the plane parts once it was disassembled. As a precaution, we dragged it over to use the fallen tree as an anchor. “They get quite a bit of wind through here sometimes.”
That seems to be how I got here although this may be just another implanted memory. It is difficult to be really sure of anything.
Frank dropped me off at my shop door and there was my name on the window.
THE RADIO SURGERY
Sales and Repairs
Ralph Fletcher
Proprietor
“How come you didn’t open today,” he asked. And what could I say? That I’d never actually been there before? I knew that this was me even though it couldn’t be. I avoided the subject.
“If I hire one of Greg Morton’s drays tomorrow, the long one perhaps, would you come with me to get the Cirrus?” I could see in his eyes that he didn’t know what I was talking about.
“The sailplane,” I amended. But it was clear that he knew nothing of any sailplane.
It appeared that I had carelessly left the door unlocked, someone had anyway, and that that someone had swept the footpath outside. The keys were on the workbench. There was some valuable stock out on the showroom floor, top-of-the-line Majestics and Gulbransens but in this valley they were unlikely to be taken. Delinquency of any sort is almost entirely unknown. The group programming tends against it.
This clearly was no instant wand-tap business. The lean-to out back held filament accumulators some on charge, some charged. The more frugal still held on to their battery sets. On the workshop floor were sets awaiting repair. On the shelves others ready to pick-up, complete with work docket, parts used and price. It appeared to be my rather distinctive handwriting on the dockets. There was a chassis upside down on the bench and I knew the problem that it had come in with and that I’d been having difficulty tracking down its cause. Another set I had left running on the signal generator, volume well down, hoping that its intermittent fault would make its appearance. But as always seems to be the case, once on the bench, it had shown no sign of trouble.
In saying ‘I’ I mean that other replaceable Ralph Fletcher most of whose memory I seem to have inherited with the shop. That framed certificate from Coynes in Chicago had now been earned by my efforts. Everything that I know about valve radios, the town, the people, comes from him. So what had happened to him? A continued worry is what did ’they’ do with him, this doppelganger other me, once he had served their purpose? I was to find that he had left me a good reputation, both as to honesty and to skill as a radio serviceman, and a helpful bank balance as well. 905