“You know,” he said absently, “you ought to take a walk.”

“Why?” She felt a trifle hurt. Harold’s face was tense and unsmiling. Nadine could understand why Harold smiled as much as he did: because when he stopped, he looked insane. She suspected that he was insane, or very nearly.

“Because I don’t know how old this dynamite is,” Harold said.

“What do you mean?”

“Old dynamite sweats, dear heart,” he said, and looked up at her. She saw that his entire face was running with sweat, as if to prove his point. “It perspires, to be perfectly couth. And what it perspires is pure nitroglycerin, one of the world’s great unstable substances. So if it’s old, there’s a very good chance that this little Science Fair project could blow us right over the top of Flagstaff Mountain and all the way to the Land of Oz.”

“Well, you don’t have to sound so snotty about it,” Nadine said.

“Nadine? Ma chère? ”

“What?”

Harold looked at her calmly and without smiling. “Shut your fucking trap.”

She did, but she didn’t take a walk, although she wanted to. Surely if this was Flagg’s will (and the planchette had told her that Harold was Flagg’s way of taking care of the committee), the dynamite wouldn’t be old. And even if it was old, it wouldn’t explode until it was supposed to… would it? Just how much control over events did Flagg have?

Enough, she told herself, he has enough. But she wasn’t sure, and she was increasingly uneasy. She had been back to her house and Joe was gone—gone for good this time. She had gone to see Lucy, and had borne the cold reception long enough to learn that since she had moved in with Harold, Joe (Lucy, of course, called him Leo) had “slipped back some.” Lucy obviously blamed her for that, too… but if an avalanche came rumbling down from Flagstaff Mountain or an earthquake ripped Pearl Street apart, Lucy would probably blame her for those things, too. Not that there wouldn’t be enough to blame on her and Harold very soon. Still, she had been bitterly disappointed not to have seen Joe once more… to kiss him goodbye. She and Harold were not going to be in the Boulder Free Zone much longer.

Never mind, best you let him go completely now that you’re embarked on this obscenity. You’d only be doing him harm… and possibly harm to yourself as well, because Joe… sees things, knows things. Let him stop being Joe, let me stop being Nadine-mom. Let him go back to being Leo, forever.

But the paradox in that was inexorable. She could not believe that any of these Zone people had more than a year’s life left in them, and that included the boy. It was not his will that they should live…

…so tell the truth, it isn’t just Harold who is his instrument. It’s you too. You, who once defined the single unforgivable sin in the postplague world as murder, as the taking of a single life…

Suddenly she found herself wishing that the dynamite was old, that it would blow up and put an end to both of them. A merciful end. And then she found herself thinking about what would happen afterward, after they had gotten over the mountains, and felt the old slippery warmth kindle in her belly.

“There,” Harold said gently. He had lowered his apparatus into a Hush Puppies shoebox and set it aside.

“It’s done?”

“Yes. Done.”

“Will it work?”

“Would you like to try it and find out?” His words were bitterly sarcastic, but she didn’t mind. His eyes were working her over in that greedy, crawling little boy’s way that she had come to recognize. He had returned from that distant place—the place from which he had written what was in the ledger that she had read and then replaced carelessly under the loose hearthstone where it had originally been. Now she could handle him. Now his talk was just talk.

“Would you like to watch me play with myself first?” she asked. “Like last night?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Good.”

“Let’s go upstairs then.” She batted her eyelashes at him. “I’ll go first.”

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. Little dots of sweat stood out on his brow, but fear hadn’t put them there this time. “Go first.”

So she went up first, and she could feel him looking up the short skirt of the little-girl sailor dress she was wearing. She was bare beneath it.

The door closed, and the thing that Harold had made sat in the open shoebox in the gloom. There was a battery-powered Realistic walkie-talkie handset from Radio Shack. Its back was off. Wired to it were eight sticks of dynamite. The book was still open. It was from the Boulder Public Library, and the title was 65 National Science Fair Prize Winners. The diagram showed a doorbell wired up to a walkie-talkie similar to the one in the shoebox. The caption beneath said: Third Prize, 1977 National Science Fair, Constructed by Brian Ball, Rutland, Vermont. Say the word and ring the bell up to twelve miles away!

Some hours later that evening, Harold came back downstairs, put the cover on the shoebox, and carried it carefully upstairs. He put it on the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard. Ralph Brentner had told him that afternoon that the Free Zone Committee was inviting Chad Norris to speak at their next meeting. When was that going to be? Harold had inquired casually. September 2, Ralph had said.

September 2.

Larry and Leo were sitting on the curb in front of the house. Larry was drinking a warm Hamm’s Beer, Leo a warm Orange Spot. You could have anything to drink in Boulder that you wanted these days, as long as it came in a can and you didn’t mind drinking it warn. From out back came the steady, gruff roar of the Lawnboy. Lucy was cutting the grass. Larry had offered to do it, but Lucy shook her head. “Find out what’s wrong with Leo, if you can.”

It was the last day of August.

The day after Nadine had moved in with Harold, Leo hadn’t appeared for breakfast. Larry had found the boy in his room, dressed only in his underpants, his thumb in his mouth. He was uncommunicative and hostile. Larry had been more frightened than Lucy, because she didn’t know how Leo had been when Larry had first encountered him. His name had been Joe then, and he had been brandishing a killer’s knife.

The best part of a week had passed since then, and Leo was a little better, but he hadn’t come back all the way and he wouldn’t talk about what had happened.

“That woman has something to do with it,” Lucy had said, screwing the cap onto the lawnmower’s tank.

“Nadine? What makes you think that?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to mention it. But she came by the other day while you and Leo were trying the fishing down at Cold Creek. She wanted to see the boy. I was just as glad the two of you were gone.”

“Lucy—”

She gave him a quick kiss, and he had slipped his hand under her halter and given her a friendly squeeze. “I judged you wrong before,” she said. “I guess I’ll always be sorry for that. But I’m never going to like Nadine Cross. There’s something wrong with her.”

Larry didn’t answer, but he thought Lucy’s judgment was probably a true one. That night up by King Sooper’s she had been like a crazy woman.

“There’s one other thing—when she was here, she didn’t call him Leo. She called him the other name. Joe.”

He looked at her blankly as she turned the automatic starter and got the Lawnboy going.

Now, half an hour after that discussion, he drank his Hamm’s and watched Leo bounce the Ping-Pong ball he had found the day the two of them had walked up to Harold’s, where Nadine now lived. The small white ball was smudged, but not dented. Thok-thok-thok against the pavement. Bouncy-bouncy-bally, look-at-the-way-we-play.

Leo (he was Leo now, wasn’t he?) hadn’t wanted to go inside Harold’s house that day.