It's released you, my darling, she thought. I can cry for the others and still be so proud of you and love you so much -
She shifted a little, propping her back more firmly against the closet door.
"We'll have our guests speak first," Stu said, "and after that we'll have a short closed meeting. Any objections to that?"
There were none.
"Okay," Stu said. "I'll turn the floor over to Brad Kitchner, and you folks want to listen close because he's the guy that's going to put the rocks back in your bourbon in about three days."
This generated a hearty round of spontaneous applause. Blushing furiously, tugging at his tie, Brad walked to the center of the room. He came very close to tripping over a hassock on his way.
"I'm. Real. Happy. To be. Here," Brad began in a trembling monotone. He looked as if he would have been happier anywhere else, even at the South Pole, addressing a penguin convention. "The... ah..." He paused, examining his notes, and then brightened. "The power!" he exclaimed with the air of a man making a great discovery. "The power is almost on. Right."
He fumbled with his notes some more and then went on.
"We had two of the generators going yesterday, and as you know, one of them overloaded and blew its cookies. So to speak. What I mean is that it overlooked. Overloaded, rather. Well... you know what I mean."
A chuckle ran through them, and it seemed to put Brad a little more at ease.
"That happened because when the plague hit, a lot of stuff got left on and we didn't have the rest of the generators on to take the overload. We can take care of the overload danger by turning on the rest of the generators - even three or four would have absorbed the load easily - but that isn't going to solve the fire danger. So we've got to get everything shut off that we can. Stove burners, electric blankets, all that stuff. In fact, I was thinking like this: The quickest way might be to go into every house where no one lives and just pull all the fuses or turn off the main breaker switches. See? Now, when we get ready to turn on, I think we ought to take some elementary fire precautions. I went to the liberty of checking out the fire station in East Boulder, and..."
The fire snapped comfortably. It's going to be all right, Fran thought. Harold and Nadine have taken off without any prompting, and maybe that's best. It solves the problem and Stu is safe from them. Poor Harold, I felt sorry for you, but in the end I felt more fear than pity. The pity is still there, and I'm afraid of what may happen to you, but I'm glad your house is empty and you and Nadine have gone. I'm glad you've left us in peace.
Harold sat atop a graffiti-inlaid picnic table like something out of a lunatic's Zen handbook. His legs were crossed. His eyes were far, hazy, contemplative. He had gone to that cold and alien place where Nadine could not follow and she was frightened. In his hands he held the twin of the walkie-talkie in the shoebox. The mountains fell away in front of them in breathtaking ledges and pine-choked ravines. Miles to the east - maybe ten, maybe forty - the land smoothed into the American Midwest and marched away to the dim blue horizon. Night had already come over that part of the world. Behind them, the sun had just disappeared behind the mountains, leaving them outlined in gold that would flake and fade.
"When?" Nadine asked. She was horribly keyed up, and she had to go to the bathroom badly.
"Pretty soon," Harold said. His grin had become a mellow smile. It was an expression she could not place right away, because she had never seen it on Harold's face before. It took her a few minutes to place it. Harold looked happy.
The committee voted 7-0 to empower Brad to round up twenty men and women for his Turning-Off Crew. Ralph Brentner had agreed to fill up two of the Fire Department's old tanker trucks at Boulder Reservoir and to have them at the power station when Brad turned on.
Chad Norris was next. Speaking quietly, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his chino pants, he talked about the work the Burial Committee had done over the last three weeks. He told them they had buried an incredible twenty-five thousand corpses, better than eight thousand a week, and that he believed they were now over the bulge.
"We've either been lucky or blessed," he said. "This mass exodus - that's all I know to call it - has done most of our work for us. In another town Boulder's size, it would have taken a year to get it done. We're expecting to inter another twenty thousand plague victims by the first of October, and we'll probably keep stumbling over individual victims for a long time after, but I wanted you to know that the job is getting done and I don't think we have to worry too much about diseases breeding in the bodies of the unburied dead."
Fran shifted her position so she could look out at the last of the day. The gold that had surrounded the peaks was already beginning to fade to a less spectacular lemon color. She felt a sudden wave of homesickness that was totally unexpected and almost sickening in its force.