The Stand

“Daddy—”

“Hush, Fra

“You say she’s being selfish,” Peter said, still looking down into his wife’s still, shocked face. “You’re the one doing that. You stopped caring about Fra

He reached down and helped her up. She came to her feet like a sleepwalker. Her expression didn’t change; her eyes were still wide and unbelieving. Relentlessness hadn’t yet come back into them, but Fra

It would.

“It’s my fault for letting you go on. For not wanting any unpleasantness. For not wanting to rock the boat. I was selfish, too, you see. And when Fran went off to school I thought, Well, now Carla can have what she wants and it won’t hurt nobody but herself, and if a person doesn’t know they’re hurting, why, maybe they’re not. I was wrong. I’ve been wrong before, but never as bad as this.” Gently, but with great force, he reached out and grasped Carla’s shoulders. “Now: I am telling you this as your husband. If Fra

Carla’s mouth had dropped open, and now a sound began to come from it. At first it sounded unca

“Peter, your own son lay in his coffin in this room! ”

“Yes. And that’s why I can’t think of a better place to christen a new life,” he said. “Fred’s blood. Live blood. Fred himself, he’s been dead a lot of years, Carla. He was worm-food long since.”

She screamed at that and put her hands to her ears. He bent down and pulled them away.

“But the worms haven’t got your daughter and your daughter’s baby. It don’t matter how it was got; it’s alive. You act like you want to drive her off, Carla. What will you have if you do? Nothing but this room and a husband who’ll hate you for what you did. If you do that, why, it might just as well have been all three of us that day—me and Fra

“I want to go upstairs and lie down,” Carla said. “I feel nauseated. I think I’d better lie down.”

“I’ll help you,” Fra

“Don’t you touch me. Stay with your father. You and he seem to have this all worked out. How you are going to destroy me in this town. Why don’t you just settle into my parlor, Fra

She began to laugh and pushed past Peter, into the hall. She was listing like a drunken woman. Peter tried to put an arm around her shoulders. She bared her teeth and hissed at him like a cat.

Her laughter turned to sobs as she went slowly up the stairs, leaning on the mahogany banister for support; those sobs had a ripping, helpless quality that made Fra

Fra

“This will work itself out,” Peter said calmly. “She’ll come around.”

“Will she?” Fra

“Never mind. We won’t think about it for now.”

“I ought to go. She doesn’t want me here.”

“You ought to stay. You ought to be here when—if—she comes to and finds out she still needs you to stay.” He paused. “Me, I already do, Fran.”

“Daddy,” she said, and put her head against his chest. “Oh, Daddy, I’m so sorry, lust so goddam sorry—”

“Shhh,” he said, and stroked her hair. Over her head he could see the afternoon sunlight streaming duskily in through the bow windows, as it had always done, golden and still, the way sunlight falls into museums and the halls of the dead. “Shhh, Fra

Chapter 13

The red light went on. The pump hissed. The door opened. The man who stepped through was not wearing one of the white all-over suits, but a small shiny nose-filter that looked a little bit like a two-pronged silver fork, the kind the hostess leaves on the canape table to get the olives out of the bottle.

“Hi, Mr. Redman,” he said, strolling across the room. He stuck out his hand, clad in a thin transparent rubber glove, and Stu, surprised into the defensive, shook it. “I’m Dick Deitz. De

Stu nodded.

“Good.” Deitz sat on the edge of the bed. He was a small brown man, and sitting there with his elbows cocked just above his knees, he looked like a gnome in a Disney picture. “So what do you want to know?”

“First, I guess I want to know why you’re not wearing one of those spacesuits.”

“Because Geraldo there says you’re not catching.” Deitz pointed to a guinea pig behind the double-paned window. The guinea pig was in a cage, and standing behind the cage was De

“Geraldo, huh?”

“Geraldo’s been breathing your air for the last three days, via convector. This disease that your friends have passes easily from humans to guinea pigs and vice versa. If you were catching, we figure Geraldo would be dead by now.”

“But you’re not taking any chances,” Stu said dryly, and cocked a thumb at the nose-filter.

“That,” Deitz said with a cynical smile, “is not in my contract.”

“What have I got?”

Smoothly, as if rehearsed, Deitz said, “Black hair, blue eyes, one hell of a suntan…” He looked closely at Stu. “Not fu

Stu said nothing.

“Want to hit me?”

“I don’t believe it would do any good.”

Deitz sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose as if the plugs going up the nostrils hurt. “Listen,” he said. “When things look serious, I do jokes. Some people smoke or chew gum. It’s the way I keep my shit together, that’s all. I don’t doubt there are lots of people who have better ways. As to what sort of disease you’ve got, well, so far as De

Stu nodded impassively. Yet somehow he had an idea this little gnome of a man had seen past his poker face to his sudden and deep relief.

“What have the others got?”

“I’m sorry, that’s classified.”

“How did that fellow Campion get it?”

“That’s classified, too.”

“My guess is that he was in the army. And there was an accident someplace. Like what happened to those sheep in Utah thirty years ago, only a lot worse.”

“Mr. Redman, I could go to jail just for telling you you were hot or cold.”