The moonlight was strong enough to write by, and two or three pages of diary were always enough to make her feel snoozy. Didn’t say much for her literary talents, she supposed. She would give sleep one more fair chance first, though.

She closed her eyes.

And went on thinking of Harold.

The situation might have eased with the coming of Mark and Perion if the two of them hadn’t already been committed to each other. Perion was thirty-three, eleven years older than Mark, but in this world such things made little difference. They had found each other, they had been looking out for each other, and they were content to stick together. Perion had confided to Frannie that they were trying to make a baby. Thank God I was on the pill and didn’t have a loop, Peri said. How in God’s name would I ever have gotten it out?

Frannie had almost told her about the baby she was carrying (she was over a third of the way along now) but something held her back. She was afraid it might make a bad situation even worse.

So now there were six of them instead of four (Glen refused utterly to try driving a motorcycle and always rode pillion behind Stu or Harold), but the situation hadn’t changed with the addition of another woman.

What about you, Frannie? What do you want?

If she had to exist in a world like this, she thought, with a biological clock inside her set to go off in six months, she wanted someone like Stu Redman to be her man—no, not someone like. She wanted him. There it was, stated with complete baldness.

With civilization gone, all the chrome and geegaws had been stripped from the engine of human society. Glen Bateman held forth on this theme often, and it always seemed to please Harold inordinately.

Women’s lib, Frannie had decided (thinking that if she was going to be bald, she might as well go totally bald), was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn’t get with child, but a woman could—every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath. Liberation —that one word said it all. Before civilization, with its careful and merciful system of protections, women had been slaves. Let us not gild the lily; slaves was what we were, Fran thought. Then the evil days ended. And the Women’s Credo, which should have been hung in the offices of Ms. magazine, preferably in needlepoint, was just this: Thank you, Men, for the railroads. Thank you, Men, for inventing the automobile and killing the red Indians who thought it might be nice to hold on to America for a while longer, since they were here first. Thank you, Men, for the hospitals, the police, the schools. Now I’d like to vote, please, and have the right to set my own course and make my own destiny. Once I was chattel, but now that is obsolete. My days of slavery must be over; I need to be a slave no more than I need to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny boat with sails. Jet planes are safer and quicker than little boats with sails and freedom makes more sense than slavery. I am not afraid of flying. Thank you, Men.

And what was there to say? Nothing. The rednecks could grunt about burning bras, the reactionaries could play intellectual little games, but the truth only smiles. Now all that had changed, in a matter of weeks it had changed—how much only time would tell. But lying here in the night, she knew that she needed a man. Oh God, she badly needed a man.

Nor was it all a matter of preserving herself and her baby, of looking out for number one (and, she supposed, number two). Stu attracted her, especially after Jess Rider. Stu was calm, capable, and most of all he was not what her father would have called “twenty pounds of bullshit in a ten-pound bag.”

He was attracted to her as well. She knew that perfectly well, had known it since that first lunch together on the Fourth of July in that deserted restaurant. For a moment—just one moment—their eyes had met and there had been that instant of heat, like a power surge when all the needles swing over to overload. She guessed Stu knew how things were, too, but he was waiting on her, letting her make her decision in her own time. She had been with Harold first, therefore she was Harold’s chattel. A stinking macho idea, but she was afraid this was going to be a stinking macho world again, at least for a while.

If only there was someone else, someone for Harold, but there wasn’t, and she was afraid she could not wait long. She thought of the day Harold, in his clumsy way, had tried to make love to her, to make his claim of ownership irrevocable. How long ago? Two weeks? It seemed longer. All the past seemed longer now. It had pulled out like warm Bonomo’s Turkish taffy. Between her worry of what to do about Harold—and her fears of what he might do if she did go to Stuart—and her fears of the dreams, she would never get to sleep.

So thinking, she drifted off.

When she woke up, it was still dark. Someone was shaking her.

She muttered some protest—her sleep had been restful and without dreams for the first time in a week—and then came reluctantly out of it, thinking that it must be morning, and time to get going. But why would they want to get going in the dark? As she sat up, she saw that even the moon was down.

It was Harold shaking her, and Harold looked scared.

“Harold? Is something wrong?”

Stu was also up, she saw. And Glen Bateman. Perion was kneeling on the far side of the place where their small fire had been.

“It’s Mark,” Harold said. “He’s sick.”

“Sick?” she said, and then a low moan came from the other side of the campfire’s ashes, where Perion was kneeling and the two men were standing. Frannie felt dread rise up inside her like a black column. Sickness was the thing they were all most afraid of.

“It isn’t… the flu, is it, Harold?” Because if Mark came down with a belated case of Captain Trips, that meant any of them could. Perhaps the germ was still hanging around. Perhaps it had even mutated. The better to feed on you, my dear.

“No, it’s not the flu. It’s nothing like the flu. Fran, did you eat any of the canned oysters tonight? Or maybe when we stopped for lunch?”

She tried to think, her mind still fuzzy with sleep. “Yes, I had some both times,” she said. “They tasted fine. I love oysters. Is it food poisoning? Is that what it is?”

“Fran, I’m just asking. None of us know what it is. There isn’t a doctor in the house. How do you feel? Do you feel all right?”

“Fine, just sleepy.” But she wasn’t. Not anymore. Another groan floated over from the other side of the camp, as if Mark were accusing her of feeling well while he did not.

Harold said, “Glen thinks it might be his appendix.”

“What? ”

Harold only grinned sickly and nodded.

Fran got up and walked across to where the others were gathered. Harold trailed her like an unhappy shadow.

“We’ve got to help him,” Perion said. She spoke mechanically, as if she had said it many times before. Her eyes went from one of them to the next relentlessly, eyes so full of terror and helplessness that Frannie once again felt accused. Her thoughts went selfishly to the baby she was carrying and she tried to push the thoughts away. Inappropriate or not, they wouldn’t go. Get away from him, part of her screamed at the rest of her. You get away from him right now, he might be catching. She looked at Glen, who was pale and old-looking in the steady glow of the Coleman lantern.

“Harold says you think it’s his appendix?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Glen said, sounding upset and scared. “He’s got the symptoms, certainly; he’s feverish, his belly is hard and swelled, painful to touch—”