Intriguing little pieces of the real 1959 turn up: a magazine article on Marilyn Monroe, a telephone book with non-operational exchanges listed and radios hidden away in someone else's house.

Few other characters notice these or experience similar anomalies; the sole exception is Gumm's supposed brother-in-law, Victor "Vic" Nielson, in whom he confides.

The fake town was thereby created on the ruins of Kemmerer, Wyoming, to accommodate and rationalize his retreat to childhood so that he could continue predicting nuclear strikes in the guise of submitting entries to a harmless newspaper contest and without the ethical qualms involved with being on the "wrong" side of a civil war.

While Gumm regressed by himself to a 1950s mindset, the rest of the town with a few exceptions like Black were all put in a similar state artificially, explaining why hardly anyone else could perceive anomalies.

When Gumm finally remembers his true personal history, he decides to emigrate to the Moon after all because he feels that exploration and migration, as basic human impulses, should never be denied to people by any national or planetary government.

Vic rejects this belief, referring to the colonists essentially as aggressors and terrorists, and returns to the simulated town - which has lost its raison d'etre because of Gumm's escape from its environs.

"[3] Colin Greenland reviewed Time Out of Joint for Imagine magazine, and stated that "As usual, Dick's deadpan investigation of a paranoid world reveals more than a little of the unreal dimensions of our own 'safe' environments.