She looked at Stu. "And he's my link with the old world. He looks more like Jess than me, and I'm glad. That seems right. Do you understand, love?"
Stu nodded, and a strange thought occurred to him--how much he would like to sit down with Hap and Norm Bruett and Vic Palfrey and have a beer with them and watch Vic make one of his shitty-smelling home-rolled cigarettes, and tell them how all of this had come out. They had always called him Silent Stu; ole Stu, they said, wouldn't say "shit" if he had a mouthful. But he would talk their ears off their heads. He would talk all night and all day. He grasped Fran's hand blindly, feeling the sting of tears.
"We've got rounds to make," George said, getting up, "but we'll be monitoring Peter closely, Fran. You'll know for sure when we know for sure."
"When could I nurse him? If ... If he doesn't ... ?"
"A week," Dan said.
"But that's so long!"
"It's going to be long for all of us. We've got sixty-one pregnant women in the Zone, and nine of them conceived before the superflu. It's going to be especially long for them. Stu? It was good meeting you." Dan held out his hand and Stu shook it. He left quickly, a man with a necessary job to do and anxious to do it.
George shook Stu's hand and said, "I'll see you by tomorrow afternoon at the latest, hum? Just tell Laurie when would be the most convenient time for you."
"What for?"
"The leg," George said. "It's bad, isn't it?"
"Not too bad."
"Stu?" Frannie said, sitting up. "What's wrong with your leg?"
"Broken, badly set, overtaxed," George said. "Nasty. But it can be fixed."
"Well ..." Stu said.
"Well, nothing! Let me see it, Stuart!" The I-want line was back.
"Later," Stu said.
George got up. "See Laurie, all right?"
"He will," Frannie said.
Stu grinned. "I will. Boss lady says so."
"It's very good to have you back," George said. A thousand questions seemed to stop just behind his lips. He shook his head slightly and then left, closing the door firmly behind him.
"Let me see you walk," Frannie said. The I-want line still creased her brow.
"Hey, Frannie--"
"Come on, let me see you walk."
He walked for her. It was a little like watching a sailor make his way across a pitching foredeck. When he turned back to her, she was crying.
"Oh, Frannie, don't do that, honey."
"I have to," she said, and put her hands over her face.
He sat beside her and took her hands away. "No. No, you don't."
She looked at him nakedly, her tears still flowing. "So many people dead ... Harold, Nick, Susan ... and what about Larry? What about Glen and Ralph?"
"I don't know."
"And what's Lucy going to say? She'll be here in an hour. She comes every day, and she's four months pregnant herself. Stu, when she asks you ..."
"They died over there," Stu said, speaking more to himself than to her. "That's what I think. What I know, in my heart."
"Don't say it that way," Fran begged. "Not when Lucy gets here. It will break her heart if you do."
"I think they were the sacrifice. God always asks for a sacrifice. His hands are bloody with it. Why? I can't say. I'm not a very smart man. P'raps we brought it on ourselves. All I know for sure is that the bomb went off over there instead of over here and we're safe for a while. For a little while."
"Is Flagg gone? Really gone?"
"I don't know. I think ... we'll have to stand a watch for him. And in time, someone will have to find the place where they made the germs like Captain Trips and fill that place up with dirt and seed the ground with salt and then pray over it. Pray for all of us."
Much later that evening, not long before midnight, Stu pushed her down the silent hospital corridor in a wheelchair. Laurie Constable walked with them, and Fran had seen to it that Stu had made his appointment.
"You look like you're the one that should be in that wheelchair, Stu Redman," Laurie said.
"Right now it doesn't bother me at all," Stu said.
They came to a large glass window that looked in on a room done in blues and pinks. A large mobile hung from the ceiling. Only one crib was occupied, in the front row.
Stu stared in, fascinated.
GOLDSMITH-REDMAN, PETER, the card at the front of the crib read. BOY. B.W. 6 LB. 9 OZ. M. FRANCES GOLDSMITH, RM. 209 F. JESSE RIDER (D.).
Peter was crying.
His small hands were balled into fists. His face was red. There was an amazing swatch of dark black hair on his head. His eyes were blue and they seemed to look directly into Stu's eyes, as if accusing him of being the author of all his misery.
His forehead was creased with a deep vertical slash ... an I-want line.
Frannie was crying again.
"Frannie, what's wrong?"
"All those empty cribs," she said, and her voice became a sob. "That's what's wrong. He's all alone in there. No wonder he's crying, Stu, he's all alone. All those empty cribs, my God--"
"He won't be alone for very long," Stu said, and put an arm around her shoulders. "And he looks to me as if he's going to bear up just fine. Don't you think so, Laurie?"
But Laurie had left the two of them alone in front of the nursery window.
Wincing at the pain in his leg, Stu knelt beside Frannie and hugged her clumsily, and they looked in at Peter in mutual wonder, as if the child were the first that had ever been gotten upon the earth. After a bit Peter fell asleep, small hands clenched together on his chest, and still they watched him ... and wondered that he should be there at all.
CHAPTER 78
MAYDAY
They had finally put the winter behind them.
It had been long, and to Stu, with his East Texas background, it had seemed fantastically hard. Two days after his return to Boulder, his right leg had been rebroken and reset and this time encased in a heavy plaster cast that had not come off until early April. By then the cast had begun to look like some incredibly complex roadmap; it seemed that everyone in the Zone had autographed it, although that was a patent impossibility. The pilgrims had begun to trickle in again by the first of March, and by the day that had been the cut-off for income tax returns in the old world, the Free Zone was nearly eleven thousand strong, according to Sandy DuChiens, who now headed a Census Bureau of a dozen persons, a bureau that had its own computer terminal at the First Bank of Boulder.
Now he and Fran stood with Lucy Swann in the picnic area halfway up Flagstaff Mountain and watched the Mayday Chase. All the Zone's children appeared to be involved (and not a few of the adults). The original maybasket, bedecked with crepe ribbons and filled with fruit and toys, had been hung on Tom Cullen. It had been Fran's idea.
Tom had caught Bill Gehringer (despite Billy's self-conscious disclaimer that he was too old for such kid games, he had joined with a will), and together they had caught the Upshaw boy--or was it Upson? Stu had trouble keeping them all straight--and the three of them had tracked down Leo Rockway hiding behind Brentner Rock. Tom himself had put the tag on Leo.
The chase ranged back and forth over West Boulder, gangs of kids and adolescents surging up and down the streets that were still mostly empty, Tom bellowing and carrying his basket. And at last it led back up here, where the sun was hot and the wind blew warm. The band of tagged children was some two hundred strong, and they were still in the process of tracking down the last half dozen or so that were still "out." In the process they were scaring up dozens of deer that wanted no part of the game.
Two miles farther up, at Sunrise Amphitheater, a huge picnic lunch had been spread where Harold Lauder had once waited for just the right moment to speak into his walkie-talkie. At noon, two or three thousand people would sit down together and look east toward Denver and eat venison and deviled eggs and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and fresh pie for dessert. It might be the last mass gathering the Zone would ever have, unless they all went down to Denver and got together in the stadium where the Broncos had once played football. Now, on Mayday, the trickle of early spring had swelled to a flood of immigrants. Since April 15 another eight thousand had come in, and they were now nineteen thousand or so--temporarily at least, Sandy's Census Bureau could not keep up. A day when only five hundred came in was a rare day.
In the playpen which Stu had brought up and covered with a blanket, Peter began to cry lustily. Fran moved toward him, but Lucy, mountainous and eight months pregnant, was there first.
"I warn you," Fran said, "it's his diapers. I can tell just by the way he sounds."
"Looking at a little poo isn't going to cross my eyes." Lucy lifted an indignantly crying Peter from the playpen and shook him gently back and forth in the sunlight. "Hi, baby. What you doing? Not too much?"
Peter blatted.
Lucy set him down on another blanket they had brought up for a changing table. Peter began to crawl away, still blatting. Lucy turned him over and began to unsnap his blue corduroy pants. Peter's legs waved in the air.
"Why don't you two go for a walk?" Lucy said. She smiled at Fran, but Stu thought the smile was sad.
"Why don't we do just that?" Fran agreed, and took Stu's arm.
Stu allowed himself to be walked away. They crossed the road and entered a mild green pasture that climbed upward at a steep angle under the moving white clouds and bright blue sky.
"What was that about?" Stu asked.
"Pardon me?" But Fran looked just a trifle too innocent.
"That look."
"What look?"
"I know a look when I see one," Stu said. "I may not know what it means, but I know it when I see it."
"Sit down with me, Stu." "Like that, is it?"
They sat down and looked east where the land fell away in a series of swoops to flatlands that faded into a blue haze. Nebraska was out there in that haze somewhere.
"It's serious. And I don't know how to talk to you about it, Stuart."
"Well, you just go on the best you can," he said, and took her hand.
Instead of speaking, Fran's face began to work. A tear spilled down her cheek and her mouth drew down, trembling.
"Fran--"
"No, I won't cry!" she said angrily, and then there were more tears, and she cried hard in spite of herself. Bewildered, Stu put an arm around her and waited.
When the worst seemed to be over, he said: "Now tell me. What's this about?"
"I'm homesick, Stu. I want to go back to Maine."
Behind them, the children whooped and yelled. Stu looked at her, utterly flabbergasted. Then he grinned a little uncertainly. "That's it? I thought you must have decided to divorce me, at the very least. Not that we've ever actually had the benefit of the clergy, as they say."
"I won't go anyplace without you," she said. She had taken a Kleenex from her breast pocket and was wiping her eyes with it. "Don't you know that?"
"I guess I do."
"But I want to go back to Maine. I dream about it. Don't you ever dream about East Texas, Stu? Arnette?"
"No," he said truthfully. "I could live just as long and die just as happy if I never saw Arnette again. Did you want to go to Ogunquit, Frannie?"
"Eventually, maybe. But not right away. I'd want to go to western Maine, what they called the Lakes Region. You were almost there when Harold and I met you in New Hampshire. There are some beautiful places, Stu. Bridgton ... Sweden ... Castle Rock. The lakes would be jumping with fish, I'd imagine. In time, we might settle on the coast, I suppose. But I couldn't face that the first year. Too many memories. It would be too big at first. The sea would be too big." She looked down at her nervously plucking hands. "If you want to stay here ... help them get it going ... I'll understand. The mountains are beautiful, too, but ... it just doesn't seem like home."
He looked east and discovered he could at last name something he had felt stirring around in himself since the snow had begun to melt: an urge to move on. There were too many people here; they weren't exactly stepping all over each other, at least not yet, but they were beginning to make him feel nervous. There were Zoners (and so they had begun to call themselves) who could cope with that sort of thing, who actually seemed to relish it. Jack Jackson, who headed the new Free Zone Committee (now expanded to nine members), was one. Brad Kitchner was another--Brad had a hundred projects going, and all the warm bodies he could use to help with each of them. It had been his idea to get one of the Denver TV stations going. It showed old movies every night from 6 to 1 A.M., with a ten-minute news broadcast at nine o'clock.
And the man who had taken over the marshaling chore in Stu's absence, Hugh Petrella, was not the sort of man Stu much cottoned to. The very fact that Petrella had campaigned for the job made Stu feel uneasy. He was a hard, puritanical fellow with a face that looked as if it had been carved by licks of a hatchet. He had seventeen deputies and was pushing for more at each Free Zone Committee meeting--if Glen had been here, Stu thought he would have said that the endless American struggle between the law and freedom of the individual had begun again. Petrella was not a bad man, but he was a hard man ... and Stu supposed that with Hugh's sure belief that the law was the final answer to every problem, he made a better marshal than Stu himself ever would have been.
"I know you've been offered a spot on the committee," Fran was saying hesitantly.
"I got the feeling that was an honorary thing, didn't you?"
Fran looked relieved. "Well ..."
"I got the idea they'd be just as happy if I turned it down. I'm the last holdover from the old committee. And we were a crisis committee. Now there's no crisis. What about Peter, Frannie?"
"I think he'll be old enough to travel by June," she said. "And I'd like to wait until Lucy has her baby."
There had been eighteen births in the Zone since Peter had come into the world on January 4. Four had died; the rest were just fine. The babies born of the plague-immune parents would begin to arrive very soon, and it was entirely possible that Lucy's would be the first. She was due on June 14.
"What would you think about leaving on July first?" he asked.
Fran's face lit up. "You will! You want to?"
"Sure."
"You're not just saying that to please me?"
"No," he said. "Other people will be leaving too. Not many, not for a while. But some."
She flung her arms around his neck and hugged him. "Maybe it will just be a vacation," she said. "Or maybe ... maybe we'll really like it." She looked at him timidly. "Maybe we'll want to stay."
He nodded. "Maybe so." But he wondered if either of them would be content to stay in one place for any run of years.
He looked over at Lucy and Peter. Lucy was sitting on the blanket and bouncing Peter up and down. He was giggling and trying to catch Lucy's nose.
"Have you thought that he might get sick? And you. What if you catch pregnant again?"
She smiled. "There are books. We can both read them. We can't live our lives afraid, can we?"
"No, I suppose not."
"Books and good drugs. We can learn to use them, and as for the drugs that have gone over ... we can learn to make them again. When it comes to getting sick and dying ..." She looked back toward the large meadow where the last of the children were walking toward the picnic area, sweaty and winded. "That's going to happen here, too. Remember Rich Moffat?" He nodded. "And Shirley Hammett?"
"Yes." Shirley had died of a stroke in February.
Frannie took his hands. Her eyes were bright and shining with determination. "I say we take our chances and live our lives the way we want."
"All right. That sounds good to me. That sounds right."
"I love you, East Texas."
"That goes back to you, ma'am."
Peter had begun to cry again.
"Let's go see what's wrong with the emperor," she said, getting up and brushing grass from her slacks.
"He tried to crawl and bumped his nose," Lucy said, handing Peter to Fran. "Poor baby."
"Poor baby," Fran agreed, and put Peter on her shoulder. He laid his head familiarly against her neck, looked at Stu, and smiled. Stu smiled back.
"Peek, baby," he said, and Peter laughed.
Lucy looked from Fran to Stu and back to Fran again. "You're going, aren't you? You talked him into it."
"I guess she did," Stu said. "We'll stick around long enough to see which flavor you get, though."
"I'm glad," Lucy said.
From far off, a bell began to clang in strong musical notes which seemed to beat themselves into the day.
"Lunch," Lucy said, getting up. She patted her gigantic belly. "Hear that, junior? We're going to eat. Ow, don't kick, I'm going."
Stu and Fran got up, too. "Here, you take the boy," Fran said.
Peter had gone to sleep. The three of them walked up the hill to Sunrise Amphitheater together.
DUSK, OF A SUMMER EVENING
They sat on the porch as the sun went down and watched Peter as he crawled enthusiastically through the dust of the yard. Stu was in a chair with a caned seat; the caning had been belled downward by years of use. Sitting at his left was Fran, in the rocker. In the yard, to Peter's left, the doughnut-shaped shadow of the tire swing printed its depthless image on the ground in the day's kind last light.
"She lived here a long time, didn't she?" Fran asked softly.
"Long and long," Stu agreed, and pointed at Peter. "He's gettin all dirty."
"There's water. She had a hand-pump. All it takes is priming. All the conveniences, Stuart."
He nodded and said no more. He lit his pipe, taking long puffs. Peter turned around to make sure they were still there.
"Hi, baby," Stu said, and waved.
Peter fell over. He got back up on his hands and knees and began to creep around in a large circle again. Standing at the end of the dirt road that cut through the wild corn was a small Winnebago camper with a winch attachment on the front. They were sticking to secondary roads, but the winch had still come in handy again and again.
"Are you lonely?" Fran asked.
"No. I may be, in time."
"Scared about the baby?" She patted her stomach, which was still perfectly flat.
"Nope."
"It's going to put a scab on Pete's nose."
"It'll fall off. And Lucy had twins." He smiled at the sky. "Can you imagine it?"
"I saw them. Seeing's believing, they say. When do you think we'll b