Frannie was crying again.
“Frannie, what’s wrong?”
“All those empty cribs,” she said, and her voice became a sob. “That’s what’s wrong. He’s all alone in there. No wonder he’s crying, Stu, he’s all alone. All those empty cribs, my God—”
“He won’t be alone for very long,” Stu said, and put an arm around her shoulders. “And he looks to me as if he’s going to bear up just fine. Don’t you think so, Laurie?”
But Laurie had left the two of them alone in front of the nursery window.
Wincing at the pain in his leg, Stu knelt beside Frannie and hugged her clumsily, and they looked in at Peter in mutual wonder, as if the child were the first that had ever been gotten upon the earth. After a bit Peter fell asleep, small hands clenched together on his chest, and still they watched him… and wondered that he should be there at all.
Chapter 78
They had finally put the winter behind them.
It had been long, and to Stu, with his East Texas background, it had seemed fantastically hard. Two days after his return to Boulder, his right leg had been rebroken and reset and this time encased in a heavy plaster cast that had not come off until early April. By then the cast had begun to look like some incredibly complex roadmap; it seemed that everyone in the Zone had autographed it, although that was a patent impossibility. The pilgrims had begun to trickle in again by the first of March, and by the day that had been the cut-off for income tax returns in the old world, the Free Zone was nearly eleven thousand strong, according to Sandy DuChiens, who now headed a Census Bureau of a dozen persons, a bureau that had its own computer terminal at the First Bank of Boulder.
Now he and Fran stood with Lucy Swann in the picnic area halfway up Flagstaff Mountain and watched the Mayday Chase. All the Zone’s children appeared to be involved (and not a few of the adults). The original maybasket, bedecked with crepe ribbons and filled with fruit and toys, had been hung on Tom Cullen. It had been Fran’s idea.
Tom had caught Bill Gehringer (despite Billy’s self-conscious disclaimer that he was too old for such kid games, he had joined with a will), and together they had caught the Upshaw boy—or was it Upson? Stu had trouble keeping them all straight—and the three of them had tracked down Leo Rockway hiding behind Brentner Rock. Tom himself had put the tag on Leo.
The chase ranged back and forth over West Boulder, gangs of kids and adolescents surging up and down the streets that were still mostly empty, Tom bellowing and carrying his basket. And at last it led back up here, where the sun was hot and the wind blew warm. The band of tagged children was some two hundred strong, and they were still in the process of tracking down the last, half dozen or so that were still “out.” In the process they were scaring up dozens of deer that wanted no part of the game.
Two miles farther up, at Sunrise Amphitheater, a huge picnic lunch had been spread where Harold Lauder had once waited for just the right moment to speak into his walkie-talkie. At noon, two or three thousand people would sit down together and look east toward Denver and eat venison and deviled eggs and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and fresh pie for dessert. It might be the last mass gathering the Zone would ever have, unless they all went down to Denver and got together in the stadium where the Broncos had once played football. Now, on Mayday, the trickle of early spring had swelled to a flood of immigrants. Since April 15 another eight thousand had come in, and they were now nineteen thousand or so—temporarily at least, Sandy’s Census Bureau could not keep up. A day when only five hundred came in was a rare day.
In the playpen which Stu had brought up and covered with a blanket, Peter began to cry lustily. Fran moved toward him, but Lucy, mountainous and eight months pregnant, was there first.
“I warn you,” Fran said, “it’s his diapers. I can tell just by the way he sounds.”
“Looking at a little poo isn’t going to cross
Peter blatted.
Lucy set him down on another blanket they had brought up for a changing table. Peter began to crawl away, still blatting. Lucy turned him over and began to unsnap his blue corduroy pants. Peter’s legs waved in the air.
“Why don’t you two go for a walk?” Lucy said. She smiled at Fran, but Stu thought the smile was sad.
“Why don’t we do just that?” Fran agreed, and took Stu’s arm.
Stu allowed himself to be walked away. They crossed the road and entered a mild green pasture that climbed upward at a steep angle under the moving white clouds and bright blue sky.
“What was that about?” Stu asked.
“Pardon me?” But Fran looked just a trifle too innocent.
“That look.”
“What look?”
“I know a look when I see one,” Stu said. “I may not know what it means, but I know it when I see it.”
“Sit down with me, Stu.”
“Like that, is it?”
They sat down and looked east where the land fell away in a series of swoops to flatlands that faded into a blue haze. Nebraska was out there in that haze somewhere.
“It’s serious. And I don’t know how to talk to you about it, Stuart.”
“Well, you just go on the best you can,” he said, and took her hand.
Instead of speaking, Fran’s face began to work. A tear spilled down her cheek and her mouth drew down, trembling.
“Fran—”
“No, I
When the worst seemed to be over, he said: “Now tell me. What’s this about?”
“I’m homesick, Stu. I want to go back to Maine.”
Behind them, the children whooped and yelled. Stu looked at her, utterly flabbergasted. Then he grinned a little uncertainly. “That’s it? I thought you must have decided to divorce me, at the very least. Not that we’ve ever actually had the benefit of the clergy, as they say.”
“I won’t go anyplace without you,” she said. She had taken a Kleenex from her breast pocket and was wiping her eyes with it. “Don’t you know that?”
“I guess I do.”
“But I want to go back to Maine. I dream about it. Don’t you ever dream about East Texas, Stu? Arnette?”
“No,” he said truthfully. “I could live just as long and die just as happy if I never saw Arnette again. Did you want to go to Ogunquit, Frannie?”
“Eventually, maybe. But not right away. I’d want to go to western Maine, what they called the Lakes Region. You were almost there when Harold and I met you in New Hampshire. There are some beautiful places, Stu. Bridgton… Sweden… Castle Rock. The lakes would be jumping with fish, I’d imagine. In time, we might settle on the coast, I suppose. But I couldn’t face that the first year. Too many memories. It would be too big at first. The sea would be too big.” She looked down at her nervously plucking hands. “If you want to stay here… help them get it going… I’ll understand. The mountains are beautiful, too, but… it just doesn’t seem like home.”
He looked east and discovered he could at last name something he had felt stirring around in himself since the snow had begun to melt: an urge to move on. There were too many people here; they weren’t exactly stepping all over each other, at least not yet, but they were beginning to make him feel nervous. There were Zoners (and so they had begun to call themselves) who could cope with that sort of thing, who actually seemed to relish it. Jack Jackson, who headed the new Free Zone Committee (now expanded to nine members), was one. Brad Kitchner was another—Brad had a hundred projects going, and all the warm bodies he could use to help with each of them. It had been his idea to get one of the Denver TV stations going. It showed old movies every night from 6 to 1 A.M., with a ten-minute news broadcast at nine o’clock.
And the man who had taken over the marshaling chore in Stu’s absence, Hugh Petrella, was not the sort of man Stu much cottoned to. The very fact that Petrella had
