The Stand

“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?”