“Well, maybe not in the old days, but it’s sure something now,” Glen said, but by then she had blundered off, crying.

She came back around three o’clock, ashamed of herself and ready to apologize. But neither Glen nor Stu was in camp. Harold was sitting dejectedly on the trunk of a fallen tree. Perion was sitting crosslegged by Mark, sponging his face with a cloth. She looked pale but composed.

“Frannie!” Harold said, looking up and brightening visibly.

“Hi, Harold.” She went on to Peri. “How is he?”

“Sleeping,” Perion said, but he wasn’t sleeping; even Fran could see that. He was unconscious.

“Where have the others gone, Peri? Do you know?”

It was Harold who answered her. He had come up behind her, and Fran could feel him wanting to touch her hair or put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t want him to. Harold had begun to make her acutely uncomfortable almost all of the time.

“They’ve gone to Kunkle. To look for a doctor’s office.”

“They thought they could get some books,” Peri said. “And some… some instruments.” She swallowed and her throat made an audible click. She went on cooling Mark’s face, occasionally dipping her cloth into one of the canteens and wringing it out.

“We’re really sorry,” Harold said uncomfortably. “I guess that doesn’t sound like jack-shit, but we really are.”

Peri looked up and offered Harold a strained, sweet smile. “I know that,” she said. “Thank you. This is no one’s fault. Unless there’s a God, of course. If there’s a God, then it’s His fault. And when I see Him, I intend to kick Him in the balls.”

She had a horsey sort of face and a thick peasant’s body. Fran, who saw everyone’s best features long before she saw the less fortunate ones (Harold, for instance, had a lovely pair of hands for a boy), noticed that Peri’s hair, a soft auburn shade, was almost gorgeous, and that her dark indigo eyes were fine and intelligent. She had taught anthropology at NYU, she had told them, and she had also been active in a number of political causes, including women’s rights and equal treatment under the law for AIDS victims. She had never been married. Mark, she told Frannie once, had been better to her than she had ever expected a man to be. The others she had known had either ignored her or lumped her in with other girls as a “pig” or a “scag.” She admitted Mark might have been in the group which had always just ignored her if conditions had been normal, but they hadn’t been. They had met each other in Albany, where Perion had been summering with her parents, on the last day of June, and after some talk they had decided to get out of the city before all the germs incubating in all the decomposing bodies could do to them what the superflu hadn’t been able to do.

So they had left, and the next night they had become lovers, more out of desperate loneliness than any real attraction (this was girl-talk, and Frannie hadn’t even written it down in her diary). He was good to her, Peri had told Fran in the soft and slightly amazed way of all plain women who have discovered a nice man in a hard world. She began to love him, a little more each day she had begun to love him.

And now this.

“It’s funny,” she said. “Everybody here but Stu and Harold are college graduates, and you certainly would have been if things had gone on in their normal course, Harold.”

“Yes, I guess that’s true,” Harold said.

Peri turned back to Mark and began to sponge his forehead again, gently, with love. Frannie was reminded of a color plate in their family Bible, a picture that showed three women making the body of Jesus ready for burial—they were anointing him with oils and spices.

“Frannie was studying English, Glen was a teacher of sociology, Mark was getting his doctorate in American history, Harold, you’d be in English, too, wanting to be a writer. We could sit around and have some wonderful bull sessions. We did, as a matter of fact, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” Harold agreed. His voice, normally penetrating, was almost too low to hear.

“A liberal arts education teaches you how to think—I read that somewhere. The hard facts you learn are secondary to that. The big thing you take away from school with you is how to induct and deduct in a constructive way.”

“That’s good,” Harold said. “I like that.”

Now his hand did drop on Fran’s shoulder. She didn’t shrug it away, but she was unhappily conscious of its presence.

“But it isn’t good,” Peri said fiercely, and in his surprise, Harold took his hand off Fran’s shoulder. She felt lighter immediately.

“No?” he asked, rather timidly.

“He’s dying!” Peri said, not loudly but in an angry, helpless way. “He’s dying because we’ve all been spending our time learning how to bullshit each other in dorms and the living rooms of cheap apartments in college towns. Oh, I could tell you about the Midi Indians of New Guinea, and Harold could explain the literary technique of the later English poets, but what good does any of that do my Mark?”

“If we had somebody from med school—” Fran began tentatively.

“Yes, if we did. But we don’t. We don’t even have a car mechanic with us, or someone who went to ag college and might have at least watched once when a vet was working on a cow or a horse.” She looked at them, her indigo eyes growing even darker. “Much as I like you all, I think at this point I’d trade the whole bunch of you for Mr. Goodwrench. You’re all so afraid to touch him, even though you know what’s going to happen if you don’t. And I’m the same way—I’m not excluding myself.”

“At least the two…” Fran stopped. She had been about to say At least the two men went, then decided that might be unfortunate phrasing, with Harold still here. “At least Stu and Glen went. That’s something, isn’t it?”

Peri sighed. “Yes—that’s something. But it was Stu’s decision to go, wasn’t it? The only one of us who finally decided it would be better to try anything than to just stand around wringing our hands.” She looked at Frannie. “Did he tell you what he did for a living before?”

“He worked in a factory,” Fran said promptly. She did not notice that Harold’s brow clouded at how quickly she was able to come up with this information. “He put circuits in electronic calculators. I guess you could say he was a computer technician.”

“Ha!” Harold said, and smiled sourly.

“He’s the only one of us who understands taking things apart,” Peri said. “What he and Mr. Bateman do will kill Mark, I’m almost sure it will, but it’s better that he be killed while somebody is trying to make him well than it would be for him to die while we just stand around watching… as if he were a dog that had been run over in the street.”

Neither Harold nor Fran could find a reply to that. They only stood behind her and watched Mark’s pale, still face. After a while Harold put his sweaty hand on Fran’s shoulder again. It made her feel like screaming.

Stu and Glen got back at quarter to four. They had taken one of the cycles. Tied behind it was a doctor’s black bag of instruments and several large black books.

“We’ll try,” was all Stu said.

Peri looked up. Her face was white and strained, her voice calm. “Would you? Please. We both want you to,” she said.

“Stu?” Perion said.

It was ten minutes past four. Stu was kneeling on a rubber sheet that had been spread under the tree. Sweat was pouring from his face in rivers. His eyes looked bright and haunted and frantic. Frannie was holding a book open in front of him, switching back and forth between two colored plates whenever Stu raised his eyes and nodded at her. Beside him, horribly white, Glen Bateman held a spool of fine white thread. Between them was an open case of stainless steel instruments. The case was now splashed with blood.

“It’s here!” Stu cried. His voice was suddenly high and hard and exultant. His eyes had narrowed to two points. “Here’s the little bastard! Here! Right here!”