He smiled at her worried tone and the slight frown which had puckered her brow. “Bothered you a little, didn’t it?”
   “Yes, but I won’t say so. You’re in Harold’s corner now.”
   “Now, that’s not fair, Fran. It bothered me, too. There we had those two advance meetings… hashed everything over to a fare-thee-well… at least we thought so… and along comes Harold. He takes a whack-whack here and a whack-whack there and says, ‘Ain’t that what you really meant?’ And we say, ‘Yeah, thanks, Harold. It was.’” Stu shook his head. “Putting everybody up for blanket election, how come we never thought of that, Fran? That was sharp. And we never even discussed it.”
   “Well, none of us knew for sure what kind of mood they’d be in. I thought—especially after Mother Abagail walked off—that they’d be glum, maybe even mean. With that Impening talking to them like some kind of deathcrow—”
   “I wonder if he should be shut up somehow,” Stu said thoughtfully.
   “But it wasn’t like that. They were so… exuberant just to be together. Did you feel that?”
   “Yeah, I did.”
   “It was like a tent revival, almost. I don’t think it was anything Harold had planned. He just seized the moment.”
   “I just don’t know how to feel about him,” Stu said. “That night after we hunted for Mother Abagail, I felt real bad for him. When Ralph and Glen turned up, he looked downright horrible, like he was going to faint, or something. But when we were talking out on the lawn just now and everybody was congratulating him, he seemed puffed up like a toad. Like he was smiling on the outside and on the inside he was saying, ‘There, you see what your committee’s worth, you stupid bunch of fools.’ He’s like one of those puzzles you could never figure out when you were a kid. The Chinese finger-pullers or those three steel rings that would come apart if you pulled them just the right way.”
   Fran stuck out her feet and looked at them. “Speaking of Harold, do you see anything funny about my feet, Stuart?”
   Stu looked at them judiciously. “Nope. Just that you’re wearing those funny-looking Earth Shoes from up the street. And they’re almighty big, o course.”
   She slapped at him. “Earth Shoes are very good for your feet. All the best magazines say so. And I happen to be a size seven, for your information. That’s practically petite.”
   “So what have your feet got to do with anything? It’s late, honey.” He began to push his bike again and she fell in beside him.
   “Nothing, I guess. It’s just that Harold kept looking at my feet. After the meeting when we were sitting out on the grass and talking things over.” She shook her head, frowning a little. “Now why would Harold Lauder be interested in my feet?” she asked.
   When Larry and Lucy got home, they were by themselves, walking hand in hand. Sometime before, Leo had gone into the house where he stayed with “Nadine-mom.”
   Now, as they walked toward the door, Lucy said: “It was quite a meeting. I never thought—” Her words caught in her throat as a dark form unfolded itself from the shadows of their porch. Larry felt hot fear leap up in his throat. It’s him, he thought wildly. He’s come to get me… I’m going to see his face.
   But then he wondered how he could have thought that, because it was Nadine Cross, that was all. She was wearing a dress of some soft bluish-gray material, and her hair was loose, flowing over her shoulders and down her back, dark hair shot with skeins of purest white.
   She sort of makes Lucy look like a used car on a scalper’s lot, he thought before he could help himself, and then hated himself for thinking it. That was the old Larry talking… old Larry? You might as well say old Adam.
   “Nadine,” Lucy was saying shakily, with one hand pressed to her chest. “You gave me the fright of my life. I thought… well, I don’t know what I thought.”
   She took no notice of Lucy. “Can I talk to you?” she asked Larry.
   “What? Now?” He looked sideways at Lucy, or thought he did… later he was never able to remember what Lucy had looked like in that moment. It was as if she had been eclipsed, but by a dark star rather than by a bright one.
   “Now. It has to be now.”
   “In the morning would—”
   “It has to be now, Larry. Or never.”
   He looked at Lucy again and this time he did see her, saw the resignation on her face as she looked from Larry to Nadine and back again. He saw the hurt.
   “I’ll be right in, Lucy.”
   “No you won’t,” she said dully. Tears had begun to sparkle in her eyes. “Oh no, I doubt it.”
   “Ten minutes.”
   “Ten minutes, ten years,” Lucy said. “She’s come to get you. Did you bring your dog collar and your muzzle, Nadine?”
   For Nadine, Lucy Swann did not exist. Her eyes were fixed only on Larry, those dark, wide eyes. For Larry, they would always be the strangest, most beautiful eyes he had ever seen, the eyes that come back to you, calm and deep, when you’re hurt or in bad trouble or maybe just about out of your mind with grief.
   “I’ll be in, Lucy,” he said automatically.
   “She—”
   “Go on.”
   “Yes, I guess I will. She’s come. I’m dismissed.”
   She ran up the steps, stumbling on the top one, regaining her balance, pulling the door open, closing it behind her with a slam, cutting off the sound of her sobs even as they started.
   Nadine and Larry looked at each other for a long time as if entranced. This is how it happens, he thought. When you catch someone’s eyes across a room and never forget them, or see someone at the far end of a crowded subway platform that could have been your double, or hear a laugh on the street that could have been the laugh of the first girl you ever made love to—
   But something in his mouth tasted so bitter.
   “Let’s walk down to the corner and back,” Nadine said in a low voice. “Would you do that much?”
   “I better go in to her. You picked one hell of a bad time to come here.”
   “Please? Just down to the corner and back? If you want, I’ll get down on my knees and beg. If that’s what you want. Here. See?”
   And to his horror she did get down on her knees, pulling her skirt up a little so she could do it, showing him her bare legs, making him curiously certain that everything else was bare as well. Why should he think that? He didn’t know. Her eyes were on him, making his head spin, and there was a sickening feeling of power involved here someplace, involved with having her on her knees before him, her mouth on a level with—
   “Get up!” he said roughly. He took her hands and yanked her to her feet, trying not to see the way the skirt rode up even more before falling back into place; her thighs were the color of cream, that shade of white that is not pale and dead but vigorous and healthy and enticing.
   “Come on,” he said, almost totally unnerved.
   They walked west, in the direction of the mountains, which were a negative presence far ahead, triangular patches of darkness blotting out the stars that had come out after the rain. Walking toward those mountains at night always made him feel queerly uneasy but somehow adventurous, and now, with Nadine by his side, her hand resting lightly in the crook of his elbow, those feelings seemed heightened. He had always had vivid dreams, and three or four nights ago about those mountains; he had dreamed there were trolls in them, hideous creatures with bright green eyes, the oversized heads of hydrocephalic cretins, and short-fingered, powerful hands. Strangler’s hands. Idiot trolls, guarding the passes through the mountains. Waiting until his time came around—the time of the dark man.
   A soft breeze meandered down the street, blowing papers before it. They passed King Sooper’s, a few shopping carts standing in the big parking lot like dead sentinels, making him think of the Lincoln Tunnel. There had been trolls in the Lincoln Tunnel. They had been dead, but that didn’t mean all the trolls in their new world were dead.
   “It’s hard,” Nadine said, her voice still low. “She made it hard because she’s right. I want you now. And I’m afraid I’m too late. I want to stay here.”
   “Nadine—”
   “No! ” she said fiercely. “Let me finish. I want to stay here, can’t you understand that? And if we’re with each other, I’ll be able to. You’re my last chance,” she said, her voice breaking. “Joe’s gone now.”
   “No, he hasn’t,” Larry said, feeling slow and stupid and bewildered. “We dropped him off at your place on the way home. Isn’t he there?”
   “No. There’s a boy named Leo Rockway asleep in his bed.”
   “What are you—”
   “Listen,” she said. “Listen to me, can’t you listen? As long as I had Joe, I was all right. I could… be as strong as I had to be. But he doesn’t need me anymore. And I need to be needed.”
   “He does need you!”
   “Of course he does,” Nadine said, and Larry felt afraid again. She wasn’t talking about Leo anymore; he didn’t know who she was talking about. “He needs me. That’s what I’m afraid of. That’s why I came to you.” She stepped in front of him and looked up, her chin tilted. He could smell her secret clean scent, and he wanted her. But part of him turned back toward Lucy. That was the part of him he needed if he was going to make it here in Boulder. If he let it go and went with Nadine, they might as well slink out of Boulder tonight. It would be finished with him. The old Larry triumphant.
   “I have to go home,” he said. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to work it out on your own, Nadine.” Work it out on your own —weren’t they the words he had been using to people in one form or another all his life? Why did they have to rise up this way when he knew he was right and still catch him, and twist in him, and make him doubt himself?
   “Make love to me,” she said, and put her arms around his neck. She pressed her body against his and he knew by its looseness, its warmth and springiness, that he had been right, she was wearing the dress and that was all. Buck naked underneath, he thought, and thinking it excited him blackly.
   “That’s all right, I can feel you,” she said, and began to wriggle against him—sideways, up and down, creating a delicious friction. “Make love to me and that will be the end of it. I’ll be safe. Safe. I’ll be safe.”
   He reached up, and later he never knew how he was able to do that when he could have been inside her warmth in only three quick movements and one thrust, the way she wanted it, but somehow he reached up and unlocked her hands and pushed her away with such force that she stumbled and almost fell. A low moan came from her.
   “Larry, if you knew—”
   “Well, I don’t. Why don’t you try telling me instead of… of raping me?”
   “Rape!” she repeated, laughing shrilly. “Oh, that’s funny! Oh, what you said! Me! Rape you! Oh, Larry!”
   “Whatever you want from me, you could have had. You could have had it last week, or the week before. The week before that I asked you to take it. I wanted you to have it.”
   “That was too soon,” she whispered.
   “And now it’s too late,” he said, hating the brutal sound of his voice but unable to control it. He was still shaking all over from wanting her, how was he supposed to sound? “What are you gonna do; huh?”
   “All right. Goodbye, Larry.”
   She was turning away. In that instant she was more than Nadine, turning her back on him forever. She was the oral hygienist. She was Yvonne, with whom he had shared an apartment in L.A.—she had pissed him off and so he had just slipped into his boogie shoes, leaving her holding the lease. She was Rita Blakemoor.
   Worst of all, she was his mother.
   “Nadine?”
   She didn’t turn around. She was a black shape distinguishable from other black shapes only when she crossed the street. Then she disappeared altogether against the black background of the mountains. He called her name once again and she didn’t answer. There was something terrifying in the way she had left him, the way she had just melted into that black backdrop.
   He stood in front of King Sooper’s, hands clenched, brow covered with pearls of sweat in spite of the evening cool. His ghosts were with him now, and at last he knew how you pay off for not being no nice guy: never clear about your own motivations, never able to weigh hurt against help except by rule of thumb, never able to get rid of the sour taste of doubt in your mouth and—
   His head jerked up. His eyes widened until they seemed to bulge from his face. The wind had picked up again, it made a strange hooting sound in some empty doorway, and farther away he thought he could hear bootheels pacing off the night, rundown bootheels somewhere in the foothills coming to him on the chilly draft of this early morning breeze.
   Dirty bootheels clocking their way into the grave of the West.
   Lucy heard him let himself in and her heart leaped up fiercely. She told it to stop, that he was probably only coming back for his things, but it would not stop. He picked me, was the thought that hammered into her brain, driven there by her heart’s triphammer beat. He picked me —
   In spite of her excitement and hope, which she was helpless to control, she lay stiffly on her back on the bed, waiting and watching nothing but the ceiling. She had only told him the truth when she had said that, for her and for girls like her friend Joline, the only fault was too much need to love. But she had always been faithful. She was no cheater. She hadn’t cheated on her husband and she had never cheated on Larry, and if in the years before she had met them she hadn’t exactly been a nun… time past was time past. You just couldn’t get hold of the things you had done and turn them right again. Such power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to men and women, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.
   If you knew that past was out of reach, maybe you could forgive.
   Tears were stealing down her cheeks.
   The door clicked open and she saw him in it, just a silhouette.
   “Lucy? You awake?”
   “Yes.”
   “Can I put on the lamp?”
   “If you want.”
   She heard the minute hiss of gas and then the light came on, turned down to a thread of flame, revealing him. He looked pale and shaken.
   “I have to say something.”
   “No you don’t. Just come to bed.”
   “I have to say it. I…” He pressed his hand against his forehead and ran it through his hair.
   “Larry?” She sat up. “Are you all right?”
   He spoke as if he hadn’t heard her, and he spoke without looking at her. “I love you. If you want me, you got me. But I don’t know if you’re getting much. I’m never going to be your best bet, Lucy.”
   “I’ll take the chance. Come to bed.”
   He did. And they did. And when the love was over she told him she loved him, it was true, God knew that, and it seemed to be what he wanted, needed, to hear, but she didn’t think he slept for a long time. Once in the night she came awake (or dreamed she did) and it seemed to her that Larry was at the window, looking out, his head cocked in a listening posture, the lines of light and shadow giving his face the appearance of a haggard mask. But in the light of day she was more sure that it must have been a dream; in the light of day he seemed to be his old self again.
   It was only three days later that they heard from Ralph Brentner that Nadine had moved in with Harold Lauder. At that, Larry’s face seemed to tighten, but it was only for a moment. And although Lucy disliked herself for it, Ralph’s news made her breathe a little easier. It seemed it must be over.
   She went home only briefly after seeing Larry. She let herself in, went to the living room, and lit the lamp. Carrying it high, she went to the back of the house, pausing for just a moment to let the light spill into the boy’s room. She wanted to see if she had told Larry the truth. She had.
   Leo lay asprawl in a tangle of bedclothes, dressed only in his undershorts… but the cuts and scratches had faded, disappeared altogether in most cases, and the all-over tan he had gotten from going practically naked had also faded. But it was more than that, she thought. Something in his face had changed—she could see the change even though he was asleep. That expression of mute, needful savagery had gone out of it. He was not Joe anymore. This was just a boy sleeping after a busy day.
   She thought of the night she had been almost asleep and had come awake to find him gone from her side. That had been in North Berwick, Maine—most of the continent away now. She had followed him to the house where Larry lay sleeping on the porch. Larry sleeping inside, Joe standing outside, brandishing his knife with mute savagery, and nothing between them but the thin and sliceable screen. And she had made him come away.
   Hate pounced on Nadine in a surging flash, striking up brilliant sparks as if from flint and steel. The Coleman lamp trembled in her hand, making wild shadows leap and dance. She should have let him do it! She should have held the door for Joe herself, let him in so he could stab and rip and cut and puncture and gut and destroy. She should have—
   But now the boy turned over, and moaned in his throat, as if waking. His hands came up and batted the air, as if warding off a black shape in a dream. And Nadine withdrew, a pulse beating thickly at her temples. There was still something strange in the boy, and she didn’t like the way he had moved just now, as if he had picked up her thoughts.
   She had to go ahead now. She had to be quick.
   She went into her own room. There was a rug on the floor. There was a single narrow bed—an old maid’s bed. That was all. There was not even a picture. The room was totally devoid of character. She opened the closet door and rummaged behind her hanging clothes. She was on her knees now, sweating. She drew out a brightly colored box with a photograph of laughing adults on the front, adults who were playing a party-game. A party-game that was at least three thousand years old.
   She had found the planchette in a downtown novelty shop, but she dared not use it in the house, not with the boy here. In fact, she had not dared use it at all… until now. Something had impelled her into the shop, and when she had seen the planchette in its gay party box, a terrible struggle had gone on inside her—the sort of struggle psychologists call aversion/compulsion. She had been sweating then as now, wanting two things at the same time: to hurry out of that shop without looking back, and to snatch the box, that dreadful gay box, and carry it home with her. The latter wish frightened her the more, because it did not seem to be her own wish.
   At last, she had taken the box.
   That had been four days ago. Each night the compulsion had grown stronger until tonight, half insane with fears she didn’t understand, she had gone to Larry wearing the blue-gray dress with nothing on underneath. She had gone to put an end to the fears for good. Waiting on the porch for them to get back from the meeting, she had been sure she had finally done the right thing. There had been that feeling in her, that lightly drunk, starstruck feeling, that she’d not properly had since she had run across the dew-drenched grass with the boy behind her. Only this time the boy would catch her. She would let him catch her. It would be the end.
   But when he had caught her, he hadn’t wanted her.
   Nadine stood up, holding the box to her chest, and put out the lamp. He had scorned her, and didn’t they say that hell hath no fury—? A scorned woman might well traffic with the devil… or his henchman.
   She paused only long enough to get the large flashlight from the table in the front hall. From deeper inside the house, the boy cried out in his sleep, freezing her for a moment, making the hair prickle on her scalp.
   Then she let herself out.
   Her Vespa was at the curb, the Vespa she had used some days ago to motor up to Harold Lauder’s house. Why had she gone there? She hadn’t passed a dozen words with Harold since she’d gotten to Boulder. But in her confusion about the planchette, and in her terror of the dreams that continued to come to her even after everyone else’s had stopped, it had seemed to her that she must talk about it to Harold. She had been afraid of that impulse, too, she remembered as she put the Vespa’s ignition key in its slot. Like the sudden urge to pick up the planchette (Amaze Your Friends! Brighten Up Your Get-togethers! the box said), it had seemed to be an idea that had come to her from outside herself. His thought, maybe. But when she had given in and gone to Harold’s, he hadn’t been at home. The house was locked, the only locked house she had come upon in Boulder, and the shades were drawn. She had rather liked that and she’d had a moment’s bitter disappointment that Harold was not there. If he had been, he could have let her in and then locked the door behind her. They could have gone into the living room and talked, or made love, or have done unspeakable things together, and no one would have known.
   Harold’s was a private place.
   “What’s happening to me?” she whispered to the dark, but the dark had no answer for her. She started the Vespa, and the steady burping pop of its engine seemed to profane the night. She put it in gear and drove away. To the west.
   Moving, the cool night air on her face, she felt better at last. Blow away the cobwebs, night wind. You know, don’t you? When all the choices have been taken away, what do you do? You choose what’s left. You choose whatever dark adventure was meant for you. You let Larry have his stupid little twist of tail with her tight pants and her single-syllable vocabulary and her movie-magazine mind. You go beyond them. You risk… whatever there is to be risked.
   Mostly you risk yourself.
   The road unrolled before her in the baby spotlight of the Vespa’s headlamp. She had to switch to second gear as the road began to climb; she was on Baseline Road now, headed up the black mountain. Let them have their meetings. They were concerned with getting the power back on; her lover was concerned with the world.
   The Vespa’s engine lugged and strained and somehow carried on. A horrible yet sexy kind of fear began to grip her, and the vibrating saddle of the motorbike began to heat her up down there (why, you’re horny, Nadine, she thought with shrill good humor, naughty, naughty, NAUGHTY). To her right was a straight dropoff. Nothing but death down there. And up above? Well, she would see. It was too late to turn back, and that thought alone made her feel paradoxically and deliciously free.
   An hour later she was in Sunrise Amphitheater—but sunrise was still three or more hours away. The amphitheater was close to the summit of Flagstaff Mountain, and nearly everyone in the Free Zone had made the trip to the camping area at the top before they had been in Boulder very long. On a clear day—which was most days in Boulder, at least during the summer season—you could see Boulder, and I-25 stretching away south to Denver and then off into the haze toward New Mexico two hundred miles beyond. Due east were the flatlands, stretching away toward Nebraska, and closer at hand was Boulder Canyon, a knife-gash through foothills that were walled in pine and spruce. In summers gone by, gliders had plied the thermals over Sunrise Amphitheater like birds.
   Now Nadine saw only what was revealed in the glow of the six-cell flashlight which she put on a picnic table near the dropoff. There was a large artist’s sketchpad turned back to a clean sheet, and squatting on it the three-cornered planchette like a triangular spider. Protruding from its belly, like the spider’s stinger, was a pencil, lightly touching the pad.
   Nadine was in a feverish state that was half-euphoria, half-terror. Coming up here on the back of her gamely laboring Vespa, which had most decidedly not been made for mountain climbing, she had felt what Harold had felt in Nederland. She could feel him. But while Harold had felt this in a rather precise and technological way, as a piece of steel attracted by a magnet, a drawing toward, Nadine felt it as a kind of mystic event, a border-crossing. It was as if these mountains, of which she was even now only in the foothills, were a no-man’s-land between two spheres of influence—Flagg in the West, the old woman in the East. And here the magic flew both ways, mixing, making its own concoction that belonged neither to God nor to Satan but which was totally pagan. She felt she was in a haunted place.
   And the planchette…
   She had tossed the brightly marked box, stamped MADE IN TAIWAN, away indifferently for the wind to take. The planchette itself was only a poorly stamped piece of fiberboard or gypsum. But it didn’t matter. It was a tool she would only use once—only dared to use once—and even a poorly made tool can serve its purpose: to break open a door, to close a window, to write a Name.
   The words on the box recurred: Amaze Your Friends! Brighten Up Your Get-togethers!
   What was that song Larry sometimes bellowed from the seat of his Honda as they rode along? Hello, Central, what’s the matter with your line? I want to talk to —
   Talk to who? But that was the question, wasn’t it?
   She remembered the time she had used the planchette in college. That had been more than a dozen years ago… but it might as well have been yesterday. She had gone upstairs to ask someone on the third floor of the dorm, a girl named Rachel Timms, about the assignment in a remedial reading class they shared. The room had been filled with girls, six or eight of them at least, giggling and laughing. Nadine remembered thinking that they acted as if they were high on something, smoke or maybe even blow.
   “Stop it!” Rachel said, giggling herself. “How do you expect the spirits to communicate if you’re all acting like a bunch of donkeys?”
   The idea of laughing donkeys struck them as deliciously funny, and a fresh feminine gale blew through the room for a while. The planchette had set then as it sat now, a triangular spider on three stubby legs, pencil pointing down. While they giggled, Nadine picked up a sheaf of oversized pages torn from an artist’s sketchbook and shuffled through those “messages from the astral plane” which had already come in.
   Tommy says you have been using that strawberry douche again.
   Mother says she’s fine.
   Chunga! Chunga!
   John says you won’t fart so much if you stop eating those CAFETERIA BEANS!!!!!
   Others, just as silly.
   Now the giggles had quieted enough so they could start again. Three girls sat on the bed, each with her fingertips placed on a different side of the planchette. For a moment there was nothing. Then the board quivered.
   “You did that, Sandy!” Rachel accused.
   “I did not!”
   “Shhhh! ”
   The board quivered again and the girls hushed. It moved, stopped, moved again. It made the letter F.
   “Fuh…” the girl named Sandy said.
   “Fuck you, too,” someone else said, and they were off and giggling again.
   “Shhhh!” Rachel said sternly.
   The planchette began to move more rapidly, tracing out the letters A, T, H, E, and R.
   “Father dear, your baby’s here,” a girl named Patty something-or-other said, and giggled. “It must be my father, he died of a heart attack when I was three.”
   “It’s writing some more,” Sandy said.
   S, A, Y, S, the planchette spelled laboriously.
   “What’s going on?” Nadine whispered to a tall, horse-faced girl she didn’t know. The horse-faced girl was looking on with her hands in her pockets and a disgusted look on her face.
   “A bunch of girls playing games with something they don’t understand,” the horse-faced girl said. “That’s what’s going on.” She spoke in an even lower whisper.
   “FATHER SAYS PATTY,” Sandy quoted. “It’s your dear old dad, all right, Pats.”
   Another burst of giggles.
   The horse-faced girl was wearing spectacles. Now she took her hands out of the pockets of the overalls she was wearing and used them to remove the spectacles from her face. She polished them and explained further to Nadine, still in a whisper. “The planchette is a tool used by psychics and mediums. Kinestheologists—”
   “What ologists?”
   “Scientists who study movement, and the interaction of muscles and nerves.”
   “Oh.”

“They claim that the planchette is actually responding to tiny muscle movements, probably guided by the subconscious rather than the conscious mind. Of course, mediums and psychics claim that the planchette is moved by entities from the spirit world—”
   Another burst of hysterical laughter came from the girls clustered around the board. Nadine looked over the horse-faced girl’s shoulder and saw the message now read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING.
   “—to the bathroom so much,” another girl in the circle of spectators suggested, and everyone laughed some more.
   “Either way, they’re just fooling with it,” the horse-faced girl said with a disdainful sniff. “It’s very unwise. Both mediums and scientists agree that automatic writing can be dangerous.”
   “The spirits are unfriendly tonight, you think?” Nadine asked lightly.
   “Perhaps the spirits are always unfriendly,” the horse-faced girl said, giving her a sharp look. “Or you might get a message from your subconscious mind which you were totally unprepared to receive. There are documented cases of automatic writing getting entirely out of control, you know. People have gone mad.”
   “Oh, that seems awfully farfetched. It’s just a game.”
   “Games have a way of turning serious sometimes.”
   The loudest burst of laughter yet tacked a period to the horse-faced girl’s comment before Nadine could reply. The girl named Patty something-or-other had fallen off the bed and lay on the floor, holding her stomach and laughing and kicking her feet weakly. The completed message read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING TO THE SUBMARINE RACES WITH LEONARD KATZ.
   “You did that!” Patty said to Sandy as she finally sat up again.
   “I didn’t, Patty! Honest!”
   “It was your father! From the Great Beyond! From Out There!” another girl told Patty in a Boris Karloff voice which Nadine thought was actually quite good. “Just remember that he’s watching you the next time you take off your pants in the back seat of Leonard’s Dodge.”
   Another loud outburst greeted this sally. As it tapered off, Nadine pushed forward and twitched Rachel’s arm. She meant to ask for the assignment and then make a quiet escape.
   “Nadine!” Rachel cried. Her eyes were sparkling and gay. Her cheeks had bloomed with roses. “Sit down, let’s see if the spirits have a message for you!”
   “No, really, I only came to get the assignment in remedial r—”
   “Oh, poop on the assignment in remedial reading! This is important, Nadine! This is big-time! You’ve got to have a try. Here, sit down next to me. Janey, you take the other side.”
   Janey sat down opposite Nadine, and at the repeated urging of Rachel Timms, Nadine found herself with the eight fingers of her hands touching the planchette lightly. For some reason she looked over her shoulder at the horse-faced girl. She shook her head at Nadine once, deliberately, and the overhead fluorescent bounced off the lenses of her spectacles and turned her eyes into a pair of large white flashes of light.
   She had felt a moment of fear then, she remembered as she stood looking down at another planchette in the glow of a six-cell flashlight, but her remark to the horse-faced girl had recurred—it was just a game, for heaven’s sake, and what horrible thing could possibly happen in the middle of a gaggle of giggling girls? If there was a more hostile atmosphere for the production of genuine spirits, hostile or otherwise, Nadine didn’t know what it would be.
   “Now everybody be quiet,” Rachel commanded. “Spirits, do you have a message for our sister and Brownie-in-good-standing Nadine Cross?”
   The planchette didn’t move. Nadine felt mildly embarrassed.
   “Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie,” the girl who had done Boris Karloff said in an equally successful Bullwinkle Moose voice. “The spirits are about to speak!”
   More giggles.
   “Shhhh!” Rachel commanded.
   Nadine decided that if one of the other two girls didn’t start moving the planchette soon so it would spell out whatever silly message they had for her, she would do it herself—slide it around to spell out something short and sweet, like BOO!, so she could get her assignment and leave.
   Just as she was about to try doing this, the planchette jerked rudely under her fingers. The pencil left a dark black diagonal slash on the fresh page.
   “Hey! No fair yanking, spirits,” Rachel said in a vaguely uneasy tone of voice. “Did you do that, Nadine?”
   “No.”
   “Janey.”
   “Uh-uh. Honestly.”
   The planchette jerked again, almost pulling their fingers from it, and skittered to the upper-lefthand corner of the paper.
   “Wowie,” Nadine said. “Did you feel—”
   They did, all of them did, although neither Rachel nor Jane Fargood would talk to her about it later. And she had never felt particularly welcome in either girl’s room after that night. It was as if they were both a little afraid to get too close to her after that.
   The planchette suddenly began to thrum underneath their fingers; it was like lightly touching the fender of a smoothly idling car. The vibration was steady and disquieting. It was not the sort of movement a person could cause without being fairly obvious about it.
   The girls had grown quiet. Their faces all wore a peculiar expression, an expression common to the faces of all people who have attended a séance where something unexpectedly genuine has occurred—when the table begins to rock, when unseen knuckles rap on the wall, or when the medium begins to extrude smoky-gray teleplasm from her nostrils. It is a pallid waiting expression, half wanting whatever it is that has begun to stop, half wanting it to go on. It is an expression of dreadful, distracted excitement… and when it wears that particular look, the human face looks most like the skull which always rests half an inch below the skin.
   “Stop it!” the horse-faced girl cried out suddenly. “Stop it right now or you’ll be sorry!”
   And Jane Fargood screamed in a fear-filled voice: “I can’t take my fingers off it! ”
   Someone uttered a little burping scream. At the same instant Nadine realized that her own fingers were also glued to the board. The muscles of her arms bunched in an effort to pull the tips of her fingers from the planchette, but they remained where they were.
   “All right, the joke is over,” Rachel said in a tight, scared voice. “Who—”
   And suddenly the planchette began to write.
   It moved with lightning speed, dragging their fingers with it, snapping their arms out and back and around in a way which would have been funny if it weren’t for the helpless, caught expressions on all three girls’ faces. Nadine thought later that it was as if her arms had been caught in an exercise machine. The writing before had been in stilted, draggling letters—messages that looked as if they had been written by a seven-year-old. This writing was smooth and powerful… big, slanting capital letters that slashed across the white page. There was something both relentless and vicious about it.
   NADINE, NADINE, NADINE, the whirling planchette wrote. HOW I LOVE NADINE TO BE MY TO LOVE MY NADINE TO BE MY QUEEN IF YOU IF YOU IF YOU ARE PURE FOR ME IF YOU ARE CLEAN FOR ME IF YOU ARE IF YOU ARE DEAD FOR ME DEAD YOU ARE
   The planchette swooped, raced, and began again, lower down.
   YOU ARE DEAD WITH THE REST OF THEM YOU ARE IN THE DEADBOOK WITH THE REST OF THEM NADINE IS DEAD WITH THEM NADINE IS ROTTEN WITH THEM UNLESS UNLESS
   It stopped. Thrummed. Nadine thought, hoped—oh how she hoped—that it was over, and then it raced back to the edge of the paper and began again. Jane shrieked miserably. The faces of the other girls were shocked white o ’s of wonder and dismay.
   THE WORLD THE WORLD SOON THE WORLD IS DEAD AND WE WE WE NADINE NADINE I I I WE WE WE ARE WE ARE WE
   Now the letters seemed to scream across the page:
   WE ARE IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD NADINE
   The last word howled itself across the page in inch-high capital letters and then the planchette whirled from the tablet, leaving a long streak of graphite behind like a shout. It fell on the floor and snapped in two.
   There had been an instant of shocked, immobile silence, and then Jane Fargood had burst into high, weeping hysterics. The thing had ended with the housemother coming upstairs to see what was wrong; Nadine remembered, and she had been about to call the infirmary for Jane when the girl had managed to get hold of herself a little.
   Through the whole thing Rachel Timms had sat on her bed, calm and pale. When the housemother and most of the other girls (including the horse-faced girl, who undoubtedly felt that a prophetess is without much honor in her own land) had left, she had asked Nadine in a flat, strange voice: “Who was it, Nadine?”
   “I don’t know,” Nadine had answered truthfully. She hadn’t had the slightest idea. Not then.
   “You didn’t recognize the handwriting?”
   “No.”
   “Well, maybe you just better take that… that note from beyond or whatever it is… and go back to your room.”
   “You asked me to sit down!” Nadine flashed at her. “How was I supposed to know anything like… like that would happen? I did it to be polite, for God’s sake!”
   Rachel had had the good grace to flush at that; she had even offered a little apology. But Nadine had never seen much of the girl after that, and Rachel Timms had been one of the few girls Nadine had ever felt really close to during her first three semesters at college.
   From then until now she had never touched one of these triangular spiders made of pressed fiberboard.
   But the time had… well, it had slouched around at last, hadn’t it?
   Yes indeed.
   Heart beating loudly, Nadine sat down on the picnic bench and pressed her fingers lightly to two of the planchette’s three sides. She could feel it begin to move under the balls of her fingers almost immediately, and she thought of a car with its engine idling. But who was the driver? Who was he, really? Who would climb in, and slam the door, and put his sun-blackened hands on the wheel? Whose foot, brutal and heavy, shod in an old and dusty cowboy boot, would come down on the accelerator and take her… where?
   Driver, where you taking us?
   Nadine, beyond help or hope of succor, sat upright on the bench at the crest of Flagstaff Mountain in the black trench of morning, her eyes wide, that feeling of being on the border stronger than ever. She stared east, but felt his presence coming from behind her, pressing heavy on her, dragging her down like weights tied to the feet of a dead woman: Flagg’s dark presence, coming in steady, inexorable waves.
   Somewhere the dark man was abroad in the night, and she spoke two words like an incantation to all the black spirits that had ever been—incantation and invitation:
   “Tell me.”
   And beneath her fingers, the planchette began to write.

Chapter 54
 
Excerpts from the Minutes of the Permanent Free Zone Committee Meeting
   August 19, 1990
   This meeting was held at the apartment of Stu Redman and Fran Goldsmith. All members of the Free Zone Committee were present.
   Stu Redman offered congratulations to all of us, including himself, on being elected to the Permanent Committee. He made a motion that a letter of thanks to Harold Lauder be drafted and signed by each member of the Committee. It passed unanimously.
   Stu: “Once we get the old business taken care of, Glen Bateman has a couple of items. I don’t know what they are any more than you do, but I suspect one of them has to do with the next public meeting. Right, Glen?”
   Glen: “I’ll wait my turn.”
   Stu: “That’s baldy for you. The main difference between an old drunk and an old bald college professor is the professor waits his turn before he starts talkin the ears off your head.”
   Glen: “Thank you for those pearls of wisdom, East Texas.”
   Fran said she could see Stu and Glen were having a wonderful time but wanted to know if they could get down to business, as all her favorite TV shows started at nine. This comment was greeted with more laughter than it probably deserved.
   The first real item of business was our scouts in the West. To recap, the committee has decided to ask Judge Farris, Tom Cullen, and Dayna Jurgens to go. Stu suggested that the people who nominated each of them be the ones to broach the subject to their own nominees—that is, Larry Underwood asks the Judge, Nick will have to talk to Tom—with Ralph Brentner’s help—and Sue will talk to Dayna.
   Nick said that working with Tom might take a few days, and Stu said that brought up the point of when to send them. Larry said they couldn’t be sent together or they might all get caught together. He went on to say that both the Judge and Dayna would probably suspect that we had sent more than one spy, but as long as they didn’t know the actual names, they couldn’t tattle. Fran said that tattle was hardly the word, considering what the man in the West might do to them—if he is a man.
   Glen: “I wouldn’t be so gloomy, if I were you, Fran. If we give our Adversary credit for even a modicum of intelligence, he’ll know we wouldn’t give our—operatives, I guess one could call them—any information we considered vital to his interests. He’ll know that torture could do him very little good.”
   Fran: “You mean he’ll probably pat them on the head and tell them not to do it anymore? I have an idea he might torture them just because torture is one of the things he likes. What do you say to that?”
   Glen: “I guess there’s not much I can say.”
   Stu: “That decision’s been made, Frannie. We’ve all agreed that we’re sending our people into a dangerous situation, and we all know that making the decision sure wasn’t any fun.”
   Glen suggested that we agree tentatively to this schedule: The Judge would go out on August twenty-sixth, Dayna on the twenty-seventh, and Tom on the twenty-eighth, none of them to know about the others and each to leave on a different road. That would allow the time necessary to work with Tom, he added.
   Nick said that, with the exception of Tom Cullen, who will be told when to come back by means of a post-hypnotic suggestion, the other two must be told to come back when their own discretion advises them to, but that the weather could become a factor—there can be heavy snow in the mountains by the first week of October. Nick suggested that each of them should be advised to spend no more than three weeks in the West.
   Fran said they could swing around to the south if the snow came early in the mountains but Larry disagreed, pointing out that the Sangre de Cristo chain would be in the way, unless they swung all the way down to Mexico. And if they had to do that, we probably wouldn’t see them again until spring.
   Larry said if that was the case, perhaps we ought to give the Judge a headstart. He suggested August 21, day after tomorrow.
   That closed the subject of the scouts… or spies, if you prefer.
   Glen was then recognized, and I am now quoting from the taped record:
   Glen: “I want to move that we call another public meeting on August twenty-fifth, and I’m going to suggest a few things that we might cover at that meeting.
   “I’d like to start by pointing out something that may surprise you. We’ve been assuming that we’ve got about six hundred people in the Zone, and Ralph has kept admirable, accurate records of the number of large groups that have come in, and we’ve based our population assumption on those figures. But there have also been people coming in by dribs and drabs, maybe as many as ten a day. So earlier today I went over to Chautauqua Park auditorium with Leo Rockway, and we counted the seats in the hall. There are six hundred and seven of them. Now does that tell you anything?”
   Sue Stern said that couldn’t be right, because people had been standing in the back and sitting in the aisles when they couldn’t get seats. Then we all saw what Glen was getting at, and I guess it would be appropriate to say the committee was thunderstruck.
   Glen: “We don’t have any way of accurately estimating how many standees and sittees we had, but my memory of the gathering is fairly clear and I’d have to say that one hundred would be a terribly conservative estimate. So you see, we really have better than seven hundred people here in the Zone. As a result of Leo’s and my findings, I motion that one of the items to go on the big meeting agenda is a Census Committee.”
   Ralph: “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch! That’s one on me.”
   Glen: “No, it’s not your fault. You’ve got about a dozen irons in the fire, Ralph, and I think we’d all agree you’ve kept them turning nicely—”
   Larry: “Boy, I’ll say.”
   Glen: “—but even if we’ve only been getting four loners a day, that still adds up to almost thirty a week. And my guess is we’re getting more like twelve or fourteen. They don’t lust run up to one of us and announce themselves, you know, and with Mother Abagail gone, there’s no one place where you can count on them going after they arrive.”
   Fran Goldsmith then seconded Glen’s motion that the committee put a Census Committee on the agenda for the meeting on August 25, said committee to be responsible for keeping a roll of every Free Zone member.
   Larry: “I’m all for that if there’s some good, practical reason for doing it. But…”
   Nick: “But what, Larry?”
   Larry: “Well… don’t we have enough other things to worry about without hacking around with a bunch of diddly-shit bureaucracy?”
   Fran: “I can see one valid reason right now, Larry.”
   Larry: “What’s that?”
   Fran: “Well, if Glen’s right, it means we’re going to need to hire a bigger hall for the next meeting. That’s one thing. If there are going to be eight hundred people here by the twenty-fifth, we’ll never cram them all into Chautauqua Auditorium.”
   Ralph: “Jesus, I never thought of that. I told you guys I wasn’t cut out for this work.”
   Stu: “Relax, Ralph, you’re doing fine.”
   Sue: “So where are we going to hold the goddam meeting?”
   Glen: “Wait a minute, wait a minute. One thing at a time. There’s a goddam motion on the goddam floor!”
   It was voted 7–0 to put the Census Committee on the agenda of the next public meeting.
   Stu then moved that we hold the meeting on August 25 in Munzinger Auditorium at CU, which had a bigger capacity—probably over a thousand.
   Glen then asked for and received the floor again.
   Glen: “Before we move on, I’d like to point out that there’s another good reason to have a Census Committee, one that’s a little more serious than knowing how much dip and how many bags of chips to bring to the party. We should know who’s coming in… but we should also know who is leaving. I think people are, you know. Maybe it’s just paranoia, but I could swear that there have been faces I’ve gotten used to seeing that just aren’t around anymore. Anyhow, after we went out to the Chautauqua Auditorium, Leo and I went over to Charlie Impening’s house. And guess what? The house is empty, Charlie’s things are gone, and so is Charlie’s BSA.”
   Some uproar from the committee, also profanity which, while colorful, does not have any place in this record.
   Ralph then asked what good it would do for us to know who is leaving. He suggested that if people like Impening wanted to go over to the dark man, then we should look at it as a case of good riddance. Several of the committee applauded Ralph, who blushed like a schoolboy, if I may add that.
   Sue: “No, I see Glen’s point. It would be like a constant drain of information.”
   Ralph: “Well, what could we do? Put them in jail?”
   Glen: “Ugly as it sounds, I think we have to consider that very strongly.”
   Fran: “No, sir. Sending spies… I can stomach that. But locking up people who come here because they don’t like the way we’re doing things? Jesus, Glen! That’s secret police stuff!”
   Glen: “Yes, that’s about what it comes down to. But our position here is extremely precarious. You’re putting me in the position of having to advocate repression, and I think that’s very unfair. I’m asking you if you want to allow a brain-drain to go on, in light of our Adversary.”
   Fran: “I still hate it. In the 1950s, Joe McCarthy had Communism. We’ve got our dark man. How wonderful for us.”
   Glen: “Fran, are you prepared to take the chance that someone may leave here with a key piece of information in his pocket? That Mother Abagail is gone, for instance?”
   Fran: “Charlie Impening can tell him that. What other key pieces of information do we have, Glen? For the most part, aren’t we just wandering around without a clue?”
   Glen: “Do you want him to know our strength of numbers? How we’re getting along on the technical side? That we don’t even have a doctor yet?”
   Fran said she’d rather have it that way than start locking people up because they didn’t like the way we were running things. Stu then motioned that we table the whole idea of locking people up for contrary views. This motion was passed, with Glen voting against.
   Glen: “You better get used to the idea that you’re going to have to deal with this sooner or later, and probably sooner. Charlie Impening spilling his guts to Flagg is bad enough. You just have to ask yourself if you want to multiply what Impening knows by some theoretical x -factor. Well, never mind, you’ve voted to table. But here’s another thing… we’re elected indefinitely, did any of you think of that? We don’t know if we’re serving six weeks, six months, or six years. My suggestion would be one year… that ought to take us to the end of the beginning, in Harold’s phrase. I’d like to see the one-year thing on the agenda for our next public meeting.
   “One last item and I’m done. Government by town meeting—which is essentially what we have, with ourselves as town selectmen—is going to be fine for a while, until we’ve got about three thousand people or so, but when things get too big, most of the people who show up at the public meetings are going to be cliques and folks with axes to grind… fluoridation makes you sterile, people who want one sort of flag, things like that. My suggestion would be that we all think very hard about how to turn Boulder into a Republic by late next winter or early spring.”
   There was some informal discussion of Glen’s last proposal, but no action was taken at this meeting. Nick was recognized and gave Ralph something to read.
   Nick: “I’m writing this on the morning of the nineteenth, in preparation for the meeting tonight, and will get Ralph to read it as the last order of business. Being mute is very difficult sometimes, but I have tried to think of all the possible ramifications of what I’m about to propose. I’d like to see this go on the agenda for our next public meeting: ‘To see if the Free Zone will create a Department of Law and Order with Stu Redman at its head.’”
   Stu: “That’s a hell of a thing to spring on me, Nick.”
   Glen: “Interesting. Goes back to what we were just talking about, too. Let him finish, Stuart—you’ll get your innings.”
   Nick: “The headquarters of this Department of Law and Order would be in the Boulder County Courthouse. Stu would have the power to deputize men on his own up to thirty, over thirty on a majority vote of the Free Zone Committee, and over seventy on a majority vote of the Free Zone in public session. That’s the resolution I’d like to see on the next agenda. Of course we can approve until we’re black in the face and it will do no good unless Stu goes along.”
   Stu: “Damn right!”
   Nick: “We’ve gotten big enough to really need some law. Things are going to get flaky without it. There’s the case of the Gehringer boy racing that fast car up and down Pearl Street. He finally crashed it and was lucky to walk away with nothing worse than a gash on his forehead. He could have killed himself or someone else. Now everybody who saw him doing that knew it was nothing but trouble, M-O-O-N, that spells trouble, as Tom would say. But nobody felt they could stop him, because they just didn’t have the authority. That’s one thing. Then there’s Rich Moffat. Probably some of you know who Rich is, but for those of you who don’t, he’s probably the Zone’s only practicing alcoholic. He’s a half-decent guy when he’s sober, but when he’s drunk, he’s just not accountable for what he does, and he spends a lot of time drunk. Three or four days ago he got a load on and decided he was going to break every plate-glass window on Arapahoe. Now I talked to him about that after he sobered off a little—in my way of talking, you know, by note—and he was pretty ashamed. He pointed back the way he come and said, ‘Look at that. Look at what I done. Glass all over the sidewalk! What if some kid gets hurt in that? I’ll be to blame.’”
   Ralph: “I got no sympathy. None.”
   Fran: “Come on, Ralph. Everybody knows alcoholism’s a disease.”
   Ralph: “Disease, my ass. It’s getting sloppo, that’s what it is.”
   Stu: “And you’re both out of order. Come on, you two, pipe down.”
   Ralph: “Sorry, Stu. I’ll stick to reading Nick’s letter here.”
   Fran: “And I’ll be quiet for at least two minutes, Mr. Chairman. I promise.”
   Nick: “To make a long story short, I found Rich a broom and he swept up most of the mess he’d made. Did a pretty good job, too. But he was right to ask why someone didn’t stop him. In the old days a guy like Rich couldn’t get anywhere near all the high-tension booze he wanted; guys like Rich were just winos. But now there are incredible amounts of booze just waiting around to be lifted off the shelves. And furthermore, I really do believe that Rich never should have been allowed to get past his second window, but he broke every window on the south side of the street for three blocks. He finally stopped because he got tired. And here is one more example: We had a case where a man whose name I won’t mention found out that his woman, who I also won’t name, was spending her afternoon sack-time with a third party. I guess we all know who I’m talking about.”
   Sue: “Yeah, I guess we do. Big man with his fists.”
   Nick: “Anyway, the man in question beat up the third party and then the woman in the case. Now I don’t think it matters to any of us here who was right and who was wrong—”
   Glen: “You are mistaken there, Nick.”
   Stu: “Let the man finish, Glen.”
   Glen: “I’m going to, but it’s a point I want to come back to.”
   Stu: “Fine. Go ahead, Ralph.”
   Ralph: “Yep—getting toward the end now.”
   Nick: “—because what matters is that the man in question committed a felony crime, assault and battery, and he is walking around free. Of the three cases, this one worries ordinary citizens the most. We’ve got a melting-pot society, a real hodgepodge, and there are going to be all kinds of conflicts and abrasions. I don’t think any of us want a frontier society here in Boulder. Think of the situation we’d have if the man in question had gotten a .45 out of a pawnshop and had shot them both dead instead of just beating them up. Then we’d have a murderer walking around free.”
   Sue: “My God, Nicky, what’s that? The thought for the day?”
   Larry: “Yeah, it’s ugly, but he’s right. There’s an old saying, Navy, I think, that goes, ‘Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.’”
   Nick: “Stu’s already our public and private moderator, which means people already see him as an authority figure. And personally, I think Stu is a good man.”
   Stu: “Thanks for the kind words, Nick. I guess you never noticed that I wear elevator shoes. Seriously, though—I’ll accept the nomination, if that’s what you want. I don’t really want the goddam job—from what I’ve seen down in Texas, police work is mostly cleaning puke off your shirt when guys like Rich Moffat barf on you, or scraping dummies like that Gehringer boy off the roads. All I ask is that when we put it up to the public meeting, we set the same one-year time limit on it that we’re setting on our committee jobs. And I intend to make it clear that I’m stepping down at the end of that year. If that’s acceptable, okay.”
   Glen: “I think I can speak for all of us in saying that it is. I want to thank Nick for his motion, and get it on the record that I think it’s a stroke of genius. And I second the motion.”
   Stu: “Okay, the motion is on the floor. Any discussion?”
   Fran: “Yes, there’s some discussion. I have a question. What if somebody blows your head off?”
   Stu: “I don’t think—”
   Fran: “No, you don’t think. You don’t think so. Well, what’s Nick going to tell me if what you all think is wrong? ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Fran?’ Is that what he’s going to say? ‘Your man is down in the county courthouse with a bullet hole in his head and I guess we made a mistake?’ Jesus Mary and Joseph, I’m going to have a baby and you people want him to be Pat Garrett!”

There was another ten minutes of discussion, most of which is irrelevant; and Fran, your ob’nt recording secretary, had herself a good cry and then got herself under control. The vote on nominating Stu to be Free Zone Marshal was 6–1, and this time Fran would not change her vote. Glen asked to be recognized for one last thing before we closed the meeting.
   Glen: “This is middle-think again, not a motion, nothing to vote on, but something we ought to chew over. Going back to Nick’s third example of law-and-order problems. He described the case and finished by saying we didn’t have to be concerned with who was right and who was wrong. I think he was mistaken. I believe Stu is one of the fairest men I’ve ever met. But law enforcement without a court system isn’t justice. It’s just vigilantism, rule by the fist. Now suppose that fellow we all know had gotten a .45 and killed his woman and her lover. And further suppose that Stu, as our marshal, went out and collared him and put him in the calaboose. Then what? How long do we keep him there? Legally, we couldn’t keep him at all, at least according to the Constitution we adopted at our meeting last night, because under that document a man’s innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now, as a matter of fact, we all know we’d keep him locked up. We wouldn’t feel safe with him walking the streets! So we’d do it even though it would be patently unconstitutional, because when safety and constitutionality are at swords’ points, safety must win out. But it behooves us to make safety and constitutionality synonymous as quickly as we can. We need to think about a court system.”
   Fran: “That’s very interesting, and I agree that it’s something we ought to think about, but right now I’m going to move that we adjourn. It’s late, and I’m very tired.”
   Ralph: “Boy, I second that motion. Let’s talk about courts next time. My head’s got so much in it right now that it’s going round and round. This reinventing the country is a lot tougher than it looked at first.”
   Larry: “Amen.”
   Stu: “There’s a motion to adjourn on the floor. Do you like it, people?”
   The motion to adjourn was voted, 7–0.
   Frances Goldsmith, Secretary
   “Why are you stopping?” Fran asked as Stu slowly biked over to the curb and put his feet down. “It’s a block further up.” Her eyes were still red from her burst of tears during the meeting, and Stu thought he had never seen her looking so tired.
   “This marshal thing—” he began.
   “Stu, I don’t want to talk about it.”
   “Somebody has to do it, honey. And Nick was right. I’m the logical choice.”
   “Fuck logic. What about me and the baby? Do you see no logic in us, Stu?”
   “I ought to know what you want for the baby,” he said softly. “Haven’t you told me enough times? You want him brought into a world that isn’t totally crazy. You want things safe for him—or her. I want that, too. But I wasn’t going to say that in front of the rest. It’s between you and me. You and the baby are the two main reasons I said okay.”
   “I know that,” she said in a low, choked voice.
   He put his fingers under her chin and tilted her face up. He smiled at her and she made an effort to smile back. It was a weary smile, and tears were coursing down her cheeks, but it was better than no smile at all.
   “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said.
   She was shaking her head back and forth slowly, and some of her tears flew off into the warm summer night.
   “I don’t think so,” she said. “No, I really don’t think it is.”
   She lay awake long into the night, thinking that warmth can only come from a burning—Prometheus got his eyes pecked out on that one—and that love always comes due in blood.
   And a queer certainty stole over her, as numbing as some creeping anesthesia, that they would finish by wading in blood. The thought made her place her hands protectively over her belly, and she found herself thinking for the first time in weeks of her dream: the dark man with his grin… and his twisted coathanger.
   As well as hunting for Mother Abagail with a picked group of volunteers in his spare time, Harold Lauder was on the Burial Committee, and on August 21 he spent the day in the back of a dump truck with five other men, all of them wearing boots and protective clothing and heavy-duty Playtex rubber gloves. The head of the Burial Committee, Chad Norris, was out at what he referred to, with an almost grisly calm, as Burial Site #1. It was ten miles southwest of Boulder in an area that had once been stripmined for coal. The site lay as bleak and barren as the mountains of the moon under the burning August sun. Chad had accepted the post reluctantly because he had once been an undertaker’s assistant in Morristown, New Jersey.
   “There’s no undertaking about this,” he had said this morning at the Greyhound Bus Terminal between Arapahoe and Walnut, which was the Burial Committee’s base of operations. He lit a Winston with a wooden match and grinned at the twenty men sitting around. “That is, it’s an undertaking but not an undertaking undertaking, if you get my meaning.”
   There were a few strained smiles, Harold’s largest among them. His belly had been rumbling constantly because he hadn’t dared eat breakfast. He hadn’t been sure he could keep it down, considering the nature of the work. He could have stuck with finding Mother Abagail and no one would have murmured a word of protest, even though it had to be obvious to every thinking man in the Zone (if there were any thinking men in the Free Zone besides himself—a debatable question) that looking for her with fifteen men was an exercise in comic relief when you considered the thousands of square miles of empty forest and plain around Boulder. And, of course, she might never have left Boulder, none of them seemed to have thought of that (which didn’t surprise Harold at all). She could be set up in a house just about anywhere beyond the center of town and they’d still never find her without a house-to-house search. Redman and Andros hadn’t raised a word of protest between them when Harold suggested that the Search Committee be a weekend and evening sort of thing, which told Harold that they accepted it as a closed case, too.
   He could have stuck with it, but who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn’t bring yourself to do.
   “It’s going to be like burying cordwood,” Chad told them. “If you can keep it on that level in your mind, you’ll be okay. Some of you may have to vomit here at the start. There’s no shame in that; just try to go someplace where the rest won’t have to look at you do it. Once you’ve puked, you’ll find it easier to think that way: cordwood. Nothing but cordwood.”
   The men were eyeing each other uncomfortably.
   Chad broke them up into three six-man crews. He and the two odd men out went to prepare a place for those who were brought. Each of the three crews were given a specific area of town to work. Harold’s truck had spent the day in the Table Mesa area, working their way slowly west from the Denver-Boulder Turnpike exit ramp. Up Martin Drive to the Broadway intersection. Down Thirty-ninth Street and then back up Fortieth, suburban houses in a tract area now about thirty years old, dating back to the start of Boulder’s population boom, houses with one floor aboveground and a second below.
   Chad had provided gas masks from the local National Guard armory, but they didn’t have to use them until after lunch (lunch? what lunch? Harold’s consisted of a can of Berry’s apple pie filling; it was all he could bring himself to eat), when they entered the Church of Latter-Day Saints on lower Table Mesa Drive. They had come here, filled with the plague, and they had died there, over seventy of them, and the stink was enormous.
   “Cordwood,” one of Harold’s mates had said in a high, revolted, laughing voice, and Harold had turned and stumbled out past him. He went around the corner of the handsome brick building that had once been a polling place in election years and up came the Berry’s apple pie filling and he discovered that Norris had been right: He really felt better without it.
   It took them two trips and most of the afternoon to empty the church. Twenty men, Harold thought, to get rid of all the corpses in Boulder. It’s almost funny. A goodly number of Boulder’s previous population had run like rabbits because of the Air Testing Center scare, but still … Harold supposed that, as the Burial Committee grew with the population, it was just barely possible that they might get most of the bodies in the ground by the first heavy snowfall (not that he himself expected to be around by then), and most of the people would never know how real the danger of some new epidemic—one they weren’t immune to—had been.
   The Free Zone Committee was full of bright ideas, he thought with contempt. The committee would be just fine… as long as they had good old Harold Lauder to make sure their shoelaces were tied, of course. Good old Harold’s good enough for that, but not quite good enough to serve on their fucking Permanent Committee. Heavens, no. He had never been quite good enough, not even quite good enough to get a date for the Class Dance at Ogunquit High School, even with a scag. Good God, no, not Harold. Let’s remember, folks, when we get right down to the proverbial place where the ursine mammal evacuated his bowels in the buckwheat, that this is no analytical, logical matter, not even a matter of common sense. When we get right down to it, what we end up with is a frigging beauty contest.
   Well, somebody remembers. Somebody is keeping score, kids. And the name of that someone—could we have a drum-roll, please maestro?—Harold Emery Lauder.
   So he came back into the church, wiping his mouth and grinning as best he could, nodding that he was ready to go on. Someone clapped him on the back and Harold’s grin widened and he thought: Someday you’re going to lose your hand for that, shitheap.
   They made their last run at 4:15 P.M., the body of the dump truck filled with the last of the Latter-Day corpses. In town the truck had to weave laboriously in and out of stalled traffic, but on Colorado 119, three tow trucks had been out all day, latching on to stalled cars and depositing them into the ditches on both sides of the road. They lay there like the overturned toys of some giant-child.
   At the burial site, the other two orange trucks were already parked. Men stood around with their rubber gloves off, their fingers white and pruney at the tips from a day of sweating inside rubber. They smoked and talked desultorily. Most of them were very pale.
   Norris and his two helpers had it down to a science now. They shook out a huge piece of plastic sheeting on the rocky ground. Norman Kellogg, the Louisianian who was driving Harold’s truck, backed up to the edge of the plastic. The tailgate slammed down and the first bodies fell out onto the plastic crawsheet like partially stiffened ragdolls. Harold wanted to turn away but was afraid that the others might construe it as weakness. He did not mind watching them fall out too much; it was the sound that got him. The sound they made when they hit what was going to become their shroud.
   The note of the dumper’s engine deepened and there was a hydraulic whine as the truck’s body began to go up. Now the bodies tumbled out in a grotesque human rain. Harold felt an instant of pity, a feeling so deep it was an ache. Cordwood, he thought. How right he was. That’s all that’s left. Just… cordwood.
   “Ho! ” Chad Norris shouted, and Kellogg pulled the dump truck ahead and shut it off. Chad and his helpers stepped onto the plastic carrying rakes and now Harold did turn away, pretending to scan the sky for rain, and he was not alone—but he heard a sound that would haunt him in his dreams, and that was the sound of change falling from the pockets of the dead men and women as Chad and his helpers worked with their rakes, spreading the corpses evenly. The coins falling on the plastic made a sound that reminded Harold absurdly of tiddledywinks. The sickly-sweet stench of corruption drifted up in the warm air.
   When he looked back, the three of them were pulling the edges of the plastic shroud together, grunting with the strain, arms bulging. A few of the other men, Harold among them, pitched in. Chad Norris produced a huge industrial stapling gun. Twenty minutes later that part of the job was done, and the plastic lay on the ground like a giant gelatin capsule. Norris climbed into the cab of a bright yellow bulldozer and keyed the engine. The scarred blade thudded down. The dozer rolled forward.
   A man named Weizak, also on Harold’s truck, walked away from the scene with the jerky steps of a badly controlled puppet. A cigarette jittered between his fingers. “Man, I can’t watch that,” he said as he passed Harold. “It’s really kind of funny. I never knew I was Jewish until today.”
   The bulldozer shoved and rolled the large plastic package into a long rectangular cut in the ground. Chad backed away, shut down, climbed off. Motioning the men to gather around, he walked over to one of the Public Works trucks and put one booted foot up on the running board.
   “No football cheers,” he said, “but you did damned good. We put away close to a thousand units today, I guess.”
   Units, Harold thought.
   “I know this kind of work takes something out of a man. Committee’s promising us another two men before the end of the week, but I know that don’t change the way you guys feel—or the way I feel, for that matter. All I’m saying is that if you’ve had enough, don’t feel like you can take another day of it, you don’t have to worry about avoiding me on the street. But if you feel like you can’t cut it, its awful-damn important that you find someone to take your place tomorrow. So far as I’m concerned, this is the most important job in the Zone. ‘It isn’t too bad now, but if we’ve still got twenty thousand corpses in Boulder next month when it gets to be wet weather, people are going to get sick. If you feel like you can make it, I’ll see you tomorrow morning at the bus station.”
   “I’ll be there,” someone said.
   “Me too,” Norman Kellogg said. “After a six-hour bath tonight.” There was laughter.
   “Count me in,” Weizak chimed in.
   “Me too,” Harold said quietly.
   “It’s a dirty job,” Norris said in a low, emotional voice. “You’re good men. I doubt if the rest of them will ever know just how good.”
   Harold felt a sense of drawing-together, a camaraderie, and he fought against it, suddenly afraid. This was no part of the plan.
   “See you tomorrow, Hawk,” Weizak said, and squeezed his shoulder.
   Harold’s grin was startled and defensive. Hawk? What kind of joke was that? A bad one, of course. Cheap sarcasm. Calling fat, pimply Harold Lauder Hawk. He felt the old black hate rise, directed at Weizak this time, and then it subsided in sudden confusion. He wasn’t fat anymore. He couldn’t even properly be called stout. His pimples had vanished over the last seven weeks. Weizak didn’t know he had once been a school joke. Weizak didn’t know that Harold’s father had once asked him if he was a homosexual. Weizak didn’t know that Harold had been his popular sister’s cross to bear. And if he had known, Weizak probably wouldn’t have given a sweet shit.
   Harold climbed into the back of one of the trucks, his mind churning helplessly. All of a sudden the old grudges, the old hurts, and the unpaid debts seemed as worthless as the paper money choking all the cash registers of America.
   Could that be true? Could it possibly be true? He felt panicked, alone, scared. No, he decided at last. It couldn’t possibly be true. Because, consider. If you were strong-willed enough to be able to resist the low opinions of others, when they thought you were a queer, or an embarrassment, or just a plain old bag of shit, then you had to be strong-willed enough to resist…
   Resist what?
   Their good opinion of you?
   Wasn’t that kind of logic… well, that kind of logic was lunacy, wasn’t it?
   An old quote surfaced in his troubled mind, some general’s defense of interning Japanese-Americans during World War II. It had been pointed out to this general that no acts of sabotage had occurred on the West Coast, where the naturalized Japanese were most heavily concentrated. The general’s reply had been: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place is an ominous development.”
   Was that him?
   Was it?
   Their truck pulled into the bus station parking lot. Harold jumped over the side, reflecting that even his coordination had improved a thousand percent, either from the weight he had lost, his almost constant exercise, or both.
   The thought came to him again, stubborn, refusing to be buried: I could be an asset to this community.
   But they had shut him out.
   That doesn’t matter. I’ve got the brains to pick the lock on the door they slammed in my face. And I believe I’ve found enough guts to open it once it’s unlocked.
   But—
   Stop it! Stop it! You might as well be wearing handcuffs and legchains with that one word stamped all over them. But! But! But! Can’t you stop it, Harold? Can’t you for Christ’s sake climb down off your high fucking horse?
   “Hey, man, you okay?”
   Harold jumped. It was Norris, coming out of the dispatcher’s office, which he had taken over. He looked tired.
   “Me? I’m fine. I was just thinking.”
   “Well, you go right along. Seems like every time you do that you coin money for this joint.”
   Harold shook his head. “Not true.”
   “No?” Chad let it go. “Can I drop you somewhere?”
   “Huh-uh. I’ve got my chopper.”
   “You wanna know something, Hawk? I think most of these guys are really going to come back tomorrow.”
   “Yes, so do I.” Harold walked over to his motorcycle and climbed on. He found himself savoring his new nickname, rather against his will.
   Norris shook his head. “I never would have believed it. I figured that once they actually saw what the job was, they’d think of a hundred other things they had to do.”
   “I’ll tell you what I think,” Harold said. “I think it’s easier to do a dirty job for yourself than it is to do for somebody else. Some of these guys, it’s the first time they ever really worked for themselves in their whole lives.”
   “Yeah, there’s something in that, I guess. I’ll see you tomorrow Hawk.”
   “Eight,” Harold confirmed, and drove out Arapahoe to Broadway. To his right a crew comprised mostly of women was at work with a wrecker and a derrick righting a tractor-trailer truck that had jackknifed, partially blocking the street. They had drawn a respectable little crowd. This place is building up, Harold thought. I don’t recognize half of those people.
   He went on out toward hit house, his mind worrying and gnawing at the problem he thought he had solved long ago. When he got home, there was a small white Vespa parked at the curb. And a woman sitting on his front step.
   She stood up as Harold came up the walk, and put her hand out. She was one of the most striking women Harold had ever seen—he had seen her before, of course, but rarely this close up.
   “I’m Nadine Cross,” she said. Her voice was low, close to being husky. Her grip was firm and cool. Harold’s eyes dropped involuntarily to her body for a moment, a habit he knew girls hated, but one he seemed powerless to stop. This one did not seem to mind. She was wearing a pair of light cotton twill slacks that clung to her long legs and a sleeveless blouse of some light blue silky material. No bra under it, either. How old was she? Thirty? Thirty-five? Younger, maybe. She was going prematurely gray.
   All over? the endlessly horny (and endlessly virginal, seemingly) part of his mind inquired, and his heart beat a little faster.
   “Harold Lauder,” he said, smiling. “You came in with Larry Underwood’s party, didn’t you?”
   “Yes, that’s right.”
   “Followed Stu and Frannie and me across the Big Empty, I understand. Larry came to see me last week, brought me a bottle of wine and some candy bars.” His words had a tinkling, false sound to them, and he was suddenly sure that she knew he had been cataloging her, undressing her in his mind. He fought an urge to lick his lips and won… at least temporarily. “He’s a helluva nice guy.”
   “Larry?” She laughed a little, a strange and somehow cryptic sound. “Yes, Larry’s a prince.”

 They gazed at each other for a moment, and Harold had never been looked at by a woman whose eyes were so frank and speculative. He was again aware of his excitement, and a warm nervousness in his belly.
   “Well,” he said. “What can I do for you this afternoon, Miss Cross?”
   “You could call me Nadine, for a start. And you could invite me to stay for supper. That would get us a little further along.”
   That sense of nervous excitement began to spread. “Nadine, would you like to stay for supper?”
   “Very much,” she said, and smiled. When she laid her hand on his forearm, he felt a tingle like a low-grade electric shock. Her eyes never left his. “Thank you.”
   He fumbled his latchkey into its slot, thinking: Now she’ll ask me why I lock my door and I’ll mumble and stumble around, looking for an answer, and seem like a fool.
   But Nadine never asked.
   He didn’t cook dinner; she did.
   Harold had gotten to the point where he considered it impossible to get even a half-decent meal out of cans, but Nadine managed nicely. Suddenly aware of and appalled by what he had spent his day doing, he asked if she could entertain herself for twenty minutes (and she was probably here on some very mundane piece of business, he cautioned himself desperately) while he cleaned up.
   When he came back—having splurged and taken a two-bucket shower—she was bustling around in the kitchen. Water was boiling merrily away on the bottled gas stove. As he came into the kitchen, she dumped half a cup of elbow macaroni into the pot. Something mellow was being simmered in a skillet on the other burner; he got a combined aroma of French onion soup, red wine, and mushrooms. His stomach rumbled. The day’s grisly work had suddenly lost its power over his appetite.
   “It smells fantastic,” he said. “You shouldn’t have, but I’m not complaining.”
   “It’s a Stroganoff casserole,” she said, turning to smile at him. “Strictly makeshift, I’m afraid. Tinned beef is not one of the recommended ingredients when they make this dish in the world’s finer restaurants, but—” She shrugged to indicate the limitations they all labored under.
   “It’s nice of you to do it.”
   “Not at all.” She gave him that speculative glance again, and turned halfway toward him, the silky material of her blouse pulled taut against her left breast, molding it sweetly. He felt a hot flush creeping up his neck and willed himself not to have an erection. He suspected that his willpower would not be equal to the task. He suspected, in fact, that it wouldn’t even be close. “We’re going to be very good friends,” she said.
   “We… are?”
   “Yes.” She turned back to the stove, seeming to close the subject, leaving Harold in a thicket of possibilities.
   After that, their conversation consisted strictly of trivialities… Free Zone gossip, for the most part. Of this there was already a rich supply. Once, halfway through the meal, he tried again to ask her what had brought her here, but she only smiled and shook her head. “I like to see a man eat.”
   For a moment Harold thought she must be talking about someone else and then realized she meant him. And he did eat; he had three helpings of the Stroganoff, and the tinned meat did not detract from the recipe at all, in Harold’s opinion. The conversation seemed to make itself, leaving him free to quiet the lion in his belly, and to look at her.
   Striking, had he thought? She was beautiful. Ripe and beautiful. Her hair, which she had pulled back into a casual horsetail in order to cook more easily, was twisted with strands of pure white, not gray as he had first thought. Her eyes were grave and dark, and when they focused unhesitatingly on his, Harold felt giddy. Her voice was low and confidential. The sound of it began to affect him in a way that was both uncomfortable and almost excruciatingly pleasant.
   When the meal was done, he started to get up but she beat him to it. “Coffee or tea?”
   “Really, I could—”
   “You could, but you won’t. Coffee, tea… or me?” She smiled then, not the smile of someone who has offered a remark of minor risquéness (“risky talk,” as his dear old mum would have said, her mouth set in a disapproving line), but a slow little smile, rich as the dollop of cream on top of a gooey dessert. And again the speculative look.
   His brain spinning, Harold replied with insane casualness: “The latter two,” and was only able to contain a burst of adolescent giggles with a mighty effort.
   “Well, we’ll start with tea for two,” Nadine said, and went to the stove.
   Hot blood crashed into Harold’s head the instant her back was turned, undoubtedly turning his face as purple as a turnip. Some Mr. Suave you are! he hectored himself feverishly. You misinterpreted a perfectly innocent remark like the goddam fool that you are, and you’ve probably spoiled a very nice occasion. And it serves you right! It serves you damned well right!
   By the time she brought the steaming mugs of tea back to the table, Harold’s violent flush had faded somewhat and he had himself under control. Giddiness had turned just as abruptly to despair, and he felt (not for the first time) that his body and mind had been stuffed willy-nilly into the car of a huge roller-coaster made of pure emotion. He hated it but was powerless to get off the ride.
   If she was interested in me at all, he thought (and God knows why she would be, he added gloomily to himself), I have undoubtedly put paid to that by exposing the full range of my sophomoric wit.
   Well, he had done things like that before, and he supposed he could live with the knowledge that he had done it again.
   She looked at him over the rim of her teacup with those disconcertingly frank eyes and smiled again, and the shred of equanimity he had been able to muster up promptly vanished.
   “Can I help you with something?” he asked. It sounded like some lumbering double-entendre, but he had to say something, because she must have had some purpose in coming here. He felt his own protective smile faltering on his lips in his confusion.
   “Yes,” she said, and put her teacup down decisively. “Yes, you can. Maybe we can help each other. Could you come into the living room?”
   “Sure.” His hand was shaking; when he set his cup down and rose, some of it spilled. As he followed her into the living room, he noticed how smoothly her slacks (which aren’t very slack at all, his mind gibbered) clung to her buttocks. It was the panty line that broke up the smooth look of most women’s slacks, he had read that somewhere, maybe in one of the magazines he had kept in the back of his bedroom closet behind the shoeboxes, and the magazine had gone on to say that if a woman really wanted that smooth and seamless look, she should wear a G-string or no panties at all.
   He swallowed; tried to, at least. There seemed to be a huge blockage of some kind in his throat.
   The living room was dim, lit only by the glow that filtered through the drawn shades. It was past six-thirty, and outside the evening was drawing toward dusk. Harold went to one of the windows to run the shade up and let more light in, when she put her hand on his arm. He turned toward her, his mouth dry.
   “No. I like them down. It gives us privacy.”
   “Privacy,” Harold croaked. His voice was that, of an age-rusted parrot.
   “So I can do this,” she said, and stepped lightly into his arms.
   Her body was pressed frankly and completely against him, the first time in his life anything of the sort had happened, and his amazement was total. He could feel the soft and individual press of each breast through his white cotton shirt and her silky blue one. Her belly, firm but vulnerable, against his, not shying away from the feel of his erection. There was a sweet smell to her, perfume maybe, or maybe just her own smell, that seemed like a told secret that bursts, revelative, on the listener. His hands found her hair and plunged into it.
   At last the kiss broke but she didn’t move away. Her body remained against his like soft fire. She was perhaps three inches shorter, and her face was turned up to his. It occurred to him in a dim sort of way that it was one of the most amusing ironies of his life: When love—or a reasonable facsimile—had finally found him, it was as if he had slipped sideways into the pages of a love story in a glossy women’s magazine. The authors of such stories, he had once claimed in an unacknowledged letter to Redbook, were one of the few convincing arguments in favor of enforced eugenics.
   But now her face was turned up to his, her lips were moist and half-parted, her eyes were bright and almost… almost… yes, almost starry. The only detail not strictly compatible with a Redbook ’s-eye view of life was his hard-on, which was truly amazing.
   “Now,” she said. “On the couch.”
   Somehow they got there, and then they were tangled up there, and her hair had come loose and flowed over her shoulders; her perfume seemed everywhere. His hands were on her breasts and she was not minding; in fact she was twisting and squirming around to allow his hands freer access. He did not caress her; in his frantic need what he did was plunder her.
   “You’re a virgin,” Nadine said. No question there… and it was easier not to have to lie. He nodded.
   “Then we do this first. Next time it will be slower. Better.”
   She unbuttoned his jeans and they snapped open to the zipper-tab of his fly. She traced a light forefinger across his belly just below the navel. Harold’s flesh shuddered and jumped at her touch.
   “Nadine—”
   “Shhh!” Her face was hidden in the fall of her hair, making it impossible to read her expression.
   His fly was pulled down and the Ridiculous Thing, made even more ridiculous by the white cotton in which it was swaddled (thank God he had changed clothes after his shower), popped out like Jack from his box. The Ridiculous Thing was unaware of its own comical appearance, for its business was deadly serious. The business of virgins is always deadly serious—not pleasure but experience.
   “My blouse—”
   “Can I—?”
   “Yes, that’s what I want. And then I’ll take care of you.”
   Take care of you. The words echoed down into his mind like stones flung into a well, and then he was sucking greedily at her breast, tasting the salt and sweet of her.
   She drew in breath. “Harold, that’s lovely.”
   Take care of you, the words clanged and banged in his mind.
   Her hands slipped inside the waistband of his underpants and his jeans slid down to his ankles in a meaningless jingle of keys.
   “Raise up,” she whispered, and he did.
   It took less than a minute. He cried aloud with the strength of his climax, unable to help himself. It was as if someone had touched a match to a whole network of nerves just under his skin, nerves that plunged deep to form the living webwork of his groin. He could understand why so many of the writers made that connection between orgasm and death.
   Then he lay back in the dimness, his head against the sofa, his chest heaving, his mouth open. He was afraid to look down. He felt that quarts of semen must have splattered all over everything.
   Young feller, we’ve struck oil!
   He looked at her shamefacedly, embarrassed at the hair-trigger way he had gone off. But she was only smiling at him with those calm, dark eyes that seemed to know everything, the eyes of a very young girl in a Victorian painting. A girl who knows too much, perhaps, about her father.
   “I’m sorry,” he muttered.
   “Why? For what?” Her eyes never left his face.
   “You didn’t get much out of that.”
   “Au contraire, I got a great deal of satisfaction.” But he didn’t think that was exactly what he had meant. Before he had a chance to consider this, she went on: “You’re young. We can go as many times as you want to.”
   He looked at her without speaking, unable to speak.
   “But you must know one thing.” She put a hand lightly on him. “What you told me about being a virgin? Well, I am, too.”
   “You—” His expression of astonishment must have been comical, because she threw back her head and laughed.
   “Is there no room for virginity in your philosophy, Horatio?”
   “No… yes… but—”
   “I’m a virgin. And I’m going to stay that way. Because it’s for someone else to… to make me not a virgin anymore.”
   “Who?”
   “You know who.”
   He stared at her, suddenly cold all over. She looked back calmly.
   “Him? ”
   She half turned away and nodded.
   “But I can show you things,” she said, still not looking at him. “We can do things. Things you’ve never even… no, I take that back. Maybe you have dreamed of them, but you never dreamed you’d do them. We can play. We can make ourselves drunk with it. We can wallow in it. We can…” She trailed off, and then did look at him, a look so sly and sensual that he felt himself stirring again. “We can do anything—everything —but that one little thing. And that one thing really isn’t so important, is it?”
   Images whirled giddily in his mind. Silk scarves… boots… leather… rubber. Oh Jesus. Fantasies of a Schoolboy. A weird kind of sexual solitaire. But it was all a kind of dream, wasn’t it? A fantasy begotten of fantasy, child of a dark dream. He wanted all those things, wanted her, but he also wanted more.
   The question was, how much would he settle for?
   “You can tell me everything,” she said. “I’ll be your mother, or your sister, or your whore, or your slave. All you have to do is tell me, Harold.”
   How that echoed in his mind! How that intoxicated him!
   He opened his mouth, and the voice that emerged was as tuneless as the chiming of a cracked bell. “But for a price. Isn’t that right? For a price. Because nothing is for free. Not even now, when everything is lying around, waiting to be picked up.”
   “I want what you want,” she said. “I know what’s in your heart.”
   “No one knows that.”
   “What’s in your heart is in your ledger. I could read it there—I know where it is—but I don’t need to.”
   He started and looked at her with a wild guilt.
   “It used to be under that loose stone there,” she said, pointing to the hearth, “but you moved it. Now it’s behind the insulation in the attic.”
   “How do you know that? How do you know? ”
   “I know because he told me. He… you could say that he wrote me a letter. And what’s more important, he told me about you, Harold. How the cowboy took your woman and then kept you off the Free Zone Committee. He wants us to be together, Harold. And he’s generous. From now until when we leave here, it’s recess for you and me.”
   She touched him and smiled.
   “From now until then it’s playtime. Do you understand?”
   “I—”
   “No,” she answered, “you don’t. Not yet. But you will, Harold. You will.”
   Insanely, it came to his mind to tell her to call him Hawk.
   “And later, Nadine? What does he want later?”
   “What you want. And what I want. What you almost did to Redman on the first night you went out hunting for the old woman… but on a much larger scale. And when that’s done, we can go to him, Harold. We can be with him. We can stay with him.” Her eyes slipped half-closed in a kind of rapture. Perhaps paradoxically, the fact that she loved the other but would give herself to him—might actually enjoy it—brought his desire up again, hot and close.
   “What if I say no?” His lips felt cold, ashy.
   She shrugged, and the movement made her breasts sway prettily. “Life will go on, won’t it, Harold? I’ll try to find some way of doing the thing I have to do. You’ll go on. Sooner or later you’ll find a girl who will do that… one little thing for you. But that one little thing is very tiresome after a while. Very tiresome.”
   “How would you know?” he asked, and grinned crookedly at her.
   “I know because sex is life in small, and life is tiresome—time spent in a variety of waiting rooms. You might have your little glories here, Harold, but to what end? On the whole it will be a humdrum, slipping-down life, and you’ll always remember me with my shirt off, and you’ll always wonder what I would have looked like with everything off. You’ll wonder what it would have been like to hear me talking dirty to you… or to have me spill honey all over your… body… and then lick it off… and you’ll wonder—”
   “Stop it,” he said. He was trembling all over.
   But she wouldn’t.
   “I think you’ll also wonder what it would have been like on his side of the world,” she said. “That more than anything and everything else, maybe.”
   “I—”
   “Decide, Harold. Do I put my shirt back on or take everything else off?”
   How long did he think? He didn’t know. Later, he wasn’t even sure he had struggled with the question. But when he spoke, the words tasted like death in his mouth: “In the bedroom. Let’s go in the bedroom.”
   She smiled at him, such a smile of triumph and sensual promise that he shuddered from it, and his own eager response to it.
   She took his hand.
   And Harold Lauder succumbed to his destiny.

Chapter 55

   The Judge’s house overlooked a cemetery.

   He and Larry sat on the back porch after dinner, smoking Roi-Tan cigars and watching sunset fade to pale orange around the mountains.
   “When I was a boy,” the Judge said, “we lived within walking distance of the finest cemetery in Illinois. Its name was Mount Hope. Every night after supper, my father, who was then in his early sixties, would take a walk. Sometimes I would walk with him. And if the walk took us past this perfectly maintained necropolis, he would say, ‘What do you think, Teddy? Is there any hope?’ And I would answer, ‘There’s Mount Hope,’ and each time he’d roar with laughter as if it had been the first time. I sometimes think we walked past that boneyard just so he could share that joke with me. He was a wealthy man, but it was the funniest joke he seemed to know.”
   The Judge smoked, his chin low, his shoulders hunched high.
   “He died in 1937, when I was still in my teens,” he said. “I have missed him ever since. A boy does not need a father unless he is a good father, but a good father is indispensable. No hope but Mount Hope. How he enjoyed that! He was seventy-eight years old when he passed on. He died like a king, Larry. He was seated upon the throne in our home’s smallest room, with the newspaper in his lap.”
   Larry, not sure how to respond to this rather bizarre bit of nostalgia, said nothing.
   The Judge sighed. “This is going to be quite a little operation here before long,” he said. “If you can get the power on again, that is. If you can’t, people are going to get nervous and start heading south before the bad weather can come and hem them in.”
   “Ralph and Brad say it’s going to happen. I trust them.”
   “Then we’ll hope that your trust is well founded, won’t we? Maybe it is a good thing that the old woman is gone. Perhaps she knew it would be better that way. Maybe people should be free to judge for themselves what the lights in the sky are, and if one tree has a face or if the face was only a trick of the light and shadow. Do you understand me, Larry?”
   “No, sir,” Larry said truthfully. “I’m not sure I do.”
   “I wonder if we need to reinvent that whole tiresome business of gods and saviors and ever-afters before we reinvent the flushing toilet. That’s what I’m saying. I wonder if this is the right time for gods.”
   “Do you think she’s dead?”
   “She’s been gone six days now. The Search Committee hasn’t found a trace of her. Yes, I think she’s dead, but even now I am not completely sure. She was an amazing woman, completely outside any rational frame of reference. Perhaps one of the reasons I’m almost glad to have her gone is because I’m such a rational old curmudgeon. I like to creep through my daily round, to water my garden—did you see the way I’ve brought the begonias back? I’m quite proud of that—to read my books, to write my notes for my own book about the plague. I like to do all those things and then have a glass of wine at bedtime and fall asleep with an untroubled mind. Yes. None of us want to see portents and omens, no matter how much we like our ghost stories and the spooky films. None of us want to really see a Star in the East or a pillar of fire by night. We want peace and rationality and routine. If we have to see God in the black face of an old woman, it’s bound to remind us that there’s a devil for every god—and our devil may be closer than we like to think.”
   “That’s why I’m here,” Larry said awkwardly. He wished mightily that the Judge hadn’t just mentioned his garden, his books, his notes, and his glass of wine before bedtime. He had had a two-bit bright idea at a meeting of friends and had made a blithe suggestion. Now he wondered if there was any possible way of going on without sounding like a cruel and opportunistic halfwit.
   “I know why you’re here. I accept.”
   Larry jerked, making the wicker of his chair strain and whisper. “Who told you? This is supposed to be very quiet, Judge. If someone on the committee has been leaking, we’re in a hell of a jam.”
   The Judge raised one liverspotted hand, cutting him off. His eyes twinkled in his time-beaten face. “Softly, my boy—softly. No one on your committee has been leaking, not that I know of, and I keep my ear close to the ground. No, I whispered the secret to myself. Why did you come here tonight? Your face is an education in itself, Larry. I hope you don’t play poker. When I was talking about my few simple pleasures, I could see your face sag and droop… a rather comic stricken expression appeared on it—”
   “Is that so funny? What should I do, look happy about… about…”
   “Sending me west,” the Judge said quietly. “To spy out the land. Isn’t that about it?”
   “That’s exactly it.”
   “I wondered how long it would be before the idea would surface. It is tremendously important, of course, tremendously necessary if the Free Zone is to be assured its full chance to survive. We have no real idea what he’s up to over there. He might as well be on the dark side of the moon.”
   “If he’s really there.”
   “Oh, he’s there. In one form or another, he is there. Never doubt it.” He took a nail-clipper from his pants pocket and went to work on his fingernails, the little snipping sound punctuating his speech. “Tell me, has the committee discussed what might happen if we decided we liked it better over there? If we decided to stay?”
   Larry was flabbergasted by the idea. He told the Judge that, to the best of his knowledge, it hadn’t occurred to anybody.
   “I imagine he’s got the lights on,” the Judge said with deceptive idleness. “There’s an attraction in that, you know. Obviously this man Impening felt it.”
   “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Larry said grimly, and the Judge laughed long and heartily.
   When he sobered he said, “I’ll go tomorrow. In a Land-Rover, I think. North to Wyoming, and then west. Thank God I can still drive well enough! I’ll travel straight across Idaho and toward Northern California. It may take two weeks going, longer coming back. Coming back, there may be snow.”
   “Yes. We’ve discussed that possibility.”
   “And I’m old. The old are prone to attacks of heart trouble and stupidity. I presume you are sending backups?”
   “Well…”
   “No, you’re not supposed to talk about that. I withdraw the question.”
   “Look, you can refuse this,” Larry blurted. “No one is holding a gun to your hea—”
   “Are you trying to absolve yourself of your responsibility to me?” the Judge asked sharply.
   “Maybe. Maybe I am. Maybe I think your chances of getting back are one in ten and your chances of getting back with information we can actually base decisions on are one in twenty. Maybe I’m just trying to say in a nice way that I could have made a mistake. You could be too old.”
   “I am too old for adventure,” the Judge said, putting his clippers away, “but I hope I am not too old to do what I feel is right. There is an old woman out there someplace who has probably gone to a miserable death because she felt it was right. Prompted by religious mania, I have no doubt. But people who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad. I’ll go. I’ll be cold. My bowels will not work properly. I’ll be lonely. I’ll miss my begonias. But…” He looked up at Larry, and his eyes gleamed in the dark. “I’ll also be clever.”
   “I suppose you will,” Larry said, and felt the sting of tears at the corners of his eyes.
   “How is Lucy?” the Judge asked, apparently closing the subject of his departure.
   “Fine,” Larry said. “We’re both fine.”
   “No problems?”
   “No,” he said, and thought about Nadine. Something about her desperation the last time he had seen her still troubled him deeply. You’re my last chance, she had said. Strange talk, almost suicidal. And what help was there for her? Psychiatry? That was a laugh, when the best they could do for a GP was a horse doctor. Even Dial-A-Prayer was gone now.
   “It’s good that you are with Lucy,” the Judge said, “but you’re worried about the other woman, I suspect.”
   “Yes, I am.” What followed was extremely difficult to say, but having it out and confessed to another person made him feel much better. “I think she might be considering, well, suicide.” He rushed on: “It’s not just me, don’t get the idea I think any girl would kill herself just because she can’t have sexy old Larry Underwood. But the boy she was taking care of has come out of his shell, and I think she feels alone, with no one to depend on her.”
   “If her depression deepens into a chronic, cyclic thing, she may indeed kill herself,” the Judge said with chilling indifference.
   Larry looked at him, shocked.
   “But you can only be one man,” the Judge said. “Isn’t that true?”
   “Yes.”
   “And your choice is made?”
   “Yes.”
   “For good?”
   “Yes, it is.”
   “Then live with it,” the Judge said with great relish. “For God’s sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little applied over all your scruples is an absolute necessity! It is to the soul what a good sun-block is to the skin during the heat of the summer. You can only captain your own soul, and from time to time some smartass psychologist will question your ability to even do that. Grow up! Your Lucy is a fine woman. To take responsibility for more than her and your own soul is to ask for too much, and asking for too much is one of humanity’s more popular ways of courting disaster.”
   “I like talking to you,” Larry said, and was both startled and amused by the open ingenuousness of the comment.
   “Probably because I am telling you exactly what you want to hear,” the Judge said serenely. And then he added: “There are a great many ways to commit suicide, you know.”
   And before too much time had passed, Larry had occasion to recall that remark in bitter circumstances.
   At quarter past eight the next morning, Harold’s truck was leaving the Greyhound depot to go back to the Table Mesa area. Harold, Weizak, and two others were sitting in the back of the truck. Norman Kellogg and another man were in the cab. They were at the intersection of Arapahoe and Broadway when a brand-new Land-Rover drove slowly toward them.
   Weizak waved and shouted, “Where ya headed, Judge?”
   The Judge, looking rather comic in a woolen shirt and a vest, pulled over. “I believe I might go to Denver for the day,” he said blandly.
   “Will that thing get you there?” Weizak asked.
   “Oh, I believe so, if I steer clear of the main-traveled roads.”
   “Well, if you go by one of those X-rated bookstores, why don’t you bring back a trunkful?”
   This sally was greeted with a burst of laughter from everyone—the Judge included—but Harold. He looked sallow and haggard this morning, as if he had rested ill. In fact, he had hardly slept at all. Nadine had been as good as her word; he had fulfilled quite a few dreams the night before. Dreams of the damp variety, let us say. He was already looking forward to tonight, and Weizak’s sally about pornography was only good for a ghost of a smile now that he had had a little first-hand experience. Nadine had been sleeping when he left. Before they dropped off around two, she had told him she wanted to read his ledger. He had told her to go ahead if she wanted to. Perhaps he was putting himself at her mercy, but he was too confused to know for sure. But it was the best writing he had ever done in his life and the deciding factor was his want—no, his need. His need to have someone else read, experience, his good work.
   Now Kellogg was leaning out of the dump truck’s cab toward the Judge. “You be careful, Pop. Okay? There’s funny folks on the roads these days.”
   “Indeed there are,” the Judge said with a strange smile. “And indeed I will. A good day to you, gentlemen. And you too, Mr. Weizak.”
   That brought another burst of laughter, and they parted.
   The Judge did not head toward Denver. When he reached Route 36, he proceeded directly across it and out along Route 7. The morning sun was bright and mellow, and on this secondary route, there was not enough stalled traffic to block the road. The town of Brighton was worse; at one point he had to leave the highway and drive across the local high school football field to avoid a colossal traffic jam. He continued east until he reached I-25. A right turn here would have taken him into Denver. Instead he turned left—north—and nosed onto the feeder ramp. Halfway down he put the transmission in neutral and looked left again, west, to where the Rockies rose serenely into the blue sky with Boulder lying at their base.

He had told Larry he was too old for adventure, and God save him, but that had been a lie. His heart hadn’t beat with this quick rhythm for twenty years, the air had not tasted this sweet, colors had not seemed this bright. He would follow I-25 to Cheyenne and then move west toward whatever waited for him beyond the mountains. His skin, dry with age, nonetheless crawled and goosebumped a little at the thought. I-80 west, into Salt Lake City, then across Nevada to Reno. Then he would head north again, but that hardly mattered. Because somewhere between Salt Lake and Reno, maybe even sooner, he would be stopped, questioned, and probably sent somewhere else to be questioned again. And at some place or other, an invitation might be issued.
   It was not even impossible to think that he might meet the dark man himself.
   “Get moving, old man,” he said softly.
   He put the Rover in gear and crept down to the turnpike. There were three lanes northbound, all of them relatively clear. As he had guessed, traffic jams and multiple accidents back in Denver had effectively dammed the flow of traffic. The traffic was heavy on the other side of the median strip—the poor fools who had been headed south, blindly hoping that south would be better—but here the going was good. For a while at least.
   Judge Farris drove on, glad to be making his start. He had slept poorly last night. He would sleep better tonight, under the stars, his old body wrapped firmly in two sleeping bags. He wondered if he would ever see Boulder again and thought the chances were probably against it. And yet his excitement was very great.
   It was one of the finest days of his life.
   Early that afternoon, Nick, Ralph, and Stu biked out to North Boulder to a small stucco house where Tom Cullen lived by himself. Tom’s house had already become a landmark to Boulder’s “old” residents. Stan Nogotny said it was as if the Catholics, Baptists, and Seventh-Day Adventists had gotten together with the Democrats and the Moonies to create a religious-political Disneyland.
   The front lawn of the house was a weird tableau of statues. There were a dozen Virgin Marys, some of them apparently in the act of feeding flocks of pink plastic lawn flamingos. The largest of the flamingos was taller than Tom himself and anchored to the ground on a single leg that ended in a four-foot spike. There was a giant wishing well with a large plastic glow-in-the-dark Jesus standing in the ornamental bucket with His hands outstretched… apparently to bless the pink flamingos. Beside the wishing well was a large plaster cow who was apparently drinking from a birdbath.
   The front door screen slammed open and Tom came out to meet them, stripped to the waist. Seen from a distance, Nick thought, you would have supposed he was some fantastically virile writer or painter, with his bright blue eyes and that big reddish-blond beard. As he got closer you might have given up that idea in favor of one not quite so intellectual… maybe some sort of craftsman from the counterculture who had substituted kitsch for originality. And when he got very close, smiling and talking away a mile a minute, you realized for sure that a goodly chunk of Tom Cullen’s attic insulation was missing.
   Nick knew that one of the reasons he felt a strong sense of empathy for Tom was because he himself had been assumed to be mentally retarded, at first because his handicap had held him back from learning to read and write, later because people just assumed that someone who was both deaf and mute must be mentally retarded. He had heard all the slang terms at one time or another. A few bricks short the load. Soft upstairs. Running on three wheels. The guy’s got a hole in his head and his brains done leaked out. This guy ain’t traveling with a full seabag. He remembered the night he had stopped for a couple of beers in Zack’s, the ginmill on the outskirts of Shoyo—the night Ray Booth and his buddies had jumped him. The bartender had stood at the far end of the bar, leaning confidentially over it to speak to a customer. His hand had been half shielding his mouth, so Nick could only make out fragments of what he had been saying. He didn’t need to make out any more than that, however. Deaf-mute… probably retarded… almost all those guys’re retarded…
   But among all the ugly terms for mental retardation, there was one term that did fit Tom Cullen. It was one Nick had applied to him often, and with great compassion, in the silence of his own mind. The phrase was: The guys not playing with a full deck. That was what was wrong with Tom. That was what it came down to. And the pity in Tom’s case was that so few cards were missing, and low cards at that—a deuce of diamonds, a trey of clubs, something like that. But without those cards, you just couldn’t have a good game of anything. You couldn’t even win at solitaire with those cards missing from the deck.
   “Nicky!” Tom yelled. “Am I glad to see you! Laws, yes! Tom Cullen is so glad!” He threw his arms around Nick’s neck and gave him a hug. Nick felt his bad eye sting with tears behind the black eyepatch he still wore on bright days like this one. “And Ralph too! And that one. You’re… let’s see…”
   “I’m—” Stu began, but Nick silenced him with a brusque chopping gesture of his left hand. He had been practicing mnemonics with Tom, and it seemed to work. If you could associate something you knew with a name you wanted to remember, it often clicked home and stuck. Rudy had turned him on to that, too, all those long years ago.
   Now he took his pad from his pocket and jotted on it. Then he handed it to Ralph to read aloud.
   Frowning a little, Ralph did so: “What do you like to eat that comes in a bowl with meat and vegetables and gravy?”
   Tom went stockstill. The animation died out of his face. His mouth dropped slackly open and he became the picture of idiocy.
   Stu stirred uncomfortably and said, “Nick, don’t you think we ought to—”
   Nick shushed him with a finger at his lips, and at the same instant Tom came alive again.
   “Stew!” he said, capering and laughing. “You’re Stew!” He looked at Nick for confirmation, and Nick gave him a V-for-victory.
   “M-O-O-N, that spells Stew, Tom Cullen knows that, everybody knows that!”
   Nick pointed to the door of Tom’s house.
   “Want to come in? Laws, yes! All of us are going to come in. Tom’s been decorating his house.”
   Ralph and Stu exchanged an amused glance as they followed Nick and Tom up the porch steps. Tom was always “decorating.” He did not “furnish,” because the house had of course been furnished when he moved in. Going inside was like entering a madly jumbled Mother Goose world.
   A huge gilded birdcage with a green stuffed parrot carefully wired to the perch hung just inside the front door and Nick had to duck under it. The thing was, he thought, Tom’s decorations were not just random rickrack. That would have made this house into something no more striking than a rummage sale barn. But there was something more here, something that seemed just beyond what the ordinary mind could grasp as a pattern. In a large square block over the mantel in the living room were a number of credit card signs, all of them centered and carefully mounted. YOUR VISA CARD WELCOME HERE. JUST SAY MASTERCARD. WE HONOR AMERICAN EXPRESS. DINER’S CLUB. Now the question occurred: How did Tom know that all those signs were part of a fixed set? He couldn’t read, but somehow he had grasped the pattern.
   Sitting on the coffee table was a large Styrofoam fireplug. On the windowsill, where it could catch the sunlight and reflect cool fans of blue light onto the wall, was a police car bubble.
   Tom toured them through the entire house. The downstairs game room was filled with stuffed birds and animals that Tom had found in a taxidermy shop; he had strung the birds on nearly invisible piano wire and they seemed to cruise, owls and hawks and even a bald eagle with moth-eaten feathers and one yellow glass eye missing. A woodchuck stood on its hind legs in one corner, a gopher in another, a skunk in another, a weasel in the fourth. In the center of the room was a coyote, somehow seeming to be the focus for all the smaller animals.
   The banister leading up the stairs had been wrapped in red and white strips of Con-Tact paper so that it resembled a barber pole. The upper hallway was hung with fighter planes on more piano wire—Fokkers, Spads, Stukas, Spitfires, Zeros, Messerschmitts. The floor of the bathroom had been painted a bright electric blue and on it was Tom’s extensive collection of toy boats, sailing an enamel sea around four white porcelain islands and one white porcelain continent: the legs of the tub, the base of the toilet.
   At last Tom took them back downstairs and they sat below the credit card montage and facing a 3-D picture of John and Robert Kennedy against a background of gold-edged clouds. The legend beneath proclaimed BROTHERS TOGETHER IN HEAVEN.
   “You like Tom’s decorations? What do you think? Nice?”
   “Very nice,” Stu said. “Tell me. Those birds downstairs… do they ever get on your nerves?”
   “Laws, no!” Tom said, astounded. “They’re full of sawdust!”
   Nick handed a note to Ralph.
   “Tom, Nick wants to know if you’d mind being hypnotized again. Like the time Stan did it. It’s important this time, not just a game. Nick says he’ll explain why afterward.”
   “Go ahead,” Tom said. “Youuu… are getting… verrrry sleepy… right?”
   “Yes, that’s it,” Ralph said.
   “Do you want me to look at the watch again? I don’t mind. You know, when you swing it back and forth? Verrrry… sleeeepy… ” Tom looked at them doubtfully. “Except I don’t feel very sleepy. Laws, no. I went to bed early last night. Tom Cullen always goes to bed early because there’s no TV to watch.”
   Stu said softly: “Tom, would you like to see an elephant?”
   Tom’s eyes closed immediately. His head dropped forward loosely. His respiration deepened to long, slow strokes. Stu watched this with great surprise. Nick had given him the key phrase, but Stu hadn’t known whether or not to believe it would work. And he had never expected that it could happen so fast.
   “Just like putting a chicken’s head under its wing,” Ralph marveled.
   Nick handed Stu his prepared “script” for this encounter. Stu looked at Nick for a long moment. Nick looked back, then nodded gravely that Stu should go ahead.
   “Tom, can you hear me?” Stu asked.
   “Yes, I can hear you,” Tom said, and the quality of his voice made Stu look up sharply.

It was different from Tom’s usual voice, but in a way Stu could not quite put his hand to. It reminded him of something which had happened when he was eighteen, and graduating from high school. They had been in the boys’ locker room before the ceremony, all the guys he’d been going to school with since… well, since the first day of the first grade in at least four cases, and almost as long in many others. And for just a moment he had seen how much their faces had changed between those old days, those first days, and that moment of insight, standing on the tile floor of the locker room with the black robe in his hands. That vision of change had made him shiver then, and it made him shiver now. The faces he had looked into had no longer been the faces of children… but neither had they yet become the faces of men. They were faces in limbo, faces caught perfectly between two well-defined states of being. This voice, coming out of the shadowland of Tom Cullen’s subconscious, seemed like those faces, only infinitely sadder. Stu thought it was the voice of the man forever denied.
   But they were waiting for him to go on, and go on he must.
   “I’m Stu Redman, Tom.”
   “Yes. Stu Redman.”
   “Nick is here.”
   “Yes, Nick is here.”
   “Ralph Brentner is here, too.”
   “Yes, Ralph is, too.”
   “We’re your friends.”
   “I know.”
   “We’d like you to do something, Tom. For the Zone. It’s dangerous.”
   “Dangerous…”
   Trouble crossed over Tom’s face, like a cloud shadow slowly crossing a midsummer field of corn.
   “Will I have to be afraid? Will I have to…” He trailed off, sighing.
   Stu looked at Nick, troubled.
   Nick mouthed: Yes.
   “It’s him,” Tom said, and sighed dreadfully. It was like the sound a bitter November wind makes in a stand of denuded oaks. Stu felt that shudder inside him again. Ralph had gone pale.
   “Who, Tom?” Stu asked gently.
   “Flagg. His name is Randy Flagg. The dark man. You want me to…” That sick sigh again, bitter and long.
   “How do you know him, Tom?” This wasn’t in the script.
   “Dreams… I see his face in dreams.”
   I see his face in dreams. But none of them had seen his face. It was always hidden.
   “You see him?”
   “Yes…”
   “What does he look like, Tom?”
   Tom didn’t speak for a long time. Stu had decided he wasn’t going to answer and he was preparing to go back to the “script” when Tom said: “He looks like anybody you see on the street. But when he grins, birds fall dead off telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits. He’s always outside. He came out of time. He doesn’t know himself. He has the name of a thousand demons. Jesus knocked him into a herd of pigs once. His name is Legion. He’s afraid of us. We’re inside. He knows magic. He can call the wolves and live in the crows. He’s the king of nowhere. But he’s afraid of us. He’s afraid of… inside.”
   Tom fell silent.
   The three of them stared at each other, pallid as gravestones. Ralph had seized his hat from his head and was kneading it convulsively in his hands. Nick had put one hand over his eyes. Stu’s throat had turned to dry glass.
   His name is Legion. He is the king of nowhere.
   “Can you say anything else about him?” Stu asked in a low voice.
   “Only that I’m afraid of him, too. But I’ll do what you want. But Tom… is so afraid.” That dreadful sigh again.
   “Tom,” Ralph said suddenly. “Do you know if Mother Abagail… if she’s still alive?” Ralph’s face was desperately set, the face of a man who has staked everything on one turn of the cards.
   “She’s alive.” Ralph leaned against the back of his chair with a great gust of breath. “But she’s not right with God yet,” Tom added.
   “Not right with God? Why not, Tommy?”
   “She’s in the wilderness, God has lifted her up in the wilderness, she does not fear the terror that flies at noon or the terror that creeps at midnight… neither will the snake bite her nor the bee sting her… but she’s not right with God yet. It was not the hand of Moses that brought water from the rock. It was not the hand of Abagail that turned the weasels back with their bellies empty. She’s to be pitied. She will see, but she will see too late. There will be death. His death. She will die on the wrong side of the river. She—”
   “Stop him,” Ralph groaned. “Can’t you stop him?”
   “Tom,” Stu said.
   “Yes.”
   “Are you the same Tom that Nick met in Oklahoma? Are you the same Tom we know when you’re awake?”
   “Yes, but I am more than that Tom.”
   “I don’t understand.”
   He shifted a little, his sleeping face calm.
   “I am God’s Tom.”
   Completely unnerved now, Stu almost dropped Nick’s notes.
   “You say you’ll do what we want.”
   “Yes.”
   “But do you see… do you think you’ll come back?”
   “That’s not for me to see or say. Where shall I go?”
   “West, Tom.”
   Tom moaned. It was a sound that made the hair on the nape of Stu’s neck stand on end. What are we sending him into? And maybe he knew. Maybe he had been there himself, only in Vermont, in mazes of corridors where the echo made it seem as if footsteps were following him. And gaining.
   “West,” Tom said. “West, yes.”
   “We’re sending you to look, Tom. To look and see. Then to come back.”
   “Come back and tell.”
   “Can you do that?”
   “Yes. Unless they catch and kill me.”
   Stu winced; they all winced.
   “You go by yourself, Tom. Always west. Can you find west?”
   “Where the sun goes down.”
   “Yes. And if anyone asks why you’re there, this is what you’ll say: They drove you out of the Free Zone—”
   “Drove me out. Drove Tom out. Put him on the road.”
   “—because you were feebleminded.”
   “They drove Tom out because Tom is feebleminded.”
   “—and because you might have a woman and the woman might have idiot children.”
   “Idiot children like Tom.”
   Stu’s stomach was rolling back and forth helplessly. His head felt like iron that had learned how to sweat. It was as if he was suffering from a terrible, debilitating hangover.
   “Now repeat what you’ll say if someone asks why you’re in the west.”
   “They drove Tom out because he was feebleminded. Laws, yes. They were afraid I night have a woman the way you have them with your prick in bed. Make her pregnant with idiots.”
   “That’s right, Tom. That’s—”
   “Drove me out,” he said in a soft, grieving voice. “Drove Tom out of his nice house and put his feet on the road.”
   Stu passed a shaking hand over his eyes. He looked at Nick. Nick seemed to double, then treble, in his vision. “Nick, I don’t know as I can finish,” he said helplessly.
   Nick looked at Ralph. Ralph, pale as cheese, could only shake his head.
   “Finish,” Tom said unexpectedly. “Don’t leave me out here in the dark.”
   Forcing himself, Stu went on.
   “Tom, do you know what the full moon looks like?”
   “Yes… big and round.”
   “Not the half-moon, or even most of the moon.”
   “No,” Tom said.
   “When you see that big round moon, you’ll come back east. Back to us. Back to your house, Tom.”
   “Yes, when I see it, I’ll come back,” Tom agreed. “I’ll come back home.”
   “And when you come back, you’ll walk in the night and sleep in the day.”
   “Walk at night, sleep in the day.”
   “Right. And you won’t let anybody see you if you can help it.”
   “No.”
   “But, Tom, someone might see you.”
   “Yes, someone might.”
   “If it’s one person that sees you, Tom, kill him.”
   “Kill him,” Tom said doubtfully.
   “If it’s more than one, run.”
   “Run,” Tom said, with more certainty.
   “But try not to be seen at all. Can you repeat all that back?”
   “Yes. Come back when the moon is full. Not the halfmoon, not the fingernail moon. Walk at night, sleep in the day. Don’t let anybody see me. If one person sees me, kill him. If more than one person sees me, run away. But try not to let anyone see me.”
   “That’s very good. I want you to wake up in a few seconds. Okay?”
   “Okay.”
   “When I ask about the elephant, you’ll wake up, okay?”
   “Okay.”
   Stu sat back with a long, shuddery sigh. “Thank God that’s over.”
   Nick agreed with his eyes.
   “Did you know that might happen, Nick?”
   Nick shook his head.
   “How could he know those things?” Stu muttered.
   Nick was motioning for his pad. Stu gave it to him, glad to be rid of it. His fingers had sweated the page with Nick’s script written on it almost to transparency. Nick wrote and handed it to Ralph. Ralph read it, lips moving slowly, and then handed it to Stu.
   “Some people through history have considered the insane and the retarded to be close to divine. I don’t think he told us anything that can be of practical use to us, but I know he scared the hell out of me. Magic, he said. How do you fight magic?”
   “It’s over my head, that’s all,” Ralph muttered. “Those things he said about Mother Abagail, I don’t even want to think about them. Wake him up, Stu, and let’s get out of here as quick as we can.” Ralph was close to tears.
   Stu leaned forward again. “Tom?”
   “Yes.”
   “Would you like to see an elephant?”
   Tom’s eyes opened at once and he looked around at them. “I told you it wouldn’t work,” he said. “Laws, no. Tom doesn’t get sleepy in the middle of the day.”
   Nick handed a sheet to Stu, who glanced at it and then spoke to Tom. “Nick says you did just fine.”
   “I did? Did I stand on my head like before?”
   With a twinge of bitter shame, Nick thought: No, Tom, you did a bunch of even better tricks this time.
   “No,” Stu said. “Tom, we came to ask if you could help us.”
   “Me? Help? Sure! I love to help!”
   “This is dangerous, Tom. We want you to go west, and then come back and tell us what you saw.”
   “Okay, sure,” Tom said without the slightest hesitation, but Stu thought he saw a momentary shadow cross Tom’s face… and linger behind his guileless blue eyes. “When?”
   Stu put a gentle hand on Tom’s neck and wondered just what in the hell he was doing here. How were you supposed to figure these things out if you weren’t Mother Abagail and didn’t have a hot line to heaven? “Pretty soon now,” he said gently. “Pretty soon.”
   When Stu got back to the apartment, Frannie was fixing supper.
   “Harold was over,” she said. “I asked him to stay to dinner, but he begged off.”
   “Oh.”
   She looked more closely at him. “Stuart Redman, what dog bit you?”
   “A dog named Tom Cullen, I guess.” And he told her everything.
   They sat down to dinner. “What does it all mean?” Fran asked. Her face was pale, and she was not really eating, only pushing her food from one side of her plate to the other.
   “Damned if I know,” Stu said. “It’s a kind of… of seeing, I guess. I don’t know why we should balk at the idea of Tom Cullen having visions while he’s under hypnosis, not after the dreams we all had on our way here. If they weren’t a kind of seeing, I don’t know what they were.”
   “But they seem so long ago now… or at least they do to me.”
   “Yeah, to me, too,” Stu agreed, and realized he was pushing his own food around.
   “Look, Stu—I know we agreed not to talk about committee business outside the committee’s meetings if we could help it. You said we’d be wrangling all the time, and you were probably right. I haven’t said word one about you turning into Marshal Dillon after the twenty-fifth, have I?”
   He smiled briefly. “No, you haven’t, Frannie.”
   “But I have to ask if you still think sending Tom Cullen west is a good idea. After what happened this afternoon.”
   “I don’t know,” Stu said. He pushed his plate away. Most of the food on it was untouched. He got up, went to the hall dresser, and found a pack of cigarettes. He had cut his consumption to three or four a day. He lit this one, drew harsh, stale tobacco smoke deep into his lungs, and blew it out. “On the positive side, his story is simple enough and believable enough. We drove him out because he’s a halfwit. Nobody is going to be able to shake him from that. And if he gets back okay, we can hypnotize him—he goes under in the time it takes you to snap your fingers, for the Lord’s sake—and he’ll tell us everything he’s seen, the important things and the unimportant things. It’s possible that he’ll turn out to be a better eyewitness than either of the others. I don’t doubt that.”
   “If he gets back okay.”
   “Yeah, if. We gave him an instruction to travel east only at night and to hide up in the day. If he sees more than one person, to run. But if he was seen by one person only, to kill him.”
   “Stu, you didn’t!”
   “Of course we did!” he said angrily, wheeling on her. “We’re not playing pat-a-cake here, Frannie! You must know what’s going to happen to him… or the Judge… or Dayna… if they get caught over there! Why else were you so set against the idea in the first place?”
   “Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay, Stu.”
   “No, it’s not okay!” he said, and slammed the freshly lit cigarette down into a pottery ashtray, sending up a little cloud of sparks. Several of them landed on the back of his hand and he brushed them off with a quick, savage gesture. “It’s not okay to send a feeble kid out to fight our battles, and it’s not okay to push people around like pawns on a fuckin chessboard and it’s not okay giving orders to kill like a Mafia boss. But I don’t know what else we can do. I just don’t know. If we don’t find out what he’s up to, there’s a damn fine chance that someday next spring he may turn the whole Free Zone into one big mushroom cloud.”
   “Okay. Hey. Okay.”
   He clenched his fists slowly. “I was shouting at you. I’m sorry. I had no right to do that, Frannie.”
   “It’s all right. You weren’t the one who opened Pandora’s box.”
   “We’re all opening it, I guess,” he said dully, and got another cigarette from the pack in the dresser. “Anyhow, when I gave him that… what do you call it? When I said he should kill any one person that got in his way, a kind of frown came over his face. It was gone right away. I don’t even know if Ralph or Nick saw it. But I did. It was like he was thinking, ‘Okay, I understand what you mean, but I’ll make up m’own mind on that when the time comes.’”
   “I’ve read that you can’t hypnotize someone into doing something they wouldn’t do when they were awake. A person won’t go against his own moral code just because they’re told to do it when they’re under.”
   Stu nodded. “Yeah, I was thinking of that. But what if this fellow Flagg has got a line of pickets strung down the whole eastern length of his border? I would, if I were him. If Tom runs into that picket line going west, he’s got his story to cover him. But if he’s coming back east and runs into them, it’s going to be kill or get killed. And if Tom won’t kill, he’s apt to be a dead duck.”
   “You may be too worried about that one part of it,” Frannie said. “I mean, if there is a picket line, wouldn’t it have to be strung pretty thin?”
   “Yeah. One man every fifty miles, something like that. Unless he’s got five times the people we do.”
   “So unless they’ve got some pretty sophisticated equipment already set up and running, radar and infrared and all that stuff you see in the spy movies, wouldn’t Tom be apt to walk right through them?”
   “That’s what we’re hoping. But—”
   “But you’ve got a bad attack of conscience,” she said softly.
   “Is that what it comes down to? Well… maybe so. What did Harold want; honey?”
   “He left a bunch of those survey maps. Areas where his Search Committee has looked for Mother Abagail. Anyhow, Harold’s been working on that burial detail as well as supervising the Search Committee. He looked very tired, but his Free Zone duties aren’t the only reason. He’s been working on something else as well, it seems.”
   “What’s that?”
   “Harold’s got a woman.”
   Stu raised his eyebrows.
   “Anyway, that’s why he begged off on dinner. Can you guess who she is?”
   Stu squinted up at the ceiling. “Now who could Harold be shackin with? Let me see—”
   “Well, that’s a hell of a way to put it! What do you think we’re doing?” She threw a mock-slap at him, and he drew back, grinning.
   “Fun, ain’t it? I give up. Who is it?”
   “Nadine Cross.”
   “That woman with the white in her hair?”
   “That’s her.”
   “Gosh, she must be twice his age.”
   “I doubt,” Frannie said, “that it’s a concern to Harold at this point in his relationship.”
   “Does Larry know?”
   “I don’t know and care less. The Cross woman isn’t Larry’s girl now. If she ever was.”
   “Yeah,” Stu said. He was glad Harold had found himself a little love-interest, but not terribly interested in the subject. “How does Harold feel about the Search Committee, anyway? Did he give you any idea?”
   “Well, you know Harold. He smiles a lot, but… not very hopeful. I guess that’s why he’s putting in most of his time on the burial detail. They call him Hawk now, did you know that?”
   “Really?”
   “I heard it today. I didn’t know who they were talking about until I asked.” She mused for a moment, then laughed.
   “What’s funny?” Stu asked.
   She stuck out her feet, which were clad in low-topped sneakers. On the soles were patterns of circles and lines. “He complimented me on my sneakers,” she said. “Isn’t that dippy?”
   “You’re dippy,” Stu said, grinning.
   Harold woke up just before dawn with a dull but not entirely unpleasant ache in his groin. He shivered a little as he got up. It was getting noticeably colder in the early mornings, although it was only August 22 and fall was still a calendar month away.
   But there was heat below his waist, oh yes. Just looking at the delectable curve of her buttocks in those tiny see-through underpants as she slept was warming him up considerably. She wouldn’t mind if he woke her up… well, maybe she would mind, but she wouldn’t object. He still had no real idea of what might lie behind those dark eyes, and he was a little afraid of her.
   Instead of waking her up, he dressed quietly. He didn’t want to mess around with Nadine, as much as he would have liked to.
   What he needed to do was go someplace alone and think.
   He paused at the door, fully dressed, carrying his boots in his left hand. Between the slight chilliness of the room and the prosy act of getting dressed, his desire had left him. He could smell the room now, and the smell was not terribly appealing.
   It was just a little thing, she had said, a thing they could do without. Perhaps it was true. She could do things with her mouth and hands that were nearly beyond belief. But if it was such a small thing, why did this room have that stale and slightly sour odor that he associated with the solitary pleasure of all his bad years?
   Maybe you want it to be bad.
   Disturbing thought. He went out, closing the door softly behind him.
   Nadine’s eyes opened the moment the door was closed. She sat up, looked thoughtfully at the door, and then lay down again. Her body ached in a slow and unrelieved cycle of desire. It felt almost like menstrual cramps. If it was such a small thing, she thought (with no idea of how close to Harold’s her own thoughts were), why did she feel this way? At one point last night she’d had to bite her lips together to stifle the cries: Stop that fooling around and STICK me with that thing! Do you hear me? STICK me with it, cram me FULL of it! Do you think what you’re doing is doing anything for me? Stick me with it and let’s for Christ’s sake—or mine, at least—end this crazy game!
   He had been lying with his head between her legs, making strange noises of lust, noises that might have been comic had they not been so honestly urgent, so nearly savage. And she had looked up, those words trembling behind her lips, and had seen (or only thought she had?) a face at the window. In an instant the fire of her own lust had been damped down to cold ash.
   It had been his face, grinning savagely in at her.
   A scream had risen in her throat… and then the face was gone, the face was nothing but a moving pattern of shadows on the darkened glass mingled with smudges of dust. No more than the boogeyman a child imagines he sees in the closet, or curled up slyly behind the chest of toys in the corner.
   No more than that.
   Except it was more, and not even now, in the first cold rational light of dawn, could she pretend otherwise. It would be dangerous to pretend otherwise. It had been him, and he had been warning her. The husband-to-be was watching over his intended. And the bride defiled would be the bride unaccepted.
   Staring at the ceiling, she thought: I suck his cock, but that’s not defilement. I let him stick himself up my ass, but that isn’t defilement, either. I dress for him like a cheap streetwalking slut, but that’s perfectly okay.
   It was enough to make you wonder what sort of man your fiancé really was.
   Nadine stared up at the ceiling for a long, long time.
   Harold made instant coffee, drank it with a grimace, and then took a couple of cold Pop-Tarts out onto the front step. He sat down and ate them while dawn crept across the land.
   In retrospect, the last couple of days seemed like a mad carnival ride to him. It was a blur of orange trucks, of Weizak clapping him on the shoulder and calling him Hawk (they all called him that now), of dead bodies, a never-ending moldy stream of them, and then coming home from all that death to a never-ending flow of kinky sex. Enough to blur your head.
   But now, sitting here on a front step as cold as a marble headstone, a horrible cup of instant coffee sloshing in his guts, he could munch these sawdust-tasting cold Pop-Tarts and think. He felt clear-headed, sane after a season of insanity. It occurred to him that, for a person who had always considered himself to be a Cro-Magnon man amid a herd of thundering Neanderthals, he had been doing precious little thinking lately. He had been led, not by the nose, but by the penis.
   He turned his mind to Frannie Goldsmith even as he turned his gaze out to the Flatirons. It was Frannie who had been at his house that day, he knew it for sure now. He had gone over to the place where she lived with Redman on a pretext, really hoping to get a look at her footgear. As it turned out, she had been wearing the sneakers that matched the print he had found on his cellar floor. Circles and lines instead of the usual waffle or zigzag tread. No question, baby.
   He thought he could put it together without too much trouble. Somehow she had found out he had read her diary. He must have left a smudge or mark on one of the pages… maybe more than one. So she had come to his house looking for some indication of how he felt about what he had read. Something written down.
   There was, of course, his ledger. But she hadn’t found it, he could feel positive of that. His ledger said flat-out that he planned to kill Stuart Redman. If she had found something like that, she would have told Stu. Even if she hadn’t, he didn’t believe she could have been as easy and as natural with him as she had been yesterday.
   He finished his last Pop-Tart, grimacing at the taste of its cold frosting and colder jelly center. He decided he would walk to the bus station instead of taking his cycle; Teddy Weizak or Norris could drop him off on the way home. He set off, zipping his light jacket all the way to his chin against the chill that would be gone in an hour or so. He walked past the empty houses with their shades drawn, and about six blocks down Arapahoe, he began to see an x -mark chalked boldly on door after door. Again, his idea. The Burial Committee had checked all those houses where the mark appeared, and had hauled away whatever bodies there were to be hauled away. x, a crossing-out. The people who had lived in those houses where the mark appeared were gone for all time. In another month that x -mark would be all over Boulder, signifying the end of an age.
   It was time to think, and to think carefully. It seemed that, since he had met Nadine, he really had stopped thinking… but maybe he had really stopped even before that.
   I read her diary because I was hurt and jealous, he thought. Then she broke into my house, probably looking for my own diary, but she didn’t find it. But just the shock of someone breaking in had maybe been revenge enough. It had certainly bent him out of shape. Maybe they were even and it could be quits.
   He didn’t really want Frannie anymore, did he?… Did he?
   He felt the sullen coal of resentment glow in his chest. Maybe not. But that didn’t change the fact that they had excluded him. Although Nadine had said little about her reasons for coming to him, Harold had an idea that she had been excluded in some way too, rebuffed, turned back. They were a couple of outsiders, and outsiders hatch plots. It’s perhaps the only thing that keeps them sane. (Remember to put that in the ledger, Harold thought… he was almost downtown now.)
   There was a whole company of outsiders on the other side of the mountains. And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you’re inside. Inside where it’s warm. Just a little thing, being inside where it’s warm, but really such a big thing. About the most important thing in the world.
   Maybe he didn’t want to be quits and even. Maybe he didn’t want to settle for a draw, for a career of riding in a twentieth-century deadcart and getting meaningless letters of thanks for his ideas, and waiting five years for Bateman to retire from their precious committee so he could be on it… and what if they decided to pass over him again? They might, too, because it wasn’t just a question of age. They had taken the goddam deaf-mute, and he was only a few years older than Harold himself.
   The coal of resentment was burning brightly now. Think, sure, think—that was easy to say, and sometimes it was even to do… but what good was thinking when all it got you from the Neanderthals who ran the world was a horselaugh, or even worse, a thank-you letter?
   He reached the bus station. It was still early, and no one was there yet. There was a poster on the door saying there was going to be another public meeting on the twenty-fifth. Public meeting? Public circle jerk.
   The waiting room was festooned with travel posters and ads for the Greyhound Ameripass and pictures of big mother-humping Scenicruisers rolling through Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, Nashville, wherever. He sat down and stared with a cold morning eye at the darkened pinball machines, the Coke machine, the coffee machine that would also dispense a Lipton Cup-a-Soup that smelled vaguely like a dead fish. He lit a cigarette and threw the matchstub on the floor.
   They had adopted the Constitution. Whooppee. How very-very and too-too. They had even sung The Star-Speckled Banana, for Christ’s sweet sake. But suppose Harold Lauder had gotten up, not to make a few constructive suggestions, but to tell them the facts of life in this first year after the plague?
   Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Harold Emery Lauder and I am here to tell you that, in the words of the old song, the fundamental things apply as time goes by. Like Darwin. The next time you stand and sing the National Anthem, friends and neighbors, chew on this: America is dead, dead as a doornail, dead as Jacob Marley and Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper and Harry S Truman, but the principles just propounded by Mr. Darwin are still very much alive—as alive as Jacob Marley’s ghost was to Ebenezer Scrooge. While you are meditating on the beauties of constitutional rule, spare a little time to meditate on Randall Flagg, Man of the West. I doubt very much if he has any time to spare for such fripperies as public meetings and ratifications and discussions on the true meaning of a peach in the best liberal mode. Instead he has been concentrating on the basics, on his Darwin, preparing to wipe the great Formica counter of the universe with your dead bodies. Ladies and gentlemen, let me modestly suggest that while we are trying to get the lights on and waiting for a doctor to find our happy little hive, he may be searching eagerly for someone with a pilot’s credentials so he can start overflights of Boulder in the best Francis Gary Powers tradition. While we debate the burning question of who will be on the Street Cleaning Committee, he has probably already seen to the creation of a Gun Cleaning Committee, not to mention mortars, missile sites, and possibly even germ warfare centers. Of course we know this country doesn’t have any germ or biological warfare centers, that’s one of the things that makes this country great—what country, ha-ha—but you should realize that while we’re busy getting all the wagons in a circle, he’s —
   “Hey, Hawk, you pullin overtime?”
   Harold looked up, smiling. “Yeah, I thought I’d get some,” he told Weizak. “I clocked you when I came in. You made six bucks already.”
   Weizak laughed. “You’re a card, Hawk, you know that?”
   “I am,” Harold agreed, still smiling. He began to relace his boots. “A wild card.”

Chapter 56
   Stu spent the next day at the power station, wrapping motors, and was cycling home at the end of the workday. He had reached the small park opposite the First National Bank when Ralph hailed him over. He parked his cycle and walked over to the bandshell where Ralph was sitting.
   “I’ve kind of been looking for you, Stu. You got a minute?”
   “Just one. I’m late for supper. Frannie’ll be worried.”
   “Yeah. Been up to the power station wrapping copper, from the look of your hands.” Ralph looked absent and worried.
   “Yeah. Not even workmen’s gloves do much good. My hands are wrecked.”
   Ralph nodded. There were maybe half a dozen other people in the park, some of them looking at the narrow-gauge railway train that had once gone between Boulder and Denver. A trio of young women had spread out a picnic supper. Stu found it very pleasant just to sit here with his wounded hands in his lap. Maybe marshaling won’t be so bad, he thought. At least it’ll get me off that goddam assembly line in East Boulder.
   “How’s it going out there?” Ralph asked.
   “Me, I wouldn’t know—I’m just hired help, like the rest. Brad Kitchner says it’s going like a house afire. He says the lights will be back on by the end of the first week of September, maybe sooner, and that we’ll have heat by the middle of the month. Of course, he’s pretty young to be making with the predictions…”
   “I’ll put my money on Brad,” Ralph said. “I trust im. He’s been gettin a lot of what you call on-the-job training.” Ralph tried to laugh; the laugh turned into a sigh which seemed fetched up from the big man’s bootheels.
   “Why you so down at the mouth, Ralph?”
   “I got some news on my radio,” Ralph said. “Some of it’s good, some of it… well, some of its not so good, Stu. I want you to know, because there’s no way to keep it secret. Lots of people in the Zone with CBs. I imagine some were listening when I was talking to these new folks coming in.”
   “How many?”
   “Over forty. One of them’s a doctor, name of George Richardson. He sounds like a fine man. Level-headed.”
   “Well, that’s great news!”
   “He’s from Derbyshire, Tennessee. Most of the people in this group are sort of mid-Southern. Well, it seems they had a pregnant woman with them, and her time come up ten days ago, on the thirteenth. This doctor delivered her of them—twins, she had—and they were fine. At first they were fine.” Ralph lapsed back into silence, his mouth working.
   Stu grabbed him. “They died? The babies died? That what you’re trying to tell me? That they died? Talk to me, dammit!”
   “They died,” Ralph said in a low voice. “One of them went in twelve hours. Appeared to just choke to death. The other went two days later. Nothing Richardson could do to save them. The woman went loony. Raving about death and destruction and no more babies. You want to make sure Fran isn’t around when they come in, Stu. That’s what I wanted to tell you. And that you should let her know about this right away. Because if you don’t, someone else will.”
   Stu let go of Ralph’s shirt slowly.
   “This Richardson, he wanted to know how many pregnant women we had, and I said only one that we know of right now. He asked how far along she was and I said four months. Is that right?”
   “She’s five months now. But Ralph, is he sure those babies died of the superflu? Is he sure?”
   “No, he’s not, and you gotta tell Frannie that, too, so she understands it. He said it could have been any number of things… the mother’s diet… something hereditary… a respiratory infection… or maybe they were just, you know, defective babies. He said it could have been the Rh factor, whatever, that is. He just couldn’t tell, them being born in the middle of a field beside the doggone Interstate 70. He said that him and about three others who were in charge of their group sat up late at night and talked it over. Richardson, he told them what it might mean if it was the Captain Trips that killed those babies, and how important it was for them to find out one way or the other for sure.”
   “Glen and I talked about that,” Stu said bleakly, “the day I met him. July Fourth, that was. It seems so long ago… anyway, if it was the superflu that killed those babies it probably means that in forty or fifty years we can leave the whole shebang to the rats and the houseflies and the sparrows.”
   “I guess that’s pretty much what Richardson told them. Anyway, they were some forty miles west of Chicago, and he persuaded them to turn around the next day so they could take the bodies back to a big hospital where he could do an autopsy. He said he could find out for sure if it was the superflu. He saw enough of it at the end of June. I guess all doctors did.”
   “Yeah.”
   “But when the morning came, the babies were gone. That woman had buried them, and she wouldn’t say where. They spent two days digging, thinking that she couldn’t have gone too far away from the camp or buried them too deep, being just over her delivery and all. But they didn’t find them, and she wouldn’t say where no matter how much they tried to explain how important it was. Poor woman was just all the way off’n her chump.”
   “I can understand that,” Stu said, thinking of how much Fran wanted her baby.
   “The doctor said even if it was the superflu, maybe two immune people could make an immune baby,” Ralph said hopefully.
   “The chances that the natural father of Fran’s baby was immune are about one in a billion, I guess,” Stu said. “He sure isn’t here.”
   “Yeah, I guess it couldn’t hardly be, could it? I’m sorry to have to put this on you, Stu. But I thought you’d better know. So you could tell her.”
   “I don’t look forward to that,” Stu said.
   But when he got home he found that someone else had already done it.
   “Frannie?”
   No answer. Supper was on the stove—burnt on, mostly—but the apartment was dark and quiet.
   Stu came into the living room and looked around. There was an ashtray on the coffee table with two cigarette butts in it, but Fran didn’t smoke and they weren’t his brand.
   “Babe?”
   He went into the bedroom and she was there, lying on the bed in the semigloom, looking at the ceiling. Her face was puffy and tear-streaked. “Hi Stu,” she said quietly.
   “Who told you?” he asked angrily. “Who just couldn’t wait to spread the good news? Whoever it was, I’ll break their damn arm.”
   “It was Sue Stern. She heard it from Jack Jackson. He’s got a CB, and he heard that doctor talking with Ralph. She thought she better tell me before someone else made a bad job of it. Poor little Frannie. Handle with care. Do not open until Christmas.” She uttered a little laugh. There was a desolation in that sound that made Stu feel like crying.
   He came across the room and lay down beside her on the bed and stroked her hair off her forehead. “Honey, it’s not sure. No way that it’s sure.”
   “I know it’s not. And maybe we could have our own babies, even so.” She turned to look up at him, her eyes red-rimmed and unhappy. “But I want this one. Is that so wrong?”
   “No. Course not.”
   “I’ve been lying here waiting for him to move, or something. I’ve never felt him move since that night Larry came looking for Harold. Remember?”
   “Yes.”
   “I felt the baby move and I didn’t wake you up. Now I wish I had. I sure do.” She began to cry again and put an arm over her face so he wouldn’t see her doing it.
   Stu took the arm away, stretched out beside her, kissed her. She hugged him fiercely and then lay passively against him. When she spoke, the words were half muffled against his neck.
   “Not knowing makes it that much worse. Now I just have to wait and see. It seems like such a long time to have to wait and see if your baby is going to die before it’s spent a day outside of your body.”
   “You won’t be waiting alone,” he said.
   She hugged him tight again for that and they lay there together without moving for a long time.
   Nadine Cross had been in the living room of her old place for almost five minutes, gathering things up, before she saw him sitting in the chair in the corner, naked except for his underpants, his thumb in his mouth, his strange gray-green Chinese eyes watching her. She was so startled—as much by the knowledge that he had been sitting there all the time as by the actual sudden sight of him—that her heart took a high, frightened leap in her chest and she screamed. The paperbacks she had been about to stuff into her packsack tumbled to the floor in a flutter of pages.
   “Joe… I mean Leo…”
   She put a hand on her chest above the swell of her breasts as if to quell the crazy beating of her heart. But her heart was not ready to slow yet, hand or no hand. Catching sudden sight of him was bad; catching sight of him dressed and acting the way he had been when she had first made his acquaintance in New Hampshire was even worse. It was too much of a return, as if some irrational god had suddenly bundled her viciously through a time-warp and condemned her to live the last six weeks all over again.
   “You scared the dickins out of me,” she finished weakly.
   Joe said nothing.
   She walked slowly over to him, half expecting to see a long kitchen knife in one of his hands, as in days of yore, but the hand which was not at his mouth was curled blamelessly in his lap. She saw that his body had been milked of its tan. The old scars and bramble-scratches were gone. But the eyes were the same… eyes that could haunt you. Whatever had been in them, a little more each day, since he had come to the fire to listen to Larry play the guitar, was now utterly gone. His eyes were as they had been when she first met him, and this filled her with a creeping sort of terror.
   “What are you doing here?”
   Joe said nothing.
   “Why aren’t you with Larry and Lucy-mom?”
   No reply.
   “You can’t stay here,” she said, trying to reason with him, but before she could go on, she found herself wondering how long he had already been here.
   This was the morning of August 24. She had spent the previous two nights at Harold’s. The thought that he might have been sitting in that chair with his thumb corked securely in his mouth for the last forty hours came to her. It was a ridiculous idea, of course, he would have to eat and drink (wouldn’t he?), but once the thought/image had come, it would not leave. That sense of creepiness came over her again, and she realized with something like despair how much she herself had changed: once she had slept fearlessly next to this little savage, at a time when he had been armed and dangerous. Now he was without weapons, but she found herself in terror of him. She had thought
   (Joe? Leo?)
   his previous self had been neatly and completely disposed of. Now he was back. And he was here.
   “You can’t stay here,” she said. “I just came back to get some things. I’m moving out. I’m moving in with a… with a man.”
   Oh, is that what Harold is? some interior voice mocked. I thought he was just a tool, a means to an end.
   “Leo, listen—”
   His head shook, faintly but visibly. His eyes, stern and glittering, fixed upon her face.
   “You’re not Leo?”
   That faint shake came again.
   “Are you Joe?”
   A nod, just as faint.
   “Well, all right. But you have to understand that it really doesn’t matter who you are,” she said, trying to be patient. That crazy feeling that she was in a time-warp, that she was back to square one, persisted. It made her feel unreal and frightened. “That part of our lives—the part where we were together and on our own—that part is gone. You’ve changed, I’ve changed, and we can’t change back.”
   But his strange eyes remained fixed upon hers, seeming to deny this.
   “And stop staring at me,” she snapped. “It’s very impolite to stare at people.”
   Now his eyes seemed to become faintly accusatory. They seemed to suggest that it was also impolite to leave people on their own, and more impolite still to withdraw one’s love from people who still needed and depended on it.
   “It’s not as if you’re on your own,” she said, turning and beginning to pick up the books she had dropped. She knelt clumsily and without grace, her knees popping like firecrackers as she did so. She began to stuff the books into the packsack willy-nilly, on top of her sanitary napkins and her aspirin and her underthings—plain cotton underthings, quite different from the ones she wore for Harold’s frantic amusement.
   “You have Larry and Lucy. You want them, and they want you. Well, Larry wants you, and that’s all that matters, because she wants all the things he does. She’s like a piece of carbon paper. Things are different for me now, Joe, and that’s not my fault. That’s not my fault at all. So you can just stop trying to guilt-trip me.”
   She began trying to buckle the packsack’s clasps but her fingers were trembling uncontrollably and it was hard work. The silence grew heavier and heavier around them.
   At last she stood up, shrugging the packsack onto her shoulders.
   “Leo.” She tried to speak calmly and reasonably, the way she used to speak to difficult children in her classes when they had tantrums. It just wasn’t possible. Her voice was all in jigs and jags, and the little shake of his head which greeted her use of the word Leo made it even worse.
   “It wasn’t Larry and Lucy,” Nadine said viciously. “I could have understood that, if that was all it was. But it was really that old bag you gave me up for, wasn’t it? That stupid old woman in her rocking chair, grinning at the world with her false teeth. But now she’s gone, and so you come running back to me. But it won’t play, do you hear me? It won’t play! ”
   Joe said nothing.
   “And when I begged Larry… got down on my knees and begged him… he couldn’t be bothered. He was too busy playing big man. So you see, none of this is my fault. None of it! ”

The boy only stared at her impassively.
   Her terror began to return, burying her incoherent rage. She backed away from him to the door and fumbled behind her for the knob. She found it at last, turned it, and jerked the door open. The rush of cool outside air against her shoulders was very welcome.
   “Go to Larry,” she muttered. “Goodbye, kiddo.”
   She backed out awkwardly and stood on the top step for a moment, trying to gather her wits. It suddenly occurred to her that the whole thing might have been a hallucination, brought on by her own guilt feelings… guilt at abandoning the boy, guilt at making Larry wait too long, guilt at the things she and Harold had done, and the much worse things which were waiting. Perhaps there had been no real boy in that house at all. No more real than the phantasms of Poe—the beating of the old man’s heart, sounding like a watch wrapped in cotton, or the raven perched on the bust of Pallas.
   “Tapping, ever tapping at my chamber door,” she whispered aloud without thinking, and that made her utter a horrid, croaking little giggle, probably not much different from the sounds ravens actually made.
   Still, she had to know.
   She went to the window beside the front steps and looked into the living room of what had once been her house. Not that it had ever been hers, not really. When you lived in a place and all you wanted to take out of it when you left would fit in one packsack, it had never really been yours to begin with. Looking in, she saw some dead wife’s rug and curtains and wallpaper, some dead husband’s pipe-stand and issues of Sports Illustrated scattered carelessly on the coffee table. Pictures of dead children on the mantel. And sitting in the corner chair, some dead woman’s little boy, clad only in his underpants, sitting, still sitting, sitting as he had sat before—
   Nadine fled, stumbling, almost falling over the low wire wickets which protected the flower bed to the left of the window where she had looked in. She flung herself onto her Vespa and got it started. She drove with reckless speed for the first few blocks, slaloming in and out of the stalled cars which still littered these side-streets, but a little at a time she calmed down.
   By the time she reached Harold’s, she had gotten herself under some kind of control. But she knew it had to end quickly for her here in the Zone. If she wanted to keep her sanity, she must soon be away.
   The meeting at Munzinger Auditorium went well. They began by singing the National Anthem again, but this time most of them remained dry-eyed; it was simply a part of what would soon become ritual. A Census Committee was voted routinely with Sandy DuChiens in charge. She and her four helpers immediately began going through the audience, counting heads, taking names. At the end of the meeting, to the accompaniment of tremendous cheers, she announced that there were now 814 souls in the Free Zone, and promised (rashly, as it turned out) to have a complete “directory” by the time the next Zone meeting was called—a directory she hoped to update week by week, containing names in alphabetical order, ages, Boulder addresses, previous addresses, and previous occupations. As it turned out, the flow into the Zone was so heavy and yet so erratic that she was always two or three weeks behind.
   The elective period of the Free Zone Committee was brought up, and after some extravagant suggestions (ten years was one, life another, and Larry brought down the house by saying they sounded more like prison terms than those of elective office), the yearly term was voted in. Harry Dunbarton’s hand waved near the back of the hall, and Stu recognized him.
   Bellowing to make himself heard, Harry said: “Even a year may be too much. I have nothing at all against the ladies and gentlemen of the committee, I think you’re doing a helluva job”—cheers and whistles—“but this is gonna get out of hand before long if we keep gettin bigger.”
   Glen raised his hand, and Stu acknowledged him.
   “Mr. Chairman, this isn’t on the agenda, but I think Mr. Dunbarton there has an excellent point.”
   I just bet you think he does, baldy, Stu thought, since you bought it up a week ago.
   “I’d like to make a motion that we have a Representative Government Committee so we can really put the Constitution back to work. I think Harry Dunbarton should head that committee, and I’ll serve on it myself, unless someone thinks I’ve got a conflict of interest.”
   More cheers.
   In the last row, Harold turned to Nadine and whispered in her ear: “Ladies and gentlemen, the public love feast is now in session.”
   She gave him a slow, dark smile, and he felt giddy.
   Stu was elected Free Zone Marshal by roaring acclamation.
   “I’ll do the best I can by you,” he said. “Some of you cheerin me now may have cause to change your tunes later if I catch you doin somethin you shouldn’t be doin. You hear me, Rich Moffat?”
   A large roar of laughter. Rich, who was as drunk as a hootowl, joined in agreeably.
   “But I don’t see any reason why we should have any real trouble here. The main job of a marshal as I see it is stoppin people from hurtin each other. And there aren’t any of us who want to do that. Enough people have been hurt already. And I guess that’s all I’ve got to say.”
   The crowd gave him a long ovation.
   “Now this next item,” Stu said, “kind of goes along with the marshaling. We need about five people to serve on a Law Committee, or I’m not going to feel right about locking anyone up, should it come to that. Do I hear any nominations?”
   “How about the Judge?” someone shouted.
   “Yeah, the Judge, damn right!” someone else yelled.
   Heads craned expectantly as people waited for the Judge to stand up and accept the responsibility in his usual rococo style; a whisper ran around the hall as people retold the story of how he had put a pin in the flying saucer nut’s balloon. Agendas were put down as people prepared to clap. Stu’s eyes met Glen’s with mutual chagrin: someone on the committee should have foreseen this.
   “Ain’t here,” someone said.
   “Who’s seen him?” Lucy Swann asked, upset. Larry glanced at her uncomfortably, but she was still looking around the hall for the Judge.
   “I seen him.”
   A mutter of interest as Teddy Weizak stood up about three quarters of the way back in the auditorium, looking nervous and polishing his steel-rimmed spectacles compulsively with his bandanna.
   “Where?”
   “Where was he, Teddy?”
   “Was it in town?”
   “What was he doing?”
   Teddy Weizak flinched visibly from this barrage of questions.
   Stu pounded his gavel. “Come on, folks. Order.”
   “I seen him two days ago,” Teddy said. “He had himself a Land-Rover. Said he was going to Denver for the day. Didn’t say why. We had a joke or two about it. He seemed in real good spirits. That’s all I know.” He sat down, still polishing his spectacles and blushing furiously.
   Stu rapped for order again. “I’m sorry the Judge isn’t here. I think he would have been just the man for the job, but since he isn’t, could we have another nomination—?”
   “No, let’s not leave it at that!” Lucy protested, getting to her feet. She was wearing a snug denim jumpsuit that brought interested looks to the faces of most of the males in the audience. “Judge Farris is an old man. What if he got sick in Denver and can’t get back?”
   “Lucy,” Stu said, “Denver’s a big place.”
   An odd silence fell over the meeting hall as people considered this. Lucy sat down, looking pale, and Larry put his arm around her. His eyes met Stu’s, and Stu looked away.
   A half-hearted motion was made to table the Law Committee until the Judge got back and was voted down after twenty minutes of discussion. They had another lawyer, a young man of about twenty-six named Al Bundell, who had come in late that afternoon with the Dr. Richardson party, and he accepted the chairmanship when it was offered, saying only that he hoped no one would do anything too terrible in the next month or so, because it would take at least that long to work out some sort of rotating tribunal system. Judge Farris was voted a place on the committee in absentia.
   Brad Kitchner, looking pale, fidgety, and a little ridiculous in a suit and tie, approached the podium, dropped his prepared remarks, picked them up in the wrong order, and contented himself by saying they hoped and expected to have the electricity back on by the second or third of September.
   This remark was greeted with such a storm of cheering that he gained enough confidence to finish in style and actually strut a little as he left the podium.
   Chad Norris was next, and Stu told Frannie later that he had approached the thing in just the right way: They were burying the dead out of common decency, none of them would feel really good until that was done and life could go on, and if it was finished by the fall rainy season they would all feel so much the better. He asked for a couple of volunteers and could have had three dozen if he wanted them. He finished by asking each member of the current Spade Squad (as he called them) to stand and take a bow.
   Harold Lauder barely popped up and then sat back down again, and there were those who left the meeting remarking on what a smart but very modest fellow he was. Actually, Nadine had been whispering things in his ear and he was afraid to do much more than bob and nod. A fairly large pup-tent appeared to have been erected in the crotch of his pants.
   When Norris left the podium, Ralph Brentner took his place. He told them that they at last had a doctor. George Richardson stood up (to loud applause; Richardson flipped the peace sign with both hands, and the applause turned to cheers), and then told them that, as far as he could tell, they had another sixty people joining them over the next couple of days.
   “Well, that’s the agenda,” Stu said. He looked out over the gathered people. “I want Sandy DuChiens to come up here again and tell us how many we are, but before I do that, is there other business we should take up tonight?”
   He waited. He could see Glen’s face in the crowd, and Sue Stern’s, Larry’s, Nick’s, and of course, Frannie’s. They all looked a bit strained. If someone was going to bring up Flagg, ask what the committee was doing about him, this would be the time. But there was silence. After fifteen seconds of it, Stu turned the meeting over to Sandy, who ended things in style. As people began to file out, Stu thought: Well, we got by it again.
   Several people came up to congratulate him after the meeting, one of them the new doctor. “You handled that very well, Marshal,” Richardson said, and for a moment Stu almost looked over his shoulder to see who Richardson was talking to. Then he remembered, and suddenly felt scared. Lawman? He was an imposter.
   A year, he told himself. A year and no more. But he still felt scared.
   Stu, Fran, Sue Stern, and Nick walked back toward the center of town together, their feet clicking hollowly on the cement sidewalk as they crossed the C.U. campus toward Broadway. Around them, other people were streaming away, talking quietly, headed home. It was nearly eleven-thirty.
   “It’s chilly,” Fran said. “I wish I’d worn my jacket as well as this sweater.”
   Nick nodded. He also felt the chill. The Boulder evenings were always cool, but tonight it could be no more than fifty degrees. It served to remind that this strange and terrible summer was nearing its end. Not for the first time he wished that Mother Abagail’s God or Muse or whatever It was had been more in favor of Miami or New Orleans. But that might not have been so great, now that he stopped to think about it. High humidity, lots of rain… and lots of bodies. At least Boulder was dry.
   “They jumped the shit out of me, wanting the Judge for the Law Committee,” Stu said. “We should have expected that.”
   Frannie nodded, and Nick jotted quickly on his pad: “Sure. People will miss Tom & Dayna, 2. Fax of life.”
   “Think people will be suspicious, Nick?” Stu asked.
   Nick nodded. “They’ll wonder if they did go west. For real.”
   They all considered this as Nick took out his butane match and burned the scrap of paper.
   “That’s tough,” Stu said finally. “You really think so?”
   “Sure, he’s right,” Sue said glumly. “What else have they got to think? That Judge Farris went to Far Rockaway to ride the Monster Coaster?”
   “We were lucky to get away tonight without a big discussion of what’s going on in the West,” Fran said.
   Nick wrote: “Sure were. Next time we’ll have to tackle it head on, I think. That’s why I want to postpone another big meeting as long as possible. Three weeks, maybe. September 15?”
   Sue said, “We can hold off that long if Brad gets the power on.”
   “I think he will,” Stu said.
   “I’m going home,” Sue told them. “Big day tomorrow. Dayna’s off. I’m going with her as far as Colorado Springs.”
   “Do you think that’s safe, Sue?” Fran asked.
   She shrugged. “Safer for her than for me.”
   “How did she take it?” Fran asked her.
   “Well, she’s a funny sort of girl. She was a jock in college, you know. Tennis and swimming were her biggies, although she played them all. She went to some small community college down in Georgia, but for the first two years she kept on going with her high school boyfriend. He was a big leather jacket type, me Tarzan, you Jane, so get out in the kitchen and rattle those pots and pans. Then she got dragged along to a couple of female consciousness meetings by her roomie, who was this big libber type.”
   “And as an upshot, she got to be an even bigger libber than the roomie,” Fran guessed.
   “First a libber, then a lesbian,” Sue said.
   Stu stopped as if thunderstruck. Frannie looked at him with guarded amusement. “Come on, splendor in the grass,” she said. “See if you can’t fix the hinge on your mouth.”
   Stu shut his mouth with a snap.
   Sue went on: “She dropped both rocks on the caveman boyfriend at the same time. It blew his wheels, and he came after her with a gun. She disarmed him. She says it was the major turning point of her life. She told me she always knew she was stronger and more agile than he was—she knew it intellectually. But it took doing it to put it in her guts.”
   “You sayin she hates men?” Stu asked, looking at Sue closely.
   Susan shook her head. “She’s bi now.”
   “Bye now?” Stu said doubtfully.
   “She’s happy with either sex, Stuart. And I hope you’re not going to start leaning on the committee to institute the blue laws along with ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
   “I got enough to worry about without gettin into who sleeps with who,” he mumbled, and they all laughed. “I only asked because I don’t want anyone goin into this thing as a crusade. We need eyes over there, not guerrilla fighters. This is a job for a weasel, not a lion.”
   “She knows that,” Susan said. “Fran asked me how she took it when I asked her if she’d go over there for us. She took it very well. For one thing, she reminded me that if we’d stayed with those men… remember how you found us, Stu?”
   He nodded.
   “If we’d stayed with them, we would have either wound up dead or in the West anyway, because that’s the direction they were going in… at least when they were sober enough to read the road-signs. She said she’d been wondering what her place in the Zone was, and guessed that her place in the Zone was out of it. And she said…”
   “What?” Fran asked.
   “That she’d try to come back,” Sue said, rather abruptly, and said no more. What else Dayna Jurgens had said was between the two of them, something not even the other members of the committee were to know. Dayna was going west with a ten-inch switchblade strapped to her arm in a spring-loaded clip. When she bent her wrist sharply, the spring unloaded and hey, presto, she had suddenly grown a sixth finger, one which was ten inches long and double-bladed. She felt that most of them—the men—would not have understood.
   If he’s a big enough dictator, then maybe he’s all that’s holding them together. If he was gone, maybe they’d start fighting and squabbling among themselves. It might be the end of them, if he dies. And if I get close to him, Susie, he better have his guardian devil with him.
   They’ll kill you, Dayna.
   Maybe. Maybe not. It might be worth it just to have the pleasure of watching his guts fall out on the floor.
   Susan could have stopped her, maybe, but she hadn’t tried. She had contented herself with extracting a promise from Dayna that she would stick to the original script unless a near-perfect opportunity came up. To that, Dayna had agreed and Sue didn’t think her friend would get that chance. Flagg would be well guarded. Still, in the three days since she had broached the idea of going west as a spy to her friend, Sue Stern had found it very difficult to sleep.
   “Well,” she said to the rest of them now, “I’m home to bed. Night, folks.”
   She walked off, hands in the pockets of her fatigue jacket.
   “She looks older,” Stu said.
   Nick wrote and offered the open pad to both of them.
   We all do was written there.
   Stu was on his way up to the power station the next morning when he saw Susan and Dayna headed down Canyon Boulevard on a pair of cycles. He waved and they pulled over. He thought he had never seen Dayna looking prettier. Her hair was tied behind her with a bright green silk scarf, and she was wearing a rawhide coat open over jeans and a chambray shirt. A bedroll was strapped on behind her.
   “Stuart!” she cried, and waved to him, smiling.
   Lesbian? he thought doubtfully.
   “I understand you’re off on a little trip,” he said.
   “For sure. And you never saw me.”
   “Nope,” Stu said. “Never did. Smoke?”
   Dayna took a Marlboro and cupped her hands over his match.
   “You be careful, girl.”
   “I will.”
   “And get back.”
   “I hope to.”
   They looked at each other in the bright late-summer morning.
   “You take care of Frannie, big fella.”
   “I will.”
   “And go easy on the marshaling.”
   “That I know I can do.”
   She cast the cigarette away. “What do you say, Suze?”
   Susan nodded and put her bike in gear, smiling a strained smile.
   “Dayna?”
   She looked at him, and Stu planted a soft kiss on her mouth.
   “Good luck.”
   She smiled. “You have to do it twice for really good luck. Didn’t you know that?”
   He kissed her again, more slowly and thoroughly this time. Lesbian? he wondered again.
   “Frannie’s a lucky woman,” Dayna said. “And you can quote me.”
   Smiling, not really knowing what to say, Stu stepped back and said nothing at all. Two blocks up, one of the lumbering orange Burial Committee trucks rumbled through the intersection like an omen and the moment was broken.
   “Let’s go, kid,” Dayna said. “Get-em-up-Scout.”
   They drove off, and Stu stood on the curbing and watched them.
   Sue Stern was back two days later. She had watched Dayna moving west from Colorado Springs, she said, had watched her until she was nothing but a speck that merged with the great still landscape. Then she had cried a little. The first night Sue had made camp at Monument, and had awakened in the small hours, chilled by a low whining sound that seemed to be coming from a culvert that traveled beneath the farm road she had camped by.