"Yeah. Not even workmen's gloves do much good. My hands are wrecked."
Ralph nodded. There were maybe half a dozen other people in the park, some of them looking at the narrow-gauge railway train that had once gone between Boulder and Denver. A trio of young women had spread out a picnic supper. Stu found it very pleasant just to sit here with his wounded hands in his lap. Maybe marshaling won't be so bad, he thought. At least it'll get me off that goddam assembly line in East Boulder.
"How's it going out there?" Ralph asked.
"Me, I wouldn't know - I'm just hired help, like the rest. Brad Kitchner says it's going like a house afire. He says the lights will be back on by the end of the first week of September, maybe sooner, and that we'll have heat by the middle of the month. Of course, he's pretty young to be making with the predictions..."
"I'll put my money on Brad," Ralph said. "I trust im. He's been gettin a lot of what you call on-the-job training." Ralph tried to laugh; the laugh turned into a sigh which seemed fetched up from the big man's bootheels.
"Why you so down at the mouth, Ralph?"
"I got some news on my radio," Ralph said. "Some of it's good, some of it... well, some of its not so good, Stu. I want you to know, because there's no way to keep it secret. Lots of people in the Zone with CBs. I imagine some were listening when I was talking to these new folks coming in."
"How many?"
"Over forty. One of them's a doctor, name of George Richardson. He sounds like a fine man. Level-headed."
"Well, that's great news!"
"He's from Derbyshire, Tennessee. Most of the people in this group are sort of mid-Southern. Well, it seems they had a pregnant woman with them, and her time come up ten days ago, on the thirteenth. This doctor delivered her of them - twins, she had - and they were fine. At first they were fine." Ralph lapsed back into silence, his mouth working.
Stu grabbed him. "They died? The babies died? That what you're trying to tell me? That they died? Talk to me, dammit!"
"They died," Ralph said in a low voice. "One of them went in twelve hours. Appeared to just choke to death. The other went two days later. Nothing Richardson could do to save them. The woman went loony. Raving about death and destruction and no more babies. You want to make sure Fran isn't around when they come in, Stu. That's what I wanted to tell you. And that you should let her know about this right away. Because if you don't, someone else will."
Stu let go of Ralph's shirt slowly.
"This Richardson, he wanted to know how many pregnant women we had, and I said only one that we know of right now. He asked how far along she was and I said four months. Is that right?"
"She's five months now. But Ralph, is he sure those babies died of the superflu? Is he sure?"
"No, he's not, and you gotta tell Frannie that, too, so she understands it. He said it could have been any number of things... the mother's diet... something hereditary... a respiratory infection... or maybe they were just, you know, defective babies. He said it could have been the Rh factor, whatever, that is. He just couldn't tell, them being born in the middle of a field beside the doggone Interstate 70. He said that him and about three others who were in charge of their group sat up late at night and talked it over. Richardson, he told them what it might mean if it was the Captain Trips that killed those babies, and how important it was for them to find out one way or the other for sure."
"Glen and I talked about that," Stu said bleakly, "the day I met him. July Fourth, that was. It seems so long ago... anyway, if it was the superflu that killed those babies it probably means that in forty or fifty years we can leave the whole shebang to the rats and the houseflies and the sparrows."
"I guess that's pretty much what Richardson told them. Anyway, they were some forty miles west of Chicago, and he persuaded them to turn around the next day so they could take the bodies back to a big hospital where he could do an autopsy. He said he could find out for sure if it was the superflu. He saw enough of it at the end of June. I guess all doctors did."
"Yeah."
"But when the morning came, the babies were gone. That woman had buried them, and she wouldn't say where. They spent two days digging, thinking that she couldn't have gone too far away from the camp or buried them too deep, being just over her delivery and all. But they didn't find them, and she wouldn't say where no matter how much they tried to explain how important it was. Poor woman was just all the way off'n her chump."
"I can understand that," Stu said, thinking of how much Fran wanted her baby.
"The doctor said even if it was the superflu, maybe two immune people could make an immune baby," Ralph said hopefully.
"The chances that the natural father of Fran's baby was immune are about one in a billion, I guess," Stu said. "He sure isn't here."
"Yeah, I guess it couldn't hardly be, could it? I'm sorry to have to put this on you, Stu. But I thought you'd better know. So you could tell her."