“Oh yeah, well, Frannie came by and said we’d be more apt to get everybody if we had something. She and her friend there, Patty Kroger, they’re going to see to it. Cookies and Za-Rex.” Ralph made a face. “If it came down to a choice between drinking Za-Rex and bullpiss, I’d have to sit down and think her over. You c’n have mine, Nicky.”

Nick grinned.

“The only thing about this,” Ralph went on more seriously, “is you guys putting me on this committee. I know what that word means. It means ‘Congratulations, you get to do all the hard work.’ Well, I don’t really mind that, I been workin hard all my life. But committees are supposed to have idears, and I ain’t much of an idear man.”

On his pad, Nick quickly sketched a big CB setup, and in the background a radio tower with bolts of electricity coming from its top.

“Yeah, but that’s a lot different,” Ralph said glumly:

“You’ll be fine,” Nick wrote. “Believe it.”

“If you say so, Nicky. I’ll give her a try. I still think you’d be better off with this Underwood fella, though.”

Nick shook his head and clapped Ralph on the shoulder. Ralph bid him goodnight and went upstairs. When he was gone, Nick looked thoughtfully at the handbill for a long time. If Stu and Glen had seen copies—and he was sure they had by now—they knew that he had unilaterally stricken Harold Lauder’s name from their list of ad hoc committee members. He didn’t know how they might be taking it, but the fact that they hadn’t shown up at his door yet was probably a good sign. They might want him to do some horsetrading of his own, and if he had to, he would do it, just to keep Harold out at the top. If he had to, he would give them Ralph. Ralph didn’t really want the position anyway, although, goddammit, Ralph had great native wit and the nearly priceless ability to think around the corners of problems. He would be a good man to have on the permanent committee, and he felt that Stu and Glen had already packed the committee with their friends. If he, Nick, wanted Lauder out, they would just have to go along. To pull off this leadership coup smoothly, there had to be no dissension at all among them. Say, Ma, how did that man get a rabbit to come out of that hat? Well, son, I’m not sure, but I think he might have used the old “misdirect em with cookies and Za-Rex” trick. It works just about every time.

He turned back to the page he had been doodling on when Ralph came in. He stared at the words he had circled not just once but three times, as if to keep them in. Authority. Organization. He suddenly wrote another one below them—there was just room. Now the words in the triple circle read:

Authority. Organization. Politics.

But he wasn’t trying to knock Lauder out of the picture just because he felt Stu and Glen Bateman were trying to hog what was really his football. He felt a certain amount of pique, sure. It would have been odd if he hadn’t. In a way, he, Ralph, and Mother Abagail had founded the Boulder Free Zone.

There’s hundreds of people here now and thousands more on their way if Bateman’s right, he thought, tapping his pencil against the circled words. The longer he looked at them, the uglier they seemed. But when Ralph and I and Mother and Tom Cullen and the rest in our party got here, the only living things in Boulder were the cats and the deer that had come down here from the state park to forage in people’s gardens… and even in the stores. Remember that one that got into the Table Mesa Supermarket somehow and then couldn’t get out? It was crazy, running up and down the aisles, knocking things over, falling down, then getting up and running again.

We’re Johnny-come-latelies, sure, we haven’t even been here a month yet, but we were first! So there’s a little pique, but pique isn’t the reason I want Harold out. I want him out because I don’t trust him. He smiles all the time, but there’s a watertight

(smiletight?)

compartment between his mouth and his eyes. There was some friction between him and Stu at one time, over Frannie, and all three of them say it’s over, but I wonder if it really is over. Sometimes I see Frannie looking at Harold, and she looks uneasy. She looks as if she’s trying to figure out how “over” this over really is. He’s bright enough, but he strikes me as unstable.

Nick shook his head. That wasn’t all. On more than one occasion he had wondered if Harold Lauder might not be crazy.

Mostly it’s that grin. I don’t want to have to share secrets with anyone who grins like that and looks as if he isn’t sleeping well at night.

No Lauder. They’ll have to go along with that.

Nick closed his ring-binder and put it away in the bottom drawer of his desk. Then he stood up and began taking off his clothes. He wanted a shower. He felt obscurely dirty.

The world, he thought, not according to Garp but according to the superflu. This brave new world. But it didn’t seem particularly brave to him, or particularly new. It was as if someone had put a large cherry bomb into a child’s toybox. There had been a big bang and everything had gone everywhere. Toys had scattered from one end of the playroom to the other. Some things were shattered beyond repair, other things would be fixable, but most of the stuff had just been scattered. Those things were still a little too hot to handle, but they would be fine once they had cooled off.

Meanwhile, the job was to sort things out. Throw away the things which were no longer good. Set aside the toys which could be fixed. List everything which was still okay. Get a new toybox to put the things in, a nice new toybox. A strong toybox. There is a frightening, sickening ease—and a clear attraction—to the way in which things can be blown apart. The hard job is bringing things together again. The sorting. The fixing. The listing. And discarding the things which are no good, of course.

Except… can you ever bring yourself to throw away the things which are no good?

Nick paused halfway to the bathroom, naked, his clothes held in his arms.

Oh, the night was so silent… but weren’t all his nights symphonies of silence? Why had his body suddenly broke out in gooseflesh?

Why, because he suddenly felt that it was not toys the Free Zone Committee would be in charge of picking up, not toys at all. He suddenly felt that he had joined some bizarre sewing circle of the human spirit—he and Redman and Bateman and Mother Abagail, yes, even Ralph with his big radio and his boosting equipment that sent the Free Zone signal flying far and wide across the dead continent. They each had a needle and perhaps they were working together to make a warm blanket to keep off the winter chill… or perhaps they had only, after a brief pause, begun once again to make a large shroud for the human race, beginning their work at the toes and working their way up.

After love, Stu had gone to sleep. He had been on short sleep rations lately, and the night before he had been up all night with Glen Bateman, getting drunk and planning for the future. Frannie had put on her robe and come out here on the balcony.

The building they lived in was downtown, on the corner of Pearl Street and Broadway. Their apartment was on the third floor, and below her she could see the intersection, Pearl running east-west, Broadway running north-south. She liked it here. They had the compass boxed. The night was warm and windless, the black stone of the sky flawed with a million stars. In their faint and frosty glow, Fran could see the slabs of the Flatirons rising in the west.

She passed a hand down from her neck to her thighs. The dressing gown she wore was silk, and she was naked underneath. Her hand passed smoothly over her breasts and then, instead of continuing on flat and straight to the mild rise of her pubis, her hand traced an arc of belly, following a curve that had not been this pronounced even two weeks ago.