“I’m. Real. Happy. To be. Here,” Brad began in a trembling monotone. He looked as if he would have been happier anywhere else, even at the South Pole, addressing a penguin convention. “The… ah…” He paused, examining his notes, and then brightened. “The power!” he exclaimed with the air of a man making a great discovery. “The power is almost on. Right.”
He fumbled with his notes some more and then went on.
“We had two of the generators going yesterday, and as you know, one of them overloaded and blew its cookies. So to speak. What I mean is that it overlooked. Overloaded, rather. Well… you know what I mean.”
A chuckle ran through them, and it seemed to put Brad a little more at ease.
“That happened because when the plague hit, a lot of stuff got left on and we didn’t have the rest of the generators on to take the overload. We can take care of the overload danger by turning on the rest of the generators—even three or four would have absorbed the load easily—but that isn’t going to solve the fire danger. So we’ve got to get everything shut off that we can. Stove burners, electric blankets, all that stuff. In fact, I was thinking like this: The quickest way might be to go into every house where no one lives and just pull all the fuses or turn off the main breaker switches. See? Now, when we get ready to turn on, I think we ought to take some elementary fire precautions. I went to the liberty of checking out the fire station in East Boulder, and…”
The fire snapped comfortably. It’s going to be all right, Fran thought. Harold and Nadine have taken off without any prompting, and maybe that’s best. It solves the problem and Stu is safe from them. Poor Harold, I felt sorry for you, but in the end I felt more fear than pity. The pity is still there, and I’m afraid of what may happen to you, but I’m glad your house is empty and you and Nadine have gone. I’m glad you’ve left us in peace.
Harold sat atop a graffiti-inlaid picnic table like something out of a lunatic’s Zen handbook. His legs were crossed. His eyes were far, hazy, contemplative. He had gone to that cold and alien place where Nadine could not follow and she was frightened. In his hands he held the twin of the walkie-talkie in the shoebox. The mountains fell away in front of them in breathtaking ledges and pine-choked ravines. Miles to the east—maybe ten, maybe forty —the land smoothed into the American Midwest and marched away to the dim blue horizon. Night had already come over that part of the world. Behind them, the sun had just disappeared behind the mountains, leaving them outlined in gold that would flake and fade.
“When?” Nadine asked. She was horribly keyed up, and she had to go to the bathroom badly.
“Pretty soon,” Harold said. His grin had become a mellow smile. It was an expression she could not place right away, because she had never seen it on Harold’s face before. It took her a few minutes to place it. Harold looked happy.
The committee voted 7–0 to empower Brad to round up twenty men and women for his Turning-Off Crew. Ralph Brentner had agreed to fill up two of the Fire Department’s old tanker trucks at Boulder Reservoir and to have them at the power station when Brad turned on.
Chad Norris was next. Speaking quietly, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his chino pants, he talked about the work the Burial Committee had done over the last three weeks. He told them they had buried an incredible twenty-five thousand corpses, better than eight thousand a week, and that he believed they were now over the bulge.
“We’ve either been lucky or blessed,” he said. “This mass exodus—that’s all I know to call it—has done most of our work for us. In another town Boulder’s size, it would have taken a year to get it done. We’re expecting to inter another twenty thousand plague victims by the first of October, and we’ll probably keep stumbling over individual victims for a long time after, but I wanted you to know that the job is getting done and I don’t think we have to worry too much about diseases breeding in the bodies of the unburied dead.”
Fran shifted her position so she could look out at the last of the day. The gold that had surrounded the peaks was already beginning to fade to a less spectacular lemon color. She felt a sudden wave of homesickness that was totally unexpected and almost sickening in its force.
It was five minutes to eight.
If she didn’t go in the bushes, she was going to wet her pants. She went around a stand of scrub, lowered herself a little, and let go. When she came back, Harold was still sitting on the picnic table with the walkie-talkie clasped loosely in his hand. He had pulled up the antenna.
“Harold,” she said. “It’s getting late. It’s past eight o’clock.”
He glanced at her indifferently. “They’ll be there half the night, clapping each other on the back. When the time’s right, I’ll pull the pin. Don’t you worry.”
“
Harold’s smile widened emptily. “Just as soon as it’s dark.”
Fran stifled a yawn as Al Bundell stepped confidently up beside Stu. They were going to run late, and suddenly she wished she was back in the apartment, just the two of them. It wasn’t just tiredness, not precisely that feeling of homesickness, either. All of a sudden she didn’t want to be in this house. There was no reason for the feeling, but it was strong. She wanted to get out. In fact, she wanted them all to get out. I’ve just lost my happy thoughts for the evening, she told herself. Pregnant woman blues, that’s all.
“The Law Committee has had four meetings in the last week,” Al was saying, “and I’ll keep this as brief as possible. The system we’ve decided on is a kind of tribunal. Sitting members would be chosen by lottery, much the same way as young men were once selected for the draft—”
“Hiss! Boo!” Susan said, and there was some companionable laughter.
Al smiled. “But, I was going to add, I think service on such a tribunal would be a lot more palatable to those who were called upon to serve. The tribunal would consist of three adults—eighteen and over—who would serve for six months. Their names would be picked out of a big drum containing the names of every adult in Boulder.”
Larry’s hand waved. “Could they be excused for cause?”
Frowning a trifle at this interruption, Al said: “I was just getting to that. There would have to be—”
Fran shifted uneasily and Sue Stern winked at her. Fran didn’t wink back. She was frightened—and frightened of her own baseless fear, if such a thing were possible. Where had this stifling, claustrophobic feeling come from? She knew that what you were supposed to do with baseless feelings was to ignore them… at least in the old world. But what about Tom Cullen’s trance? What about Leo Rockway?
But it was so crazy. She shifted again and decided to say nothing.
“—a brief deposition from the person wanting to be excused, but I don’t think—”
“Someone’s coming,” Fran said suddenly, getting to her feet.
There was a pause. They could all hear motorcycle engines revving toward them up Baseline, coming fast. Horns were beeping. And suddenly, for Frannie, the panic overflowed.
“Listen,” she said, “all of you!”
Faces turning toward her, surprised, concerned.
“Frannie, are you—” Stu started toward her.
She swallowed. It felt as if there was a heavy weight on her chest, stifling her. “We have to get out of here.
It was eight twenty-five. The last of the light had gone out of the sky. It was time. Harold sat up a little straighter and held the walkie-talkie to his mouth. His thumb rested lightly on the SEND button. He would depress it and blow them all to hell by saying—
“What’s that?”
Nadine’s hand on his arm, distracting him, pointing. Far below, snaking up Baseline, there was a daisy-chain of lights. In the great silence they could hear the faint roar of a great many motorcycle engines. Harold felt a thin thread of disquiet and threw it off.
“Leave me be,” he said. “This is it.”
Her hand fell from his shoulder. Her face was a white blur in the darkness. Harold pressed the SEND button.
She never knew if it was the motorcycles or her own words that got them moving. But they didn’t move fast enough. That would always be on her heart; they didn’t move fast enough.
Stu was first out the door, the snarl and echo of the motorcycles enormous. They came across the bridge that spanned the small dry wash below Ralph’s house, headlights blazing. Instinctively, Stu’s hand dropped to the butt
