“Well, no,” Ralph conceded. “But Harold had a real good idea.”
Stu’s eyes shifted. “How you doing, Harold?”
“Pretty good. You?”
“Fine.”
“And Fran? You watching out for her?” Harold’s eyes didn’t waver from Stu’s, and they kept their slightly humorous, pleasant light, but Stu had a momentary feeling that Harold’s smiling eyes were like sunshine on the water of Brakeman’s Quarry back home—the water looked so pleasant, but it went down and down to black depths where the sun had never reached, and four boys had lost their lives in pleasant-looking Brakeman’s Quarry over the years.
“As best I can,” he said. “What’s your thought, Harold?”
“Well, look. I see Nick’s point. Glen’s, too. They recognize that the Free Zone sees Mother Abagail as a theocratic symbol… and they’re pretty close to speaking for the Zone now, aren’t they?”
Stu sipped his coffee. “What do you mean, ‘theocratic symbol’?”
“I’d call it an earthly symbol of a covenant made with God,” Harold said, and his eyes veiled a little. “Like Holy Communion, or the Sacred Cows of India.”
Stu kindled a little at that. “Yeah, pretty good. Those cows… they let em walk the streets and cause traffic jams, right? They can go in and out of the stores, or decide to leave town altogether.”
“Yes,” Harold agreed. “But most of those cows are sick, Stu. They’re always near the point of starvation. Some are tubercular. And all because they’re an aggregate symbol. The people are convinced God will take care of them, just as our people are convinced God will take care of Mother Abagail. But I have my own doubts about a God that says it’s right to let a poor dumb cow wander around in pain.”
Ralph looked momentarily uncomfortable, and Stu knew what he was feeling. He felt it himself, and it gave him a way to measure how he felt about Mother Abagail himself. He felt that Harold was edging into blasphemy.
“Anyway,” Harold said briskly, dismissing the Sacred Cows of India, “we can’t change the way people feel about her—”
“And wouldn’t want to,” Ralph added quickly.
“Right!” Harold exclaimed. “After all, she brought us together, and not exactly by shortwave, either. My idea was that we mount our trusty cycles and spend the afternoon reconnoitering the west side of Boulder. If we stay fairly close, we can keep in touch with each other by walkie-talkie.”
Stu was nodding. This was the sort of thing he had wanted to do all along. Sacred Cows or not, God or not, it just wasn’t right to leave her to wander around on her own. That didn’t have anything to do with religion; something like that was just callous disregard.
“And if we find her,” Harold said, “we can ask her if she wants anything.”
“Like a ride back to town,” Ralph chipped in.
“At least we can keep tabs on her,” Harold said.
“Okay,” Stu said. “I think it’s a helluva good idea, Harold. Just let me leave a note for Fran.”
But as he scribbled the note, he kept feeling an urge to look back over his shoulder at Harold—to see what Harold was doing while Stu wasn’t looking, and what expression might be in Harold’s eyes.
Harold had asked for and gotten the twisting stretch of road between Boulder and Nederland, because he considered it to be the least likely area. He didn’t think
Now, at a quarter to seven, he was on his way back. His Honda was parked in a rest area and he was sitting at a picnic table, having a Coke and a few Slim Jims. The walkie-talkie that hung over the Honda’s handlebars with its antenna at full extension crackled faintly with Ralph Brentner’s voice. They were short-range radios only, and Ralph was somewhere up on Flagstaff Mountain.
“… Sunrise Amphitheater… no sign of her… storm’s over up here.”
Then Stu’s voice, stronger and closer. He was in Chautauqua Park, only four miles from Harold’s location. “Say again, Ralph.”
Ralph’s voice came back, really bellowing. Maybe he would give himself a stroke. That would be a lovely way to end the day. “No sign of her up here! I’m going down before it gets dark! Over!”
“Ten-four,” Stu said, sounding discouraged. “Harold, you there?” Harold got up, wiping Slim Jim grease on his jeans. “Harold? Calling Harold Lauder! You copy, Harold?”
Harold pointed his middle finger—yer fuckfinger, as the high school Neanderthals back in Ogunquit had called it—at the walkie-talkie; then he depressed the talk button and said pleasantly, but with just the right note of discouragement: “I’m here. I was off to one side… thought I saw something down in the ditch. It was just an old jacket. Over.”
“Yeah, okay. Why don’t you come down to Chautauqua, Harold? We’ll wait there for Ralph.”
Love to give orders, don’t you, suckhole? I might have something for you. Yes, I just might.
“Harold, you copy?”
“Yes. Sorry, Stu, I was woolgathering. I can be there in fifteen minutes.”
“
“Roger, you’ll be at Chautauqua Park,” Ralph’s voice came faintly through the roar of static. “I’m on my way. Over and out.”
“I’m on my way, too,” Harold said. “Over and out.”
He turned off the walkie-talkie, collapsed the antenna, and hung the radio on the handlebars again, but he sat astride the Honda for a moment without operating the kickstarter. He was wearing an army surplus flak jacket; the heavy padding was good when you were riding a cycle above six thousand feet, even in August. But the jacket served another purpose. It had a great many zippered pockets and in one of these was a Smith & Wesson .38. Harold took the pistol out and turned it over and over in his hands. It was fully loaded and it was heavy in his hands, as if it realized its purposes were grave ones: death, destruction, assassination.
Tonight?
Why not?
He had initiated this expedition on the chance that he might be alone with Stu long enough to do it. Now it looked as though he was going to have that chance, at Chautauqua Park, in less than fifteen minutes. But the trip had served another purpose, as well.
He hadn’t meant to go all the way to Nederland, a miserable little town nestled high above Boulder, a town whose only claim to fame was that Patty Hearst had once allegedly stayed there during her time as a fugitive. But as he drove up and up, the Honda purring smoothly between his legs, the air as cold as a blunt razorblade against his face, something had happened.
If you put a magnet on one end of a table and a steel slug on the other, nothing happens. If you move the slug closer to the magnet in slow increments of distance (he held this image in his mind for a moment, savoring it, reminding himself to put it in his diary when he entered tonight), a time will come when the shove you give the slug seems to propel it farther than it should. The slug stops, but it seems to do so reluctantly, as if it has come alive, and part of its liveliness is a resentment of the physical law which deals with inertia. Another little push or two and you can almost—or perhaps even actually—see the slug trembling on the table, seeming to jitter and vibrate slightly, like one of those Mexican jumping beans you can buy in novelty shops, the ones which look like knuckle-sized knots of wood but which actually have a live worm inside. One more push and the balance between friction/inertia and the attraction of the magnet begins to tip the other way. The slug, wholly alive now, moves on its own, faster and faster, until it finally smacks into the magnet and sticks there.
Horrible, fascinating process.
When the world had ended this June, the force of magnetism had still not been understood, although Harold thought (his mind had never been of the rational-scientific bent) that the physicists who studied such things thought it was intimately entwined with the phenomenon of gravity, and that gravity was the keystone of the universe.
On his way to Nederland, moving west, moving
