He felt the sullen coal of resentment glow in his chest. Maybe not. But that didn't change the fact that they had excluded him. Although Nadine had said little about her reasons for coming to him, Harold had an idea that she had been excluded in some way too, rebuffed, turned back. They were a couple of outsiders, and outsiders hatch plots. It's perhaps the only thing that keeps them sane. (Remember to put that in the ledger, Harold thought... he was almost downtown now.)
There was a whole company of outsiders on the other side of the mountains. And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside. Inside where it's warm. Just a little thing, being inside where it's warm, but really such a big thing. About the most important thing in the world.
Maybe he didn't want to be quits and even. Maybe he didn't want to settle for a draw, for a career of riding in a twentieth-century deadcart and getting meaningless letters of thanks for his ideas, and waiting five years for Bateman to retire from their precious committee so he could be on it... and what if they decided to pass over him again? They might, too, because it wasn't just a question of age. They had taken the goddam deaf-mute, and he was only a few years older than Harold himself.
The coal of resentment was burning brightly now. Think, sure, think - that was easy to say, and sometimes it was even to do... but what good was thinking when all it got you from the Neanderthals who ran the world was a horselaugh, or even worse, a thank-you letter?
He reached the bus station. It was still early, and no one was there yet. There was a poster on the door saying there was going to be another public meeting on the twenty-fifth. Public meeting? Public circle jerk.
The waiting room was festooned with travel posters and ads for the Greyhound Ameripass and pictures of big mother-humping Scenicruisers rolling through Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, Nashville, wherever. He sat down and stared with a cold morning eye at the darkened pinball machines, the Coke machine, the coffee machine that would also dispense a Lipton Cup-a-Soup that smelled vaguely like a dead fish. He lit a cigarette and threw the matchstub on the floor.
They had adopted the Constitution. Whooppee. How very-very and too-too. They had even sung The Star-Speckled Banana, for Christ's sweet sake. But suppose Harold Lauder had gotten up, not to make a few constructive suggestions, but to tell them the facts of life in this first year after the plague?
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Harold Emery Lauder and I am here to tell you that, in the words of the old song, the fundamental things apply as time goes by. Like Darwin. The next time you stand and sing the National Anthem, friends and neighbors, chew on this: America is dead, dead as a doornail, dead as Jacob Marley and Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper and Harry S Truman, but the principles just propounded by Mr. Darwin are still very much alive - as alive as Jacob Marley's ghost was to Ebenezer Scrooge. While you are meditating on the beauties of constitutional rule, spare a little time to meditate on Randall Flagg, Man of the West. I doubt very much if he has any time to spare for such fripperies as public meetings and ratifications and discussions on the true meaning of a peach in the best liberal mode. Instead he has been concentrating on the basics, on his Darwin, preparing to wipe the great Formica counter of the universe with your dead bodies. Ladies and gentlemen, let me modestly suggest that while we are trying to get the lights on and waiting for a doctor to find our happy little hive, he may be searching eagerly for someone with a pilot's credentials so he can start overflights of Boulder in the best Francis Gary Powers tradition. While we debate the burning question of who will be on the Street Cleaning Committee, he has probably already seen to the creation of a Gun Cleaning Committee, not to mention mortars, missile sites, and possibly even germ warfare centers. Of course we know this country doesn't have any germ or biological warfare centers, that's one of the things that makes this country great - what country, ha-ha - but you should realize that while we're busy getting all the wagons in a circle, he's -
"Hey, Hawk, you pullin overtime?"
Harold looked up, smiling. "Yeah, I thought I'd get some," he told Weizak. "I clocked you when I came in. You made six bucks already."
Weizak laughed. "You're a card, Hawk, you know that?"
"I am," Harold agreed, still smiling. He began to relace his boots. "A wild card."
BOOK II ON THE BOARDER Chapter 56
Stu spent the next day at the power station, wrapping motors, and was cycling home at the end of the workday. He had reached the small park opposite the First National Bank when Ralph hailed him over. He parked his cycle and walked over to the bandshell where Ralph was sitting.
"I've kind of been looking for you, Stu. You got a minute?"
"Just one. I'm late for supper. Frannie'll be worried."
"Yeah. Been up to the power station wrapping copper, from the look of your hands." Ralph looked absent and worried.