"I don't know what I would do if one of them tried to . . ." Betts said to Patsy. "What would you do?"
Oh Andy. Patsy said, "I don't know."
"There's only one thing to do," Rap said, with force. "Shoot on sight."
It was hard to say what their expectations had been after this first victory. There were probably almost as many expectations as there were women. A certain segment of the group was disappointed because Vic/Richard/Tom-Dick-Harry had not come crawling up the hill, crying, My God how I have misused you, come home and everything will be different. Rap and the others would have wished for more carnage, and as the days passed the thirst for blood heaped dust in their mouths; Sheena was secretly disappointed that there had not been wider coverage of the battle in the press and on nationwide TV. The mood in the camp after that first victory was one of anticlimax, indefinable but growing discontent.
Petty fights broke out in the rank-and-file.
There arose, around this time, some differences between the rank-and-file women, some of whom had children, and the Mothers' Escadrille, an elite corps of women who saw themselves as professional mothers. As a group, they looked down on people like Glenda, who sent their children off to the day care compound. The Mothers' Escadrille would admit, when pressed, that their goal in banding together was the eventual elimination of the role of the man in the family, for man, with his incessant demands, interfered with the primary function of the mother. Still, they had to admit that, since they had no other profession, they were going to have to be assured some kind of financial support in the ultimate scheme of things. They also wanted more respect from the other women, who seemed to look down on them because they lacked technical or professional skills, and so they conducted their allotted duties in a growing atmosphere of hostility.
It was after a heated discussion with one of the mothers that Glenda, suffering guilt pangs and feelings of inadequacy, went down to the day care compound to see her own children. She picked them out at once, playing in the middle of a tangle of preschoolers, but she saw with a pang that Bobby was reluctant to leave the group to come and talk to her, and even after she said, "It's Mommy," it took Tommy a measurable number of seconds before he recognized her.
The price, she thought in some bitterness. I hope in the end it turns out to be worth the price.
Betts had tried running across the field both with and without her bra, and except for the time when she wrapped herself in the Ace bandage, she definitely bounced/At the moment nobody in the camp was agreed as to whether it was a good or a bad thing to bounce; it was either another one of those things the world at large was going to have to, by God, learn to ignore, or else it was a sign of weakness. Either way, it was uncomfortable, but so was the Ace bandage uncomfortable.
Sally was drawn toward home but at the same time, looking around at the disparate women and their growing discontentment, she knew she ought to stay on until the revolution had put itself in order. The women were unable to agree what the next step would be, or to consolidate their gains, and so she met late into the night with Sheena, and walked around among the others. She had the feeling she could help, that whatever her own circumstance, the others were so patently miserable that she must help.
"Listen," said Zack, when Sally called him to explain, "it's no picnic being a guy, either."
The fear of rape had become epidemic. Perhaps because there had been no overt assault on the women's camp, no army battalions, not even any police cruisers, the women expected more subtle and more brutal retaliation. The older women were outraged because some of the younger women said what difference did it make? If you were going to make it, what did the circumstances matter? Still, the women talked about it around the campfire and at last it was agreed that regardless of individual reactions, for ideological reasons it was important that it be made impossible; the propaganda value to the enemy would be too great, and so, at Rap's suggestion, each woman was instructed to carry her handweapon at all times and to shoot first and ask questions later.
Patsy and Andy Ellis were finding more and more ways to be together, but no matter how much they were together, it didn't seem to be enough. Since Andy's hair was long, they thought briefly of disguising him as a woman and getting him into camp, but a number of things: whiskers, figure, musculature, would give him away and Patsy decided it would be too dangerous.
"Look, I'm in love with you," Andy said. "Why don't you run away?"
"Oh, I couldn't do that," Patsy said, trying to hide herself in his arms. "And besides . . ."
He hid his face in her hair. "Besides nothing."
"No, really. Besides. Everybody has guns now, everybody has different feelings, but they all hate deserters. We have a new policy."
"They'd never find us."
She looked into Andy's face. "Don't you want to hear about the new policy?"
"Okay, what?"
"About deserters." She spelled it out, more than a little surprised at how far she had come. "It's hunt down and shave and kill,"
"They wouldn't really do that."
"We had the first one last night, this poor old lady, about forty. She got homesick for her family and tried to run away."
Andy was still amused. "They shaved all her hair off."
"That wasn't all," Patsy said. "When they got finished they really did it. Firing squad, the works."
Although June would not have been sensitive to it, there were diverging feelings in the camp about who did what, and what there was to do. All she knew was she was sick and tired of working in the day care compound and when she went to Sheena and complained, Sheena, with exquisite sensitivity, put her in charge of the detail that guarded the shopping center. It was a temporary assignment but it gave June a chance to put on a cartridge belt and all the other paraphernalia of victory, so she cut an impressive figure for Vic, when he came along.
"It's me, honey, don't you know me?"
"Go away," she said with some satisfaction. "No civilians allowed."
"Oh for God's sake."
To their mutual astonishment, she raised her rifle. "Bug off, fella."
"You don't really think you can get away with this."
"Bug off or I'll shoot."
"We're just letting you do this, to get it out of your system." Vic moved as if to relieve her of the rifle. "If it makes you feel a little better ..."
"This is your last warning."
"Listen," Vic said, a study in male outrage, "one step too far, and, tschoom, federal troops."
She fired a warning shot so he left.
Glenda was a little sensitive about the fact that various husbands had found ways to smuggle in messages, some had even come looking for their wives, but not Richard. One poor bastard had been shot when he came in too close to the fire; they heard an outcry and a thrashing in the bushes but when they looked for him the next morning there was no body, so he must have dragged himself away. There had been notes in food consignments and one husband had hired a skywriter, but so far she had neither word nor sign from Richard, and she wasn't altogether convinced she cared. He seemed to have drifted off into time past along with her job, her students and her book. Once her greatest hope had been to read her first chapter at the national psychological conference; now she wondered whether there would even be any more conferences. If she and the others were successful, that would break down, along with a number of other things. Still, in the end she would have her definitive work on the women's revolution, but so far the day-to-day talks had been so engrossing that she hadn't had a minute to begin. Right now, there was too much to do.