The Stand

  "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 tearstreaked. "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 comer, 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, stem 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 stu
ff 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 comer 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 brought 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.