The Judge, who had his suspicions, kept silent.
"It can't be the dreams," she said. "No one has them anymore, unless Joe does. And Joe's... different."
"Yes. He is. Poor boy."
"And everyone's healthy. At least since Mrs. Vollman died." Two days after the Judge joined them, a couple who introduced themselves as Dick and Sally Vollman had thrown in with Larry and his assorted company of survivors. Lucy thought it extremely unlikely that the flu had spared a man and wife, and suspected that their marriage was common-law and of extremely short duration. They were in their forties, and obviously very much in love. Then, a week ago, at the old woman's house in Hemingford Home, Sally Vollman had gotten sick. They camped for two days, waiting helplessly for her to get better or die. She had died. Dick Vollman was still with them, but he was a different man - silent, thoughtful, pale.
"He's taken that to heart, hasn't he?" she asked Judge Farris.
"Larry is a man who found himself comparatively late in life," the Judge said, clearing his throat. "At least, that is how he strikes me. Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizens should be: partisans but never zealots, respecters of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely able to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered... or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power. Quite the opposite. And when things go wrong... when a Mrs. Vollman dies..."
"Could it have been diabetes?" the Judge interrupted himself. "I think it likely. The cyanosed skin, the fast drop into a coma... possibly, possibly. But if so, where was her insulin? Might she have let herself die? Could it have been suicide?"
The Judge lapsed into a thinking pause, hands clasped under his chin. He looked like a brooding black bird of prey.
"You were going to say something about when things go wrong," Lucy prompted gently.
"When they go wrong - when a Sally Vollman dies, of diabetes or internal bleeding or whatever - a man like Larry blames himself. The men the civics books idolize rarely come to good ends. Melvin Purvis, the super G-man of the thirties, shot himself with his own service pistol in 1959. When Lincoln was assassinated, he was a prematurely old man tottering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. We used to watch Presidents decay before our very eyes from month to month and even week to week on national TV - except for Nixon, of course, who thrived on power the way that a vampire bat thrives on blood, and Reagan, who seemed a little too stupid to get old. I guess Gerald Ford was that way, too."
"I think there's something more," Lucy said sadly.
He looked at her, inquiring.
"How did it go? I am full of tossings and turnings unto the dawning of the day?"
He nodded it?
Lucy said, "Pretty good description of a man in love, isn't it?"
He looked at her, surprised that she had known all along about the thing he wouldn't say. Lucy shrugged, smiled - a bitter quirk of the lips. "Women know," she said. "Women almost always know."
Before he could reply, she had drifted away toward the road, where Larry would be, sitting and thinking about Nadine Cross.
"Larry?"
"Here," he said briefly. "What are you doing up?"
"I got cold," she said. He was sitting cross-legged on the shoulder of the road, as if in meditation. "Room for me?"
"Sure." He moved over. The boulder still held a bit of warmth from the day which was now passing. She sat down. He slipped an arm around her. According to Lucy's estimation, they were about fifty miles east of Boulder tonight. If they could get on the road by nine tomorrow, they could be in the Boulder Free Zone for lunch.
It was the man on the radio who called it the Boulder Free Zone; his name was Ralph Brentner, and he said (with some embarrassment) that the Boulder Free Zone was mostly a radio call-sign, but Lucy liked it just for itself, for the way it sounded. It sounded right. It sounded like a fresh start. And Nadine Cross had adopted the name with an almost religious zeal, as if it was talismanic.
Three days after Larry, Nadine, Joe, and Lucy had arrived at Stovington and found the plague center deserted, Nadine had suggested they pick up a CB radio and start conning the forty channels. Larry had accepted the idea wholeheartedly - the way he accepted most of her ideas, Lucy thought. She didn't understand Nadine Cross at all. Larry was stuck on her, that was obvious, but Nadine didn't want to have much to do with him outside of each day's routine.