Damn if I know.
Ain’t got a friggin clue.
Dig a hole, then jump in and pull it over you.
And around ten o’clock Stu Redman, Glen Bateman, and Ralph Brentner came among them, talking quietly and giving out fliers, telling them to pass the word on to those not here tonight. Glen was limping slightly because a flying stove dial had clipped a piece of meat out of his right calf. The mimeographed posters said: FREE ZONE MEETING * MUNZINGER AUDITORIUM * SEPTEMBER 4 * 8:00 P.M.
That seemed to be the signal to leave. People drifted away silently into the dark. Most of them took the fliers, but quite a few were crumpled into balls and thrown away. All of them went home to get what sleep they could.
Perchance to dream.
The auditorium was crammed but extremely quiet when Stu convened the meeting the following night. Sitting behind him were Larry, Ralph, and Glen. Fran had tried to get up, but her back was still much too painful. Unmindful of the grisly irony, Ralph had patched her through to the meeting by walkie-talkie.
“There’s a few things that need talking about,” Stu said with quiet and studied understatement. His voice, although only slightly amplified, carried well in the silent hall. “I guess there’s nobody here who doesn’t know about the explosion that killed Nick and Sue and the others, and nobody who doesn’t know that Mother Abagail has come back. We need to talk about those things, but we wanted you to have some good news first. Want you to listen to Brad Kitchner for that. Brad?”
Brad walked toward the podium, not nearly as nervous as he had been the night before last, and was greeted by listless applause. When he got there he turned to face them, gripped the lectern in both hands, and said simply: “We’re going to switch on tomorrow.”
This time the applause was much louder. Brad held up his hands, but the applause rode over him in a wave. It held for thirty seconds or more. Later Stu told Frannie that if it hadn’t been for the events of the last two days, Brad probably would have been dragged down from the podium and carried around the auditorium on the shoulders of the crowd like a halfback who has scored the winning touchdown of the championship game in the last thirty seconds. It had gotten so close to the end of the summer that, in a way, that was just what he was.
But at last the applause subsided.
“We’re going to switch on at noon, and I’d like to have every one of you at home and ready. Ready for what? Four things. Listen up now, this is important. First, turn off every light and electrical appliance in your own house that you’re not using. Second, do the same for the unoccupied houses around yours. Third, if you smell gas, track down the smell and shut off whatever is on. Fourth, if you hear a fire siren, go to the source of the sound… but go safely and sanely. Let’s not have any necks broken in motorcycle accidents. Now—are there any questions?”
There were several, all of them reconfirming Brad’s original points. He answered each one patiently, the only sign of nervousness the way he bent his little black notebook ceaselessly back and forth in his hands.
When the questions had slowed to a trickle, Brad said: “I want to thank the folks who busted their humps getting us going again. And I want to remind the Power Committee that it isn’t disbanded. There are going to be lines down, power outages, oil supplies to track down in Denver and haul up here. I hope you’ll all stick with it. Mr. Glen Bateman says we may have ten thousand people here by the time the snow flies, and a lot more next spring. There’s power stations in Longmont and Denver that are going to have to come on line before next year’s done with—”
“Not if that hardcase gets his way!” someone shouted out hoarsely in the back of the hall.
There was a moment of dead silence. Brad stood with his hands clutching the lectern in a deathgrip, his face pasty white.
“My business is power, whoever said that. But I think we’ll be here long after that other guy’s dead and gone. If I didn’t think that, I’d be wrapping motors over on his side. Who gives a shit for him?”
Brad stepped away front the podium and someone else bellowed, “You’re goddam right!”
This time the applause was heavy and hard, nearly savage, but there was a note to it Stu didn’t like. He bad to pound with his gavel a long time to get the meeting back under control.
“The next thing on the agenda—”
“Fuck your agenda!” a young woman yelled stridently. “Let’s talk about the dark man! Let’s talk about
Roars of approval. Shouts of “out of order!” Disapproving babble at the young woman’s choice of words. Rumble of side-chatter.
Stu whacked at the block on the podium so hard that the mallet-head flew off his gavel. “This is a meeting here!” he shouted. “You’re going to get a chance to talk about whatever you want to talk about, but while I’m chairing this meeting, I want… to have… some ORDER!” He bellowed the last word so loudly that feedback cut through the auditorium like a boomerang, and they quieted at last.
“Now,” Stu said, his voice purposely low and calm, “the next thing is to report to you on what happened up at Ralph’s on the night of September second, and I guess that falls to me, since I’m our elected law enforcement officer.”
He had quiet again, but like the applause that had greeted Brad’s closing remarks, this wasn’t a quiet Stu liked. They were leaning forward, intent, their expressions greedy. It made him feel disquieted and bewildered, as if the Free Zone had changed radically over the last forty-eight hours and he didn’t know what it was anymore. It made him feel the way he’d felt when he had been trying to find his way out of the Stovington Plague Center—a fly caught and struggling in an invisible spider’s web. There were so many faces he didn’t recognize out there, so many strangers…
But there was no time to think about it now.
He described the events leading up to the explosion briefly, omitting Fran’s last-minute premonition; with the mood they were in, they didn’t need that.
“Yesterday morning Brad and Ralph and I went up and poked through the ruins for three hours or more. We found what seemed to be a dynamite bomb wired up to a walkie-talkie. It appears that this bomb was planted in the living room closet. Bill Scanlon and Ted Frampton found another walkie-talkie up in Sunrise Amphitheater, and we assume the bomb was set off from there. It—”
“Assume, my ass!” Ted Frampton shouted from the third row. “It was that bastard Lauder and his little whore!”
An uneasy murmur ran through the room.
He happened to catch Glen’s eye; Glen offered him a very small, very cynical shrug.
“If one more person yells out from the floor without bein recognized, I’m gonna declare this meeting closed and you can talk to each other,” Stu said. “This is no bull session. If we don’t keep to the rules, where are we?” Ted Frampton was staring up at him angrily, and Stu stared back. After a few moments, Ted dropped his eyes.
“We suspect Harold Lauder and Nadine Cross. We have some good reasons, some pretty convincing circumstantial evidence. But there’s no real hard evidence against them yet, and I hope you’ll keep that in mind.”
A sullen eddy of conversation rippled and disappeared.
“I only said that to say this,” Stu continued. “If they happen to wander back into the Zone, I want them brought to me. I’ll lock them up and Al Bundell will see to it that they’re tried… and a trial means they get to tell their side, if they got one. We’re… we’re supposed to be the good guys here. I guess we know where the bad guys are. And being the good guys means we have to be civilized about this.”
He looked out at them hopefully and saw only puzzled resentment. Stuart Redman had seen two of his best friends blown to hell, those eyes said, and here he was, taking up for the ones who did it.
“For what it’s worth to you, I think they’re the ones,” he said. “But it’s got to be done right. And I’m here to tell you that it will be.”
