The Stand

As she was buttoning her blouse, Laurie said quietly: “I envy you, you know. Uncertainty and all. Dick and I had been trying to make a baby like mad. It’s really funny—I was the one who used to wear a ZERO POPULATION button to work. It meant zero population growth, of course, but when I think about that button now, it gives me a really creepy feeling. Oh, Frannie, yours is going to be the first. And I know it will be all right. It has to be.”

Fran only smiled and nodded, not wanting to remind Laurie that hers would not be the first.

Mrs. Wentworth’s twins had been the first.

And Mrs. Wentworth’s twins had died.

“Fine,” George said half an hour later.

Fran raised her eyebrows, thinking for a moment he had mispronounced her name. For no good reason she remembered that until the third grade little Mikey Post from down the street had called her Fan.

“The baby. It’s fine.”

Fran found a Kleenex and held it tightly. “I felt it move… but that was some time ago. Nothing since then. I was afraid…”

“It’s alive, all right, but I really doubt if you felt it move, you know. More likely a little intestinal gas.”

“It was the baby,” Fran said quietly.

“Well, whether it did or not, it’s going to move a lot in the future. I’ve got you pegged for early to mid-January. How does that sound?”

“Fine.”

“Are you eating right?”

“Yes, I think so—trying hard, anyway.”

“Good. No nausea now?”

“A little at first, but it’s passed.”

“Lovely. Getting plenty of exercise?”

For a nightmare instant she saw herself digging her father’s grave. She blinked the vision away. That had been another life. “Yes, plenty.”

“Have you gained any weight?”

“About five pounds.”

“That’s all right. You can have another twelve; I’m feeling generous today.”

She grinned. “You’re the doctor.”

“Yes, and I used to be an OB man, so you’re in the right place. Take your doctor’s advice and you’ll go far. Now, concerning bicycles, motorbikes, and mopeds. All of them a no-no after November fifteenth, let’s say. No one’s going to be riding them by then anyway. Too damn cold. Don’t smoke or drink to excess, do you?”

“No.”

“If you want a nightcap once in a while, I think that’s perfectly okay. I’m going to put you on a vitamin supplement; you can pick it up at any drugstore in town—”

Frannie burst into laughter, and George smiled uncertainly.

“Did I say something funny?”

“No. It just came out funny under the circumstances.”

“Oh! Yes, I see. Well, at least there won’t be any more complaining about high drug prices, will there? One last thing, Fran. Have you ever been fitted with an intrauterine device… an IUD?”

“No, why?” Fran asked, and then she happened to think of her dream: the dark man with his coathanger. She shuddered. “No,” she said again.

“Good. That’s it.” He stood up. “I won’t tell you not to worry—”

“No,” she agreed. The laughter was gone from her eyes. “Don’t do that.”

“But I will ask you to keep it to a minimum. Excess anxiety in the mother can lead to glandular imbalance. And that’s not good for the baby. I don’t like to prescribe tranquilizers for pregnant women, but if you think—”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” Fran said, but going out into the hot midday sunshine, she knew that the entire second half of her pregnancy was going to be haunted by thoughts of Mrs. Wentworth’s vanished twins.

On the twenty-ninth of August three groups came in, one with twenty-two members, one with sixteen, and one with twenty-five. Sandy DuChiens got around to see all seven members of the committee and tell them that the Free Zone now had over one thousand residents.

Boulder no longer seemed such a ghost town.

On the evening of the thirtieth, Nadine Cross stood in the basement of Harold’s house, watching him and feeling uneasy.

When Harold was doing something that didn’t involve having some sort of strange sex with her, he seemed to go away to his own private place where she had no control over him. When he was in that place he seemed cold; more than that, he seemed contemptuous of her and even of himself. The only thing that didn’t change was his hate of Stuart Redman and the others on the committee.

There was a dead air-hockey game in the basement and Harold was working on its pinholed surface. There was an open book beside him. On the facing page was a diagram. He would look at the diagram for a while, then look at the apparatus he was working on, and then he would do something to it. Spread out neatly by his right hand were the tools from his Triumph motorcycle kit. Little snips of wire littered the air-hockey table.

“You know,” he said absently, “you ought to take a walk.”

“Why?” She felt a trifle hurt. Harold’s face was tense and unsmiling. Nadine could understand why Harold smiled as much as he did: because when he stopped, he looked insane. She suspected that he was insane, or very nearly.

“Because I don’t know how old this dynamite is,” Harold said.

“What do you mean?”

“Old dynamite sweats, dear heart,” he said, and looked up at her. She saw that his entire face was running with sweat, as if to prove his point. “It perspires, to be perfectly couth. And what it perspires is pure nitroglycerin, one of the world’s great unstable substances. So if it’s old, there’s a very good chance that this little Science Fair project could blow us right over the top of Flagstaff Mountain and all the way to the Land of Oz.”

“Well, you don’t have to sound so snotty about it,” Nadine said.

“Nadine? Ma chere? ”

“What?”

Harold looked at her calmly and without smiling. “Shut your fucking trap.”

She did, but she didn’t take a walk, although she wanted to. Surely if this was Flagg’s will (and the planchette had told her that Harold was Flagg’s way of taking care of the committee), the dynamite wouldn’t be old. And even if it was old, it wouldn’t explode until it was supposed to… would it? Just how much control over events did Flagg have?

Enough, she told herself, he has enough. But she wasn’t sure, and she was increasingly uneasy. She had been back to her house and Joe was gone—gone for good this time. She had gone to see Lucy, and had borne the cold reception long enough to learn that since she had moved in with Harold, Joe (Lucy, of course, called him Leo) had “slipped back some.” Lucy obviously blamed her for that, too… but if an avalanche came rumbling down from Flagstaff Mountain or an earthquake ripped Pearl Street apart, Lucy would probably blame her for those things, too. Not that there wouldn’t be enough to blame on her and Harold very soon. Still, she had been bitterly disappointed not to have seen Joe once more… to kiss him goodbye. She and Harold were not going to be in the Boulder Free Zone much longer.

Never mind, best you let him go completely now that you’re embarked on this obscenity. You’d only be doing him harm… and possibly harm to yourself as well, because Joe… sees things, knows things. Let him stop being Joe, let me stop being Nadine-mom. Let him go back to being Leo, forever.

But the paradox in that was inexorable. She could not believe that any of these Zone people had more than a year’s life left in them, and that included the boy. It was not his will that they should live…

…so tell the truth, it isn’t just Harold who is his instrument. It’s you too. You, who once defined the single unforgivable sin in the postplague world as murder, as the taking of a single life…