The Stand

was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn’t get with child, but a woman could—every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath. Liberation —that one word said it all. Before civilization, with its careful and merciful system of protections, women had been slaves. Let us not gild the lily; slaves was what we were, Fran thought. Then the evil days ended. And the Women’s Credo, which should have been hung in the offices of Ms. magazine, preferably in needlepoint, was just this: Thank you, Men, for the railroads. Thank you, Men, for inventing the automobile and killing the red Indians who thought it might be nice to hold on to America for a while longer, since they were here first. Thank you, Men, for the hospitals, the police, the schools. Now I’d like to vote, please, and have the right to set my own course and make my own destiny. Once I was chattel, but now that is obsolete. My days of slavery must be over; I need to be a slave no more than I need to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny boat with sails. Jet planes are safer and quicker than little boats with sails and freedom makes more sense than slavery. I am not afraid of flying. Thank you, Men.

And what was there to say? Nothing. The rednecks could grunt about burning bras, the reactionaries could play intellectual little games, but the truth only smiles. Now all that had changed, in a matter of weeks it had changed—how much only time would tell. But lying here in the night, she knew that she needed a man. Oh God, she badly needed a man.

Nor was it all a matter of preserving herself and her baby, of looking out for number one (and, she supposed, number two). Stu attracted her, especially after Jess Rider. Stu was calm, capable, and most of all he was not what her father would have called “twenty pounds of bullshit in a ten-pound bag.”

He was attracted to her as well. She knew that perfectly well, had known it since that first lunch together on the Fourth of July in that deserted restaurant. For a moment—just one moment—their eyes had met and there had been that instant of heat, like a power surge when all the needles swing over to overload. She guessed Stu knew how things were, too, but he was waiting on her, letting her make her decision in her own time. She had been with Harold first, therefore she was Harold’s chattel. A stinking macho idea, but she was afraid this was going to be a stinking macho world again, at least for a while.

If only there was someone else, someone for Harold, but there wasn’t, and she was afraid she could not wait long. She thought of the day Harold, in his clumsy way, had tried to make love to her, to make his claim of ownership irrevocable. How long ago? Two weeks? It seemed longer. All the past seemed longer now. It had pulled out like warm Bonomo’s Turkish taffy. Between her worry of what to do about Harold—and her fears of what he might do if she did go to Stuart—and her fears of the dreams, she would never get to sleep.

So thinking, she drifted off.

When she woke up, it was still dark. Someone was shaking her.

She muttered some protest—her sleep had been restful and without dreams for the first time in a week—and then came reluctantly out of it, thinking that it must be morning, and time to get going. But why would they want to get going in the dark? As she sat up, she saw that even the moon was down.

It was Harold shaking her, and Harold looked scared.

“Harold? Is something wrong?”

Stu was also up, she saw. And Glen Bateman. Perion was kneeling on the far side of the place where their small fire had been.

“It’s Mark,” Harold said. “He’s sick.”

“Sick?” she said, and then a low moan came from the other side of the campfire’s ashes, where Perion was kneeling and the two men were standing. Frannie felt dread rise up inside her like a black column. Sickness was the thing they were all most afraid of.

“It isn’t… the flu, is it, Harold?” Because if Mark came down with a belated case of Captain Trips, that meant any of them could. Perhaps the germ was still hanging around. Perhaps it had even mutated. The better to feed on you, my dear.

“No, it’s not the flu. It’s nothing like the flu. Fran, did you eat any of the canned oysters tonight? Or maybe when we stopped for lunch?”

She tried to think, her mind still fuzzy with sleep. “Yes, I had some both times,” she said. “They tasted fine. I love oysters. Is it food poisoning? Is that what it is?”

“Fran, I’m just asking. None of us know what it is. There isn’t a doctor in the house. How do you feel? Do you feel all right?”

“Fine, just sleepy.” But she wasn’t. Not anymore. Another groan floated over from the other side of the camp, as if Mark were accusing her of feeling well while he did not.

Harold said, “Glen thinks it might be his appendix.”

“What? ”

Harold only grinned sickly and nodded.

Fran got up and walked across to where the others were gathered. Harold trailed her like an unhappy shadow.

“We’ve got to help him,” Perion said. She spoke mechanically, as if she had said it many times before. Her eyes went from one of them to the next relentlessly, eyes so full of terror and helplessness that Frannie once again felt accused. Her thoughts went selfishly to the baby she was carrying and she tried to push the thoughts away. Inappropriate or not, they wouldn’t go. Get away from him, part of her screamed at the rest of her. You get away from him right now, he might be catching. She looked at Glen, who was pale and old-looking in the steady glow of the Coleman lantern.

“Harold says you think it’s his appendix?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Glen said, sounding upset and scared. “He’s got the symptoms, certainly; he’s feverish, his belly is hard and swelled, painful to touch—”

“We’ve got to help him,” Perion said again, and burst into tears.

Glen touched Mark’s belly and Mark’s eyes, which had been half-lidded and glazed, opened wide. He screamed. Glen jerked his hand away as if he had put it on a hot stove and looked from Stu to Harold and then back to Stu again with barely concealed panic. “What would you two gentlemen suggest?”

Harold stood with his throat working convulsively, as if something was stuck in there, and choking him. At last he blurted, “Give him some aspirin.”

Perion, who had been gazing down at Mark through her tears, now whirled to look at Harold. “Aspirin?” she asked. Her tone was one of furious astonishment. “Aspirin? ” This time she shrieked it. “Is that the best you can do with all your big-talk smartassery? Aspirin? ”

Harold stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked at her miserably, accepting the rebuke.

Stu said very quietly, “But Harold’s right, Perion. For now, aspirin’s just about the best we can do. What time is it?”

“You don’t know what to do!” she screamed at them. “Why don’t you just admit it?”

“It’s quarter of three,” Frannie said.

“What if he dies?” Peri pushed a sheaf of dark auburn hair away from her face, which was puffed from crying.

“Leave them alone, Peri,” Mark said in a dull, tired voice. It startled them all. “They’ll do what they can. If it goes on hurting as bad as this, I think I’d father be dead anyway. Give me some aspirin. Anything.”

“I’ll get it,” Harold said, eager to be away. “There’s some in my knapsack. Extra Strength Excedrin,” he added, as if hoping for their approval, and then he went for it nearly scuttling in his hurry.

“We’ve got to help him,” Perion said, returning to her old scripture.

Stu drew Glen and Frannie off to one side.

“Any ideas on what to do about this?” he asked them quietly. “I don’t have any, I can tell you. She was mad at Harold, but his aspirin idea was just about twice as good as any I’ve had.”

“She’s upset, that’s all,” Fran said.

Glen sighed. “Maybe it’s just his bowels. Too much roughage. Maybe he’ll have a good movement and it’ll clear up.”