Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Chapter 20

The new dormitory was dark except for the pale lights spaced regularly in the halls. Mark darted down the hallway and went inside one of the rooms. There was too little light to make out details; only the shapes of sleeping boys on the white beds could be seen at first. The windows were dark shadows.

Mark stood by the door silently and waited for his eyes to adjust; the shapes emerged from darkness and became dark and light areas — arms, faces, hair. His bare feet made no sound as he approached the first cot, and again he stopped; this time his wait was shorter. The boy on the cot didn’t stir. Slowly Mark opened a small bottle of ink, made from blackberries and walnuts, and dipped a fine brush into it. He had been holding the ink next to his chest; it was warm. Moving very carefully, he leaned over the sleeping boy and quickly painted the numeral 1 on the boy’s cheek. The boy didn’t move.

Mark backed away from the first bed, went to another, and again paused to make certain the boy was sleeping deeply. This time he painted a 2.

Presently he left the room and hurried to the next one. He repeated the procedure there. If the boy was sleeping on his stomach, his face buried in the covers, Mark painted a number on his hand or arm.

Shortly before dawn Mark put the top back on his bottle of ink and crept to his own room, a cubicle large enough to contain only his cot and some shelves above it. He put the ink on a shelf, making no attempt to hide it. Then he sat cross-legged on his bed and waited.

He was a slightly built boy, with dark, abundant hair that made his head seem overlarge, not conspicuously so, but noticeable if one examined him closely. The only startling feature was his eyes, a blue of such intensity and depth that they were unforgettable. He sat patiently, a slight smile playing on his lips, deepening, leaving, forming again. The light outside his window brightened; it was spring and the air had a luminosity that was missing in other seasons.

Now he could hear voices, and his smile deepened, widened his mouth. The voices were loud and angry. He began to laugh, and was weak from laughter when his door opened and five boys entered. There was so little room they had to line up with their legs tight against his cot.

“Good morning, One, Two, Three, Four, Five,” Mark said, choking on the words with new laughter. They flushed angrily and he doubled over, unable to contain himself.

“Where is he?” Miriam asked. She had entered the conference room and was still standing at the door.

Barry was at the head of the table. “Sit down, Miriam,” he said. “You know what he did?”

She sat at the other end of the long table and nodded. “Who doesn’t? It’s all over, that’s all anyone’s talking about.” She glanced at the others. The doctors were there, Lawrence, Thomas, Sara . . . A full council meeting.

“Has he said anything?” she asked.

Thomas shrugged. “He didn’t deny it.”

“Did he say why he did it?”

“So he could tell them apart,” Barry said.

For a brief moment Miriam thought she heard a trace of amusement in his voice, but nothing of it showed on his face. She felt tight with fury, as if somehow she might be held responsible for the boy, for his aberrant behavior. She wouldn’t have it, she thought angrily. She leaned forward, her hands pressed on the tabletop, and demanded, “What are you going to do about him? Why don’t you control him?”

“This meeting has been called to discuss that,” Barry said. “Have you any suggestions?”

She shook her head, still furious, unappeased. She shouldn’t even be there, she thought. The boy was nothing to her; she had avoided contact with him from the beginning. By inviting her to the meeting, they had made a link that in reality didn’t exist. Again she shook her head and now she leaned back in her chair, as if to divorce herself from the proceedings.

“We’ll have to punish him,” Lawrence said after a moment of silence. “The only question is how.”

How? Barry wondered. Not isolation; he thrived on it, sought it out at every turn. Not extra work; he was still working off his last escapade. Only three months ago he had gotten inside the girls’ rooms and mixed up their ribbons and sashes so that no group had anything matching. It had taken hours for them to get everything back in place. And now this, and this time it would take weeks for the ink to wear off.

Lawrence spoke again, his voice thoughtful, a slight frown on his face. “We should admit we made a mistake,” he said. “There is no place for him among us. The boys his age reject him; he has no friends. He is capricious and willful, brilliant and moronic by turns. We made a mistake with him. Now his pranks are only that, childish pranks, but in five years? Ten years? What can we expect from him in the future?” He directed his questions at Barry.

“In five years he will be downriver, as you know. It is during the next few years that we have to find a way to manage him better.”

Sara moved slightly in her chair, and Barry turned to her. “We have found that he is not made repentant by being isolated,” Sara said. “It is his nature to be an isolate, therefore by not allowing him the privacy he craves we will have found the correct punishment for him.”

Barry shook his head. “We discussed that before,” he said. “It would not be fair to the others to force them to accept him, an outsider. He is disruptive among his peers; they should not be punished along with him.”

“Not his peers,” Sara said emphatically. “You and your brothers voted to keep him here in order to study him for clues in how to train others to endure separate existences. It is your responsibility to accept him among yourselves, to let his punishment be to have to live with you under your watchful eyes. Or else admit Lawrence is right, that we made a mistake, and that it is better to correct the mistake now than to let it continue to compound.”

“You would punish us for the misdeeds of the boy?” Bruce asked.

“That boy wouldn’t be here if it were not for you and your brothers,” Sara said distinctly. “If you’ll recall, at our first meeting concerning him, the rest of us voted to rid ourselves of him. We foresaw trouble from the beginning, and it was your arguments about his possible usefulness that finally swayed us. If you want to keep him, then you keep him with you, under your observation, away from the other children, who are constantly being hurt by him and his pranks. He is an isolate, an aberration, a troublemaker. These meetings have become more frequent, his pranks more destructive. How many more hours must we spend discussing his behavior?”

“You know that isn’t practical,” Barry said impatiently. “We’re in the lab half the time, in the breeders’ quarters, in the hospital. Those aren’t places for a child of ten.”

“Then get rid of him,” Sara said. She sat back now and crossed her arms over her chest.

Barry looked at Miriam, whose lips were tightly compressed. She met his gaze coldly. He turned to Lawrence.

“Can you think of any other way?” Lawrence asked. “We’ve tried everything we can think of, and nothing has worked. Those boys were angry enough to kill him this morning. Next time there might be violence. Have you thought what violence would do to this community?”

They were a people without violence in their history. Physical punishment had never been considered, because it was impossible to hurt one without hurting others equally. That didn’t apply to Mark, Barry thought suddenly, but he didn’t say it. The thought of hurting him, of causing him physical pain, was repugnant. He glanced at his brothers and saw the same confusion on their faces that he was feeling. They couldn’t abandon the boy. He did hold clues about how man lived alone; they needed him. His mind refused to probe more deeply than that: they needed to study him. There were so many things about human beings that were incomprehensible to them; Mark might be the link that would enable them to understand.

The fact that the boy was Ben’s child, that Ben and his brothers had been as one, had nothing to do with it. He felt no particular bond to the boy. None at all. If anyone could feel such a bond, it should be Miriam, he thought, and looked at her for a sign that she felt something. Her face was stony, her eyes avoided him. Too rigid, he realized, too cold.

And if that were so, he thought coolly, as if thinking about an experiment with insensate material, then it truly was a mistake to keep the boy with them. If that one child had the power to hurt the Miriam sisters as well as the Barry brothers, he was a mistake. It was unthinkable that an outsider could somehow reach in and twist the old hurts so much that they became new hurts, with even more destructive aftermaths.

“We could do it,” Bob said suddenly. “There are risks, of course, but we could manage him. In four years,” he continued, looking now at Sara, “he’ll be sent out with the road crew, and from then on, he won’t be a threat to any of us. But we will need him when we begin to reach out to try to understand the cities. He can scout out the paths, survive alone in the woods without danger of mental breakdown through separation. We’ll need him.”

Sara nodded. “And if we have to have another meeting such as this one, can we agree today that it will be our final meeting?”

The Barry brothers exchanged glances, then reluctantly nodded and Barry said, “Agreed. We manage him or get rid of him.”

The doctors returned to Barry’s office, where Mark was waiting for them. He was standing at the window, a small dark figure against the glare of sunlight. He turned to face them, and his own face seemed featureless. The sun touched his hair and made it gleam with red-gold highlights.

“What will you do with me?” he asked. His voice was steady.

“Come over here and sit down,” Barry said, taking his place behind the desk. The boy crossed the room and sat on a straight chair, perching on the extreme front of it, as if ready to leap up and run.

“Relax,” Bob said, and sat on the edge of the desk, swinging his leg as he regarded the boy. When the five brothers were in the room it seemed very crowded suddenly. The boy looked from one to another of them and finally turned his attention to Barry. He didn’t ask again.

Barry told him about the meeting, and watching him, he thought, there was a little of Ben, and a little of Molly, and for the rest, he had gone into the distant past, dipped into the gene pool, had come up with strangers’ genes, and he was unlike anyone else in the valley. Mark listened intently, the way he listened in class when he was interested. His grasp was immediate and thorough.

“Why do they think what I did was so awful?” he asked when Barry became silent.

Barry looked at his brothers helplessly. This was how it was going to be, he wanted to say to them. No common grounds for understanding. He was an alien in every way.

Suddenly Mark asked, “How can I tell you apart?”

“There’s no need for you to tell us apart,” Barry said firmly.

Mark stood up then. “Should I go get my stuff, bring it to your place?”

“Yes. Now, while the others are in school. And come right back.”

Mark nodded. At the door he paused, glanced at each in turn once more, and said, “Maybe just a tiny, tiny touch of paint, on the tips of the ears, or something . . . ?” He opened the door and ran out, and they could hear him laughing as he raced down the hall.

Chapter 21

Barry glanced about the lecture room and spotted Mark in the rear, looking sleepy and bored. He shrugged; let him be bored. Three of the brothers were working in the labs, and the fourth was busy in the breeders’ quarters; that left the lecture, and Mark had to sit through it if it killed him.

“The problem we raised yesterday, if you’ll recall,” Barry said then, referring briefly to his notes, “is that we have yet to discover the cause of the decline of the clone strains after the fourth generation. The only way we have got around this to date is through constant replenishment of our stocks by the use of sexually reproduced babies who are cloned before the third month in utero. In this way we have been able to maintain our families of brothers and sisters, but admittedly this is not the ideal solution. Can any of you tell me what some of the obvious drawbacks to this system are?” He paused and glanced about. “Karen?”

“There is a slight difference between the babies cloned in the laboratory and those born of human mothers. There is the prenatal influence and also the birth trauma that might alter the sexually reproduced person.”

“Very good,” Barry said. “Comments, anyone?”

“In the beginning they waited two years before they cloned the babies,” Stuart said. “Now we don’t, and that makes the family almost as close as if they were all clones.”

Barry nodded, then pointed to Carl. “If the human baby has a birth defect, caused by a birth trauma, he can be aborted, and still the cloned babies will be all right.”

“That’s hardly in the nature of a drawback,” Barry said, smiling. There was an answering ripple of amusement throughout the class.

He waited a moment, then said, “The genetic pool is unpredictable, its past is unknown, its constituents so varied that when the process is not regulated and controlled, there is always the danger of producing unwanted characteristics. And the even more dangerous threat of losing talents that are important to our community.” He allowed time for this to be grasped, then continued. “The only way to ensure our future, to ensure continuity, is through perfecting the process of cloning, and for this reason we need to expand our facilities, increase our researchers, locate a source of materials to replace what is wearing out and equip the new laboratories, and we need to complete a safe link to that source or sources.”

A hand was raised. Barry nodded. “What if we can’t find enough equipment in good condition soon enough?”

“Then we will have to go to human implantation of the cloned fetus. We have done this in a number of cases, and we have the methods, but it is wasteful of our few human resources, and it would necessitate changing our timetable drastically to use the breeders this way.” He looked over the class, then continued. “Our goal is to remove the need for sexual reproduction. Then we will be able to plan our future. If we need road builders, we can clone fifty or a hundred for this purpose, train them from infancy, and send them out to fulfill their destiny. We can clone boat builders, sailors, send them out to the sea to locate the course of the fish our first explorers discovered in the Potomac. A hundred farmers, to relieve those who would prefer to be working over test tubes than hoeing rows of carrots.”

Another ripple of laughter passed over the students. Barry smiled also; without exception they all worked their hours in the fields.

“For the first time since mankind walked the face of the earth,” he said, “there will be no misfits.”

“And no geniuses,” a voice said lazily, and he looked to the rear of the class to see Mark, still slouched down in his chair, his blue eyes bright, grinning slightly. Deliberately he winked at Barry, then closed both eyes again, and apparently returned to sleep.

“I’ll tell you a story if you want,” Mark said. He stood in the aisle between two rows of three beds each. The Carver brothers had all had appendicitis simultaneously. They looked at him from both sides, and one of them nodded. They were thirteen.

“Once there was a woji,” he said, moving to the window, where he sat cross-legged on a chair with the light behind him.

“What’s a woji?”

“If you ask questions, I won’t tell it,” Mark said. “You’ll see as I go along. This woji lived deep in the woods, and every year when winter came he nearly froze to death. That was because the icy rains soaked him and the snow covered him over, and he had nothing at all to eat because the leaves all fell and he ate leaves. One year he got an idea, and he went to a big spruce tree and told it his idea. At first the spruce tree wouldn’t even consider his suggestion. The woji didn’t go away, though. He kept telling the spruce tree his idea over and over, and finally the spruce tree thought, What did he have to lose? Why not try it? So the spruce tree told the woji to go ahead. For days and days the woji worked on the leaves, rolling them up and making them over into needles. He used some of the needles to sew them all tightly to the tree branches. Then he climbed to the very top of the spruce tree and yelled at the ice wind, and laughed at it and said it couldn’t hurt him now, because he had a home and food to eat all winter.

“The other trees heard him and laughed, and they began to tell each other about the crazy little woji who yelled at the ice wind, and finally the last tree, at the place where the trees end and the snow begins, heard the story. It was a maple tree, and it laughed until its leaves shook. The ice wind heard it laughing and came blowing up, storming and throwing ice, and demanded to know what was so funny. The maple tree told the ice wind about the crazy little woji who had challenged his powers to take the leaves off the trees, and the ice wind became madder and madder. It blew harder and harder. The maple leaves turned red and gold with fear and then fell to the ground, and the tree stood naked before the wind. The ice wind blew south and the other trees shivered and turned color and dropped their leaves.

“Finally the ice wind came to the spruce tree and screamed for the woji to come out. He wouldn’t. He was hidden deep in the spruce needles where the ice wind couldn’t see him or touch him. The wind blew harder and the spruce tree shivered, but its needles held tight and they didn’t turn color at all. The ice wind now called up the ice rain to help, and the spruce tree was covered with icicles, but the needles held on and the woji stayed dry and warm. Then the ice wind got madder than ever and called the snow to help, and it snowed deeper and deeper until the spruce tree looked like a mountain of snow, but deep inside, the woji was warm and content, close to the trunk of the tree, and soon the tree shrugged and the snow fell away from it and it knew the ice wind could no longer hurt it.

“The ice wind howled about the tree all winter, but the needles held tight and the woji stayed snug and warm, and if he nibbled on a needle now and then the tree forgave him, because he had taught it not to cringe and turn colors and stand naked all winter shivering before the ice wind just because that’s what the other trees did. When spring came the other trees begged the woji to turn their leaves into needles too, and the woji finally agreed. But only for those trees that hadn’t laughed at him. And that’s why the evergreen trees are evergreen.”

“Is that all?” demanded one of the Carver brothers.

Mark nodded.

“What’s a woji? You said we’d know when the story was over.”

“That’s the thing that lives in spruce trees,” Mark said, grinning. “He’s invisible, but sometimes you can hear him. He’s usually laughing.” He jumped down from the chair. “I’ve gotta go.” He trotted to the door.

“There’s no such thing!” one of the brothers yelled.

Mark opened the door and looked out cautiously. He wasn’t supposed to be there. Then he looked over his shoulder and asked the brothers, “How do you know? Have you ever gone out there to try to hear him laughing?” He left them quickly before a doctor or nurse showed up.

Before dawn one morning near the end of May the families began to gather at the dock once more to see off the six boats and crews of brothers and sisters. There was no gaiety now, there had been no party the night before. Barry stood near Lewis and watched the preparations. They were both silent.

There was no way to draw back now, Barry knew. They had to have the supplies that were in the big cities, or die. That was the alternative they had. The toll had been too high, and he knew no way to reduce it. Special training had helped a little, but not enough. Sending groups of brothers and sisters had helped, but not enough. So far in the four trips downriver, they had lost twenty-two people, and another twenty-four had been affected by the ordeal, perhaps permanently affected, and through them their families. Thirty-six of them this time. They were to stay out until frost, or until the river started its usual fall rise, whichever was first.

Some of them were to build a bypass around the falls; some would dig a canal to link the Shenandoah to the Potomac to avoid the danger of the rough water they now had to face with each trip. Two groups were to go back and forth between the falls and Washington and bring out the supplies that had been found the previous year. One group was on river patrol, to clear the rapids that the capricious rivers renewed each winter.

How many would return this time? Barry wondered. They would stay out longer than any of the others had; their work was more dangerous. How many?

“Having a building at the falls will help,” Lewis said suddenly. “It was the feeling of being exposed that made it particularly bad.”

Barry nodded. It was what they all reported — they felt exposed, watched. They felt the world was pressing in on them, that the trees moved closer as soon as the sun set. He glanced at Lewis, forgot what he had started to say, and instead watched a tic that had appeared at the corner of his mouth. Lewis was clenching his fists; he stared at the dwindling boats, and the tic jerked and vanished, jerked again.

“Are you all right?” Barry asked. Lewis shook himself and looked away from the river. “Lewis? Is anything wrong?”

“No. I’ll see you later.” He strode away swiftly.

“There’s something about being in the woods in the dark especially that has a traumatic effect,” Barry said later to his brothers. They were in the dormitory room they shared; at the far end, apart from them, sat Mark, cross-legged on a cot, watching them. Barry ignored him. They were so used to his presence now that they seldom noticed him at all, unless he got in the way. They usually noticed if he vanished, as he frequently did.

The brothers waited. That was well known, the fear of the silent woods.

“In training the children to prepare for their future roles, we should incorporate experience in living in the woods for prolonged periods. They could start with an afternoon, then go to an overnight camping expedition, and so on, until they are out for several weeks at a time.”

Bruce shook his head. “What if they were adversely affected to the point where they could not go out on the expeditions at all? We could lose ten years of hard work that way.”

“We could try it with a sample,” Barry said. “Two groups, one male, one female. If they show distress after the first exposure, we can slow it down, or even postpone it until they are a year or two older. Eventually they’ll have to go out there; we might be able to make it easier on them.”

They no longer were holding the number of like clones to six, but had increased them to ten of each group. “We have eighty children almost eleven years old,” Bruce said. “In four years they will be ready. If the statistics hold up, we’ll lose two-fifths of them within the first four months they are away, either to accidents or psychological stress. I think it’s worth a try to condition them to the woods and living apart beforehand.”

“They have to have supervision,” Bob said. “One of us.”

“We’re too old,” Bruce said with a grimace. “Besides, we know we’re susceptible to the psychological stress. Remember Ben.”

“Exactly,” Bob said. “We’re too old to make any difference here. Our young brothers are taking over our functions more and more, and their little brothers are ready to step into their places when needed. We are expendable,” he concluded.

“He’s right,” Barry said reluctantly. “It’s our experiment, our obligation to see it through. Draw lots?”

“Take turns,” Bruce said. “Each of us to have a crack at it before it’s over.”

“Can I go too?” Mark asked suddenly, and they all turned to look at him.

“No,” Barry said brusquely. “We know you’re not hurt by the woods. We don’t want anything to go wrong with this, no pranks, no tricks, no bravado.”

“You’ll get lost then,” Mark shouted. He jumped down from his cot and ran to the door and paused there to yell back, “You’ll be out in the woods with a bunch of crying babies and you’ll all go crazy and the woji will die laughing at you!”

A week later Bob led the first group of boys up into the woods behind the valley. Each carried a small pack with his lunch in it. They wore long pants and shirts and boots. Watching them leave, Barry could not banish the thought that he should have been the first to try it with them. His idea, his risk. He shook his head angrily. What risk? They were going for a hike in the woods. They would have lunch, turn around, and come back down. He caught Mark’s glance and for a moment they stared at each other, the man and boy, curiously alike, yet so distant from each other that no similarity was possible.

Mark broke the stare and looked again at the boys, who were climbing steadily and coming to the thicker growths. Soon they were invisible among the trees.

“They’ll get lost,” he said.

Bruce shrugged. “Not in one hour or two,” he said. “At noon they’ll eat, turn around, and come back.”

The sky was deep blue with puffs of white clouds and a very high band of cirrus clouds with no apparent beginning or end. It would be noon in less than two hours.

Stubbornly Mark shook his head, but he said nothing more. He returned to class, and then went to the dining room for lunch. After lunch he was due to work in the garden for two hours, and he was there when Barry sent for him.

“They aren’t back yet,” Barry said when Mark entered the office. “Why were you so certain they would be lost?”

“Because they don’t understand about the woods,” Mark said. “They don’t see things.”

“What things?”

Mark shrugged helplessly. “Things,” he said again. He looked from one brother to another and again shrugged.

“Could you find them?” Bruce asked. His voice sounded harsh, and deep frown lines cut into his forehead.

“Yes.”

“Let’s go,” Barry said.

‘The two of us?” Mark asked.

“Yes.”

Mark looked doubtful. “I could do it faster alone,” he said.

Barry felt a shudder start, and drew himself away from his desk with a brusque motion. He was holding himself rigidly under control now. “Not you alone,” he said. “I want you to show me those things you see, how you can find your way where there’s no path. Let’s go before it gets any later.” He glanced at the boy in his short tunic, barefooted. “Go get changed,” he said.

“This is all right for up there,” Mark said. “There’s nothing under the trees up there.”

Barry thought about his words as they headed for the woods. He watched the boy, now ahead of him, now at his side, sniffing the air happily, at home in the silent, dim woods.

They moved quickly and very soon they were deep in the forest where the trees had reached mature growth and made a canopy overhead that excluded the sun completely. No shadows, no way to discover directions, Barry thought, breathing hard as he worked to keep up with the nimble boy. Mark never hesitated, never paused, but moved rapidly with certainty, and Barry didn’t know what clues he found, how he knew to go this way and not that. He wanted to ask, but he needed his breath for climbing. He was sweating, and his feet felt like lead as he followed the boy.

“Let’s rest a minute,” he said. He sat on the ground, his back against a mammoth tree trunk. Mark had been ahead of him, and now he trotted back and squatted a few feet away.

“Tell me what you look for,” Barry said after a moment. “Show me a sign of their passage there.”

Mark looked surprised at the demand. “Everything shows they came this way,” he said. He pointed to the tree that supported Barry’s back. “That’s a bitternut hickory tree — see, nuts.” He brushed the dirt aside and uncovered several nuts. They were half rotted. “The boys found some and threw them. And there,” he said, pointing, “see that sprout. Someone bent it to the ground, it still isn’t straight again. And the marks of their feet, scuffing the dirt and leaves on the forest floor. It’s like a sign saying, this way, this way.”

Barry could see the difference when Mark showed him, but when he looked in another direction, he thought he could see scuff marks there also.

“Water,” Mark said. “That’s a runoff trail from melting snow. It’s different.”

“How did you learn about the woods? Molly?”

Mark nodded. “She couldn’t get lost ever. She couldn’t forget how things looked, and if she saw them again, she knew. She taught me. Or else I was born with it, and she showed me how to use it. I can’t get lost either.”

“Can you teach others?”

“I guess so. Now that I showed you, you could lead, couldn’t you?” He had turned his back, scanning the woods, and now faced Barry again. “You know which way to start, don’t you?”

Barry looked carefully about them. The scuff marks were on the path they had just made, where Mark had pointed them out. He saw the water trail, and looked harder for the trail they should follow. There was nothing. He looked again at Mark, who was grinning. “No,” he said. “I don’t know which way to go now.”

Mark laughed. “Because it’s rocky,” he said. “Come on.” He started again, this time keeping to the edge of a rocky trail.

“How did you know?” Barry asked. “There’s no sign of them among the rocks.”

“Because there was no sign anywhere else. It was all that was left. There!” He pointed, and there was another bent tree, this one stronger, older, more firmly rooted. “Someone pulled that spruce down and let it spring back up. Probably more than one did, because it’s still not quite straight, and you can see now that the rocks have been kicked around.”

The rocky trail deepened and became a creek bed. Mark watched the edges carefully and soon turned again, pointing to scuff marks as he went. The woods were deeper, the gloom more intense here. Thick evergreen trees covered the slope they began to descend, and sometimes they had to wind their way among the branches that touched one another in the spruce forest. The floor was brown, springy with generations of needles.

Barry found himself holding his breath in order not to disturb the silence of the great forest, and he understood why the others talked of a presence, something that watched as they moved among the trees. The silence was so intense, it was like a dream world where mouths open and close and no noise is heard, where musicians’ instruments are strangely muted, where one screams and screams silently. Behind him he could sense the trees moving in closer, closer.

Then, suddenly, as if it had been growing a long time and he only now had become aware of it, he found that he was listening to something over and beyond the silence, something that was like a voice, or voices mingling in whispers too distant to make out the words. Like Molly, he thought, and a shiver of fear raced through him. The voices faded. Mark had stopped and was looking about again.

“They doubled back here,” he said. “They must have had lunch up there and started back, but here they lost their way. See, they went over too far, and kept going farther and farther from the way they had come.”

Barry could see nothing to indicate they had done that, but he knew he was helpless in that dark forest and he could only follow the boy wherever he led.

They climbed again and the spruces thinned out and now there were aspens and cottonwoods bordering a stream.

“You’d think they’d know they hadn’t seen this before,” Mark said with disgust. He was moving faster now. He stopped again and a grin came and went, leaving him looking worried. “Some of them began to run here,” he said. “Wait. I’ll see if they regrouped ahead, or if we have to find any of them.” He vanished before he finished speaking, and Barry sank to the ground to wait for him. The voices came back almost instantly. He looked at the trees that seemed unmoving, and knew that the branches high above were stirring in the wind, that they made the voicelike whispering, but still he strained to hear the words over and over. He put his head down on his knees and tried to will the voices into silence.

His legs were throbbing, and he was very hot. He could feel trickles of sweat running down his back, and he hunched over more so his shirt was snug across his shoulders, absorbing the sweat. They couldn’t send their people out to live in the forests, he knew. This was a hostile environment, with a spirit of malevolency that would stifle them, craze them, kill them. He could feel the presence now, pressing in on him, drawing closer, feeling him . . . Abruptly he stood up and started to follow Mark.

Chapter 22

Barry heard voices again, this time real voices, childish voices, and he waited.

“Bob, are you all right?” he called when his brother came into view. Bob looked bedraggled and there was dirt on his face; he nodded and waved, breathing heavily.

“They were climbing toward the knob,” Mark said, suddenly at Barry’s side. He had come upon him from a different direction, invisible until he spoke.

Now the boys were straggling into the same area, and they looked worse than Bob. Some of them had been crying. Just as Mark had predicted, Barry thought.

“We thought we might be able to see where we were if we climbed higher,” Bob said, glancing at Mark, as if for approval.

Mark shook his head. “Always go down, follow a stream, if you don’t know where you are,” he said. “It’ll go to a bigger stream, then finally to the river, and you can follow it back to where you have to go.”

The boys were watching Mark with open admiration. “Do you know the way down?” one of them asked.

Mark nodded.

“Rest a few minutes first,” Barry said. The voices were gone now, the woods merely dark woods, uninhabited by anything at all.

Mark led them down quickly, not the way they had gone up, not the way he had followed them, but in a more direct line that had them looking over the valley within half an hour.

“It was a mistake to risk them like that!” Lawrence said angrily. It was the first council meeting since the adventure in the forest.

“It’s necessary to teach them to live in the woods,” Barry said.

“They won’t have to live out there. The best thing we can do with the woods is clear them as quickly as possible. We’ll have a shelter for them down below the falls where they’ll live, just as they live here, in a clearing.”

“As soon as you’re away from this clearing, the woods make themselves felt,” Barry said. “Everyone has reported the same terror, the feeling of being closed in by the trees, of being threatened by them. They have to learn how to live with that.”

“They’ll never live in the woods,” Lawrence said with finality. “They’ll live in a dormitory building on the bank of the river, and when they travel, they’ll go by boat, and when they stop, they’ll stop in another clearing where there is decent shelter, where the woods have been beaten back and will be kept back.” He emphasized his words by hitting his fist on the tabletop as he spoke.

Barry regarded Lawrence bitterly. “We can run the laboratories five more years, Lawrence! Five years! We have almost nine hundred people in this valley right now. Most of them are children, being trained to forage for us, to find those things we need to survive. And they won’t find them on the banks of your tamed rivers! They’re going to have to make expeditions to New York, to Philadelphia, to New Jersey. And who’s going to go before them and clear back the woods for them? We train those children now to cope with the woods, or we’ll die, all of us!”

“It was a mistake to rush into this,” Lawrence said. “We should have waited until we knew how much we could find and get back to the valley before we got into this so deeply.”

Barry nodded. “You can’t have it both ways,” he said. “We made the decision. Every year we wait, the less there is for us to forage in the cities. And we have to salvage what we can. Without it we die anyway, more slowly perhaps than with the timetable we now have, but in the end it would be the same. We can’t exist without the tools, the hardware, the information that’s in the cities. And now we’re committed to this path, and we have to do our best to see that these children are equipped as well as possible to survive when we send them out.”

Five years, he thought, that’s all they needed. Five years to find a source of laboratory equipment — tubing, stainless steel tanks, centrifuges . . . Computer components, wiring, wafers . . . They knew the things they needed had been stored carefully, they had the papers to prove that. They would find the right warehouses, weathertight, dry, with acres of well-stacked shelves. It was a gamble, producing so many children in so short a time, but a gamble they had taken knowingly, aware of the consequences if anything went wrong along the way. They might be hungry before the five years were over; whether or not the valley could adequately feed over a thousand people had been endlessly debated. For the kind of restocking they required, they needed a lot of people, and in five years they would know if they had gambled foolishly.

Four hundred fifty children between five and eleven years, that was what was in the kitty, Barry thought. That was the extent of the gamble. And in four years the first eighty of them would leave the valley, possibly forever, but if they returned, if even a few of them returned with materials, with information about Philadelphia or New York, with anything of value, the gamble would have paid off.

It was agreed that the training program as outlined by Barry should be continued on a trial basis, risking no more than three groups — thirty children. And further, if the children were psychologically damaged by the equipment, they were not to be salvaged, and the experiment would be discontinued immediately. Barry left the meeting satisfied.

“What will I get out of it?” Mark demanded.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you get a teacher, and the brothers and sisters get training. What do I get?”

“What do you want? You’ll have companionship. More than you have now.”

“They won’t play with me,” Mark said. “They’ll listen and do what I say because they’re afraid and they know I’m not, but they won’t play with me. I want my own room again.”

Barry glanced at his brothers and knew they would all agree to that instantly. It had been a nuisance having the boy in their communal bedroom. By mutual consent they had not dragged the mat out in his presence, and their talk had been censored — when they remembered he was there. Barry nodded. “Not back in the dormitory, here in this building.”

“That’s all right.”

“Then here’s what we’ll do. Once a week each group will go out, one hour at a time to start with, and not more than a few minutes from a place where they can see the valley. After several exposures of this limited duration and distance, you’ll take them farther, keep them longer. Are there games you could play with them in the woods to help them become accustomed to being there?” There was no longer any question of not including Mark in this phase of the training.

Mark sat on a branch hidden by thick foliage from below and watched the boys stumbling about the edges of the clearing, looking for the path he had left them to follow. It was as if they were blind, he thought wonderingly. All they really cared about was staying close together, not becoming separated even momentarily. This was the third time this week Mark had tried this game with the clones; the other two groups had failed also.

At first he had enjoyed leading them out into the woods; their frank admiration of him had been pleasant, unexpected, and for once he had felt the differences that separated them might be lessened when they learned some of the things he knew, when they could all play together among the whispering trees. He knew now such hopes had been wrong. The differences were more pronounced than ever, and the early admiration was turning into something else, something he could not really understand. They seemed to dislike him more, to be almost afraid of him, certainly resentful of him.

He whistled and watched the reaction pass over them all simultaneously, like grass being blown by a gust of wind. Even knowing the direction, they were not able to find his trail. Disgustedly he left the tree, sliding part way, dropping agilely from branch to branch where it was too rough to slide. He joined the boys and glanced at Barry, who also looked disgusted.

“Are we going back now?” one of the boys asked.

“No,” Barry said. “Mark, I want you to take two of the boys a short distance away, try to hide with them. Let’s see if the others can find you.”

Mark nodded. He glanced at the ten boys and knew it made no difference which two went with him. He pointed to the two nearest him and turned and went into the woods, the boys at his heels.

Again he left a trail that anyone with eyes could follow, and as soon as they were out of sight of the larger group he began to circle around to get behind the boys in the clearing, not trying for distance at all, since they couldn’t follow a trail even three feet. Finally he stopped. He put his fingers to his lips and the other two nodded, and they sat down to wait. They looked desperately afraid, sat touching at the arms, their legs touching. Mark could hear their brothers now, not following the trail, but coming straight for them. Too fast, he thought suddenly. The way they were rushing was dangerous.

The brothers he was with jumped up excitedly, and in a moment the others rushed into sight. Their reunion was jubilant and triumphant, and even Barry looked pleased. Mark drew back and watched, his warning about rushing in strange woods stilled.

“That’s enough for today,” Barry said. “Very good, boys. Very good indeed. Who knows the way back?”

They were all flushed with their first success in the woods, and they began to point one way after another, laughing, elbowing each other. Barry laughed with them. “I’d better lead you out of here,” he said.

He looked about for Mark, but he was not there. For a moment Barry felt a thrill of fear. It passed almost too quickly to be identified, and he turned and started to walk toward the massive oak tree that was the last tree before the long slope down to the valley. At least he had learned that much, he thought, and he knew the boys also should have learned that much by now. The grin of triumph at their earlier success faded, and he felt the weight of doubts and disappointment settle over him again.

Twice more he looked back for Mark and failed to spot him in the dense woods. Mark saw him looking and made no sign. He watched the boys tripping, laughing, touching, and he felt his eyes burn and a strange emptiness almost like nausea gripped him. When they were out of sight down in the valley, he stretched out on the ground and looked up through the thick branches that veiled the sky, breaking it up into fragments of light, black against white, or white through black. By squinting his eyes he could make the black merge and the light pieces take precedence, then recede once more.

“They hate me,” he whispered, and the trees whispered back, but he could not make out the words. Just leaves in the wind, he thought suddenly, not voices at all. He sat up and threw a handful of rotted leaves at the nearest tree trunk, and somewhere he thought someone laughed. The woji. “You’re not real, either,” he said softly. “I made you up. You can’t laugh at me.”

The sound persisted, grew louder, and suddenly he stood up and looked back over his shoulder at a black cloud bank that had been forming all afternoon. Now the trees were crying out warnings to him, and he began to scramble down the slope, not following the boys and Barry, but heading for the old farmhouse.

The house was completely hidden by a thicket of bushes and trees. Like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, he thought, trotting toward it. The wind howled, hurling bits of dirt, twigs, leaves stripped from the trees. He crawled through the bushes and in the shelter the wind seemed very distant. The entire sky was darkening fast, and the wind was dangerous, he knew. Tornado weather, that’s what they called it. There had been a rash of tornados two years ago; they all feared them now.

At the house, he didn’t pause. He opened the coal chute, concealed by a tangle of ivy, and slid down and landed lightly in the black basement. He felt about for his candle and sulfur matches, and then went upstairs, where he watched the weather through a chink in the boarded-up window in the top bedroom. The house was completely boarded up now, doors, windows, the chimney sealed. They had decided it was not good for him to spend time alone in the old building, but they hadn’t known about the coal chute and what they had done actually was to provide him with a sanctuary where no one could follow.

The storm roared through the valley and left as abruptly as it had started. The heavy rain became a spatter, then a drizzle; it stopped and presently the sun was shining again. Mark left the window. There was an oil lantern in the bedroom. He lighted the lamp and looked at his mother’s paintings, as he had done many times in the years since she had taken him camping. She knew, he thought. Always that one person, in the fields, at the doorway, on the river or ocean. Always just one. She knew what it was like. Without warning he started to sob, and threw himself down on the floor and wept until he was weak. Then he slept.

He dreamed the trees took him by the hand and led him to his mother and she held him close and sang and told him stories and they laughed together.

“Is it working?” Bob asked. “Can they be trained to live in the wilderness?”

Mark was in the corner of the room, sitting cross-legged on the floor, forgotten by the doctors. He looked up from the book he was reading and waited for the answer.

“I don’t know,” Barry said. “Not for a lifetime, I don’t think. For short periods, yes. But they’ll never be woodsmen, if that’s what you mean.”

“Should we go ahead with the others next summer? Are they getting enough out of it to make a large-scale attempt?”

Bruce shrugged. “It’s been a training program for us too,” he said. “I know I don’t want to keep going back into those dismal woods. I dread my days more and more.”

“Me too,” Bob said. “That’s why I brought this up now. Is there any real point to it?”

“You’re thinking about the camp-out next week, aren’t you?” Barry asked.

“Yes. I don’t want to go. I know the boys are dreading it. You must be anxious about it.”

Barry nodded. “You and I are too aware of what happened to Ben and Molly. But what’s going to happen to those children when they leave here and have to spend night after night in the woods? If preparation like this can ease it for them, we have to do it.”

Mark returned to his book, but he was not seeing it now. What happened to them? he wondered. Why were they all so afraid? There wasn’t anything in the woods. No animals, nothing to hurt anyone. Maybe they heard the voices and that made them afraid, he thought. But then, if they heard the voices too, the voices had to be real. He felt his pulse racing suddenly. For several years he had believed the voices were only the leaves, that he was only pretending they were really voices. But if the brothers heard them too, that made them real. The brothers and sisters never made up anything. They didn’t know how. He wanted to laugh with joy, but he didn’t make a sound to attract attention. They would want to know what was funny, and he knew he could never tell them.

The camp was a large clearing several miles from the valley. Twenty boys, ten girls, two doctors, and Mark sat about the campfire eating, and Mark remembered that other time he had sat eating popcorn at a campfire. He blinked rapidly and the feeling that came with the memory faded slowly. The clones were uneasy, but not really frightened. Their large number was reassuring, and the babble of their voices drowned out the noises of the woods.

They sang, and one of them asked Mark to tell the woji story, but he shook his head. Barry asked lazily what a woji was, and the clones nudged each other and changed the subject. Barry let it drop. One of those things that all children know and adults never do, he thought. Mark told another story and they sang some more, and then it was time to unroll the blankets and sleep.

Much later Mark sat up, listening. One of the boys was going to the latrine, he decided, and lay down again and was asleep almost instantly.

The boy stumbled and clutched a tree to steady himself. The fire was dim now, no more than embers through the tree trunks. He took several more steps and abruptly the embers vanished. For a moment he hesitated, but his bladder urged him on, and he didn’t yield to the temptation to relieve himself against a tree. Barry had made it clear they had to use the latrine in the interest of health. He knew the ditch was only twenty yards from the camp, only another few steps, but the distance seemed to grow rather than decrease and he had a sudden fear that he was lost.

“If you get lost,” Mark had said, “the first thing to do is sit down and think. Don’t run. Calm down and think.”

But he couldn’t sit down here. He could hear the voices all around him, and the woji laughing at him, and something coming closer and closer. He ran blindly, his hands over his ears trying to blot out the ever louder voices.

Something clutched at him and he felt it ripping his side, felt the blood flowing, and he screamed a high wild shriek that he couldn’t stop.

In the camp his brothers sat up and looked about in terror. Danny!

“What was that?” Barry demanded.

Mark was standing up listening, but now the brothers were calling out, “Danny! Danny!”

“Tell them to shut up,” Mark said. He strained to hear. “Make them stay here,” he ordered, and trotted into the woods toward the latrine. He could hear the boy now, faintly, dashing madly into trees, bushes, stumbling, screaming. Abruptly the sounds stopped.

Mark paused again to listen, but the woods were silent. There was pandemonium behind him in camp and ahead of him nothing.

He didn’t move for several minutes, listening. Danny might have fallen, winded himself. He might be unconscious. There was no way in the dark for Mark to follow him without sounds to lead him. Slowly he turned back to camp. They were all up now, standing in three groups, the two doctors also close to each other.

“I can’t find him in the dark,” Mark said. “We’ll have to wait for morning.” No one moved. “Build up the fire,” he said. “Maybe he’ll see the glow and follow it back.”

One group of brothers started to throw wood on the embers, smothering it. Bob took charge, and presently they had a roaring fire again. Danny’s brothers sat huddled together, all looking pinched and cold and very afraid. They could find him, Mark thought, but they were afraid to go after him in the black woods. One of them began to cry, and almost as if that had been the signal, they were all weeping. Mark turned from them and went again to the edge of the woods to listen.

With the first faint light of dawn Mark started to follow the trail of the missing boy. He had dashed back and forth, zig-zagging, rebounding from tree to bush to tree, Here he had run forward for a hundred yards, only to crash into a boulder. There was blood. He had been scraped by a spruce branch. Here he had run again, faster this time. Up a rise . . . Mark paused looking at the rise, and he knew what he was going to find. He had been trotting easily, and now he slowed to a walk and followed the trail, not stepping on any of Danny’s prints, but keeping to one side, reading what had happened.

At the top of the rise there was a narrow ridge of limestone. There were many such outcroppings in the woods, and almost always when there was a rise such as this, the other side was steep also, sometimes steeper, rockier. He stood on the ridge looking down the thirty feet of sparse growth and rocks, and twisted among them he could see the boy, his eyes open as if he were studying the pale, colorless sky. Mark didn’t go down. He squatted several moments looking at the figure below, then turned and went back to camp, not rushing now.

“He bled to death,” Barry said after they brought the body back to camp.

“They could have saved him,” Mark said. He didn’t look at Danny’s brothers, who were all gray, waxy-looking, in shock. “They could have gone straight to him.” He stood up. “Are we going down now?”

Barry nodded. He and Bob carried the body on a litter made from thin tree branches tied together. Mark led them to the edge of the woods and turned. “I’ll go make sure the fire’s all the way out,” he said. He didn’t wait for permission, but vanished among the trees almost instantly.

Barry put the surviving nine brothers in the hospital to be treated for shock. They never emerged, and no one ever asked about them.

The following morning Barry arrived in the lecture room before the class had assembled. Mark was already in his place at the rear of the room. Barry nodded to him, opened his notes, straightened his desk, and looked up again to find Mark still regarding him. His eyes were as bright as twin blue lakes covered with a layer of ice, Barry thought.

“Well?” he asked finally when it seemed the locked stare would be maintained indefinitely.

Mark didn’t look away. “There is no individual, there is only the community,” he said clearly. “What is right for the community is right even unto death for the individual. There is no one, there is only the whole.”

“Where did you hear that?” Barry demanded.

“I read it.”

“Where did you get that book?”

“From your office. It’s on one of the shelves.”

“You’re forbidden to enter my office!”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve already read everything in it.” Mark stood up and his eyes glinted as the light changed in them. “That book is a lie,” he said clearly. “They’re all lies! I’m one. I’m an individual! I am one!” He started for the door.

“Mark, wait a minute,” Barry said. “Have you ever seen what happens to a strange ant when it falls into another ant colony?”

At the door Mark nodded. “But I’m not an ant,” he said.

Chapter 23

Late in September the boats reappeared on the river, and the people gathered at the dock to watch. It was a cold, rainy day; already frosts had turned the landscape bleak, and fog over the river obscured everything until the boats were very close. A meeting party set out to help bring in the exhausted people, and when they were all docked and the tally taken, the realization that nine people had been lost wreathed the homecoming in gloom.

The following night they held the Ceremony for the Lost, and the survivors told their story haltingly. They had brought back five boats, one under tow most of the way. One boat had been swept away at the mouth of the Shenandoah; they had found it smashed and broken up, with no survivors, its load of surgical equipment lost to the river. The second damaged boat had been run aground by a sudden storm that overturned it and ruined its load of maps, directories, warehouse lists — bales and bales of papers that would have proven useful.

The shelter at the falls had been started; the canal had proven disastrous, impossible to dig as proposed. The river flooded in from below and washed it out repeatedly, and all they had succeeded in doing was to make a swampy area that flooded in high water and was a muddy bog when the river fell. And the worst part, they agreed, had been the cold. As soon as they had reached the Potomac the cold had plagued them. There had been frosts; leaves had fallen prematurely, and the river was numbing. Much of the vegetation was dead; only the hardiest plants were surviving. The cold had persisted in Washington, had made the canal digging a hellish task.

The snow came to the valley early that year, on the first of October. It remained on the ground for a week before the wind shifted and warm southerly breezes melted it. On the infrequent clear days when the sun shone brightly and no mist hid the tops of the surrounding hills and mountains, the snow could still be seen on the high ridges.

Later Barry would be able to look back on that winter and know it had been crucial, but at the time it seemed just one more in the endless string of seasons.

One day Bob called to him to come outside and look at something. No new snow had fallen for several days, and the sun was bright and gave the illusion of warmth. Barry pulled on a heavy cape and followed Bob out. There was a snow sculpture standing in the center of the courtyard between the new dorms. It was a male figure, eight feet tall, nude, its legs fused into a base that was also a pedestal. In one hand the figure carried a club, or perhaps a torch, and the other hand swung at its side. The feeling of motion, of life, had been captured. It was a man on his way to somewhere else, striding along, not to be stopped.

“Mark?” Barry asked.

“Who else?”

Barry approached it slowly; there were others looking at it also, mostly children. A few adults were there, and others came out until there was a crowd about the statue. A small girl stared, then turned and began to roll a snowball. She threw it at the figure. Barry caught her arm before she could throw again.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

She looked at him blankly, looking at the figure even more blankly, and started to inch away. He released her, and she darted back through the people. Her sisters ran to her. They touched each other as if to reassure themselves that all was well.

“What is it?” one of them asked, unable to see over the heads of the people between her and the statue.

“Just snow,” the little girl answered. “It’s just snow.”

Barry stared at her. She was about seven, he thought. He caught her again, and this time lifted her so she could see. “Tell me what that is,” he said.

She wriggled to get loose. “Snow,” she said. “It’s snow.”

“It’s a man,” he said sharply.

She looked at him in bewilderment and glanced at the figure again. Then she shook her head. One by one he held other small children up to see. All they saw was snow.

Barry and his brothers talked to their younger brothers about it later that day, and the younger doctors were impatient at what was clearly, to them, a trifle.

“So the younger children can’t see that it’s supposed to be the figure of a man. What does it matter?” Andrew asked.

“I don’t know,” Barry said slowly. And he didn’t know why it was important, only that it was.

During the afternoon the sun melted the snow a bit, and overnight it froze solid once more. By morning when the sun hit the statue, it was blinding. Barry went out to look at it several times that day. That night someone, or a group, went out and toppled it and stamped it into the ground.

Two days later four groups of boys reported the disappearance of their mats. They searched Mark’s room, other places where he might have hidden them, and came up with nothing. Mark started a new sculpture, this time a woman, presumably a companion piece to the man, and this time the statue remained until spring, long after it was no longer identifiable, but was simply a mound of snow that had melted, frozen, melted repeatedly.

The next incident happened soon after the New Year celebration. Barry was awakened from a deep sleep by an insistent hand on his shoulder.

He sat up feeling groggy and disoriented, as if he had been pulled a long way to find himself in his bed, cold, stupid, blinking without recognition at the younger man standing over him.

“Barry, snap out of it! Wake up!” Anthony’s voice registered first, then his face. The other brothers were waking up now.

“What’s wrong?” Suddenly Barry was thoroughly awake.

“A breakdown in the computer section. We need you.” Stephen and Stuart were already tearing down the computer when Barry and his brothers got to the laboratory. Several younger brothers were busy disconnecting tubes from the terminal in order to regulate the flow manually. Other young doctors were making a tank-by-tank check of the dials. The scene was of orderly chaos, Barry thought, if there could be such a thing. A dozen people were moving about quickly, each intent on his own job, but each out of place there. The aisles became cluttered when more than two people tried to move among the tanks, and now there were a dozen, and more coming every minute.

Andrew had taken charge, Barry noted with satisfaction. All the newcomers were assigned sections immediately, and he found himself monitoring a row of embryos seven weeks old. There were ninety babies in the tanks at various stages of development. Two groups could be removed and finished in the premature ward, but their chances of survival would be drastically reduced. His group seemed all right, but he could hear Bruce muttering at the other end of the same aisle and he knew there was trouble there. The potassium salts had been increased. The embryos had been poisoned.

The scientists were spoiled, he thought. So used to the computer analysis of the amniotic fluids, they had let their own skills deteriorate. Now trial and error was too slow to save the embryos. The survivor of that group was turned off. No more solitaires. Members of another group had suffered, but this time only four were overdosed. The six survivors were allowed to continue.

Throughout the night they monitored the fluids, added salts as they were needed, diluted the fluids if salt started to build, kept a temperature check and oxygen count, and by dawn Barry felt as if he were swimming through an ocean of congealed amniotic fluids himself. The computer was not yet functioning. The checks would have to be continued around the clock.

The crisis lasted four days, and during that time they lost thirty-four babies, and forty-nine animals. When Barry finally fell into bed exhausted, he knew the loss of the animals was the more grievous. They had depended on those animals for the glandular secretions, for the chemicals they extracted from their bone marrow and blood. Later, he thought, sinking down into the fog of sleep, later he would worry about the implications of the loss.

“No maybes! We have to have the computer parts as soon as the snow melts. If this happens again, I don’t know if we can repair it.” Everett was a thin, tall computer expert, no more than twenty, possibly not that yet. His older brothers deferred to him, and that was a good sign that he knew what he was talking about.

“The new paddle-wheel boats will be ready by summer,” Lawrence said. “If a road crew can get out early enough to make certain the bypass is open . . .”

Barry stopped listening. It was snowing again. Large lazy flakes of snow drifted, in no hurry to get to earth, wafted this way and that. He could not see past the first dormitory, only twenty yards from the window he looked through. The children were in school, absorbing everything being presented to them. The laboratory conditions had been stabilized again. It would work out, he told himself. Four years wasn’t too long to hold out, and if they could have four years they would be over the line from experimental to proven.

The snow drifted, and he mused at the individuality of each snowflake. Like millions of others before him, he thought, awed by the complexities of nature. He wondered suddenly if Andrew, the self he had been at thirty, had ever felt bemused by the complexities of nature. He wondered if any of the younger children knew each snowflake was different. If they were told that it was so, were ordered to examine the snowflakes as a project, would they see the difference? Would they think it marvelous? Or would they accept it as another of the endless lessons they were expected to learn, and so learn it obediently and derive no pleasure or satisfaction from the new knowledge?

He felt chilled, and turned his attention back to the meeting. But the thoughts would not stop there. They learned everything they were taught, he realized, everything. They could duplicate what had gone before, but they originated nothing. And they couldn’t even see the magnificent snow sculpture Mark had created.

After the meeting he walked with Lawrence to inspect the new paddle-wheel boats. “Everything’s top priority,” he said. “Without exception.”

“Trouble is,” Lawrence said, “they’re right. Everything really is top priority. It’s a fragile structure we have here, Barry. Very fragile indeed.”

Barry nodded. Without the computers they would have to close down all but a couple dozen of the tanks. Without the parts for the generator, they would have to cut down on electricity, start burning wood for warmth, to cook with, read by tallow candles. Without the boats they could not travel to the cities, where their supplies were rotting away more each season. Without the new supply of workers and explorers they could not maintain the bypass road around the falls, maintain the rivers so that the paddle boats could navigate them . . .

“You ever read that poem about the want of a nail?” he asked.

“No,” Lawrence said, and looked at him questioningly. Barry shook his head.

They watched the crew working on the boat for a few minutes, and then Barry said, “Lawrence, how good are the younger brothers at boat building?”

“The best,” Lawrence said promptly.

“I don’t mean just following orders. I mean, has one of the younger brothers come up with an idea you could use?”

Lawrence turned to study him again. “What’s bothering you, Barry?”

“Have they?”

Lawrence frowned and was silent for what seemed a long time. Finally he shrugged. “I don’t think so. I can’t remember. But then, Lewis has such clear ideas of what it has to be, I doubt if anyone would even think of contradicting him, or adding to anything he has planned.”

Barry nodded. “I thought so,” he said, and walked away on the snow-cleared path, edged on either side by a white fence as high as his head. “And it never used to snow this much, either,” he said to himself. There. He had said it aloud. He thought he probably was the first one of the inhabitants to say that. It never used to snow this much.

Later that day he sent for Mark, and when the boy stood before him, he asked, “What are the woods like in the winter, when there’s snow like now?”

Mark looked guilty for a moment. He shrugged.

“I know you’ve managed to learn to walk with snowshoes,” Barry said. “And you ski. I’ve seen your trail leading up into the woods. What is it like?”

Now Mark’s eyes seemed to glow with blue fires, and a smile formed, then left. He ducked his head. “Not like summer,” he said. “Stiller. And it’s pretty.” Suddenly he blushed and became silent.

“More dangerous?” Barry asked.

“I guess so. You can’t see dips, they fill up with snow, and sometimes snow hangs on ridges so you can’t be real sure where the land ends. You could go over an edge that way. I guess, if you didn’t know about it.”

“I want to train our children in getting around on snowshoes and skis. They might have to be in the woods in winter. They have to have some training. Can they find enough material to make fires?”

Mark nodded.

“We’ll start them on making snowshoes tomorrow,” Barry said decisively. He stood up. “I’ll need your help. I’ve never seen a pair of snowshoes. I don’t know how to begin.” He opened the door and before Mark left he asked, “How did you learn to make them?”

“I saw them in a book.”

“What book?”

“Just a book,” Mark said. “It’s gone now.”

In the old house, Barry understood. What other books were in the old house? He knew he had to find out. That night when he met with his brothers they talked long and soberly about the conclusions he had drawn.

“We’ll have to teach them everything they might ever need,” Barry said, and felt a new weariness settle over him.

“The hardest thing we’ll have to do,” Bruce said thoughtfully after a moment, “will be to convince others that this is so. We’ll have to test it, make certain we are right, then prove it. This will put a terrible burden on the teachers, on the older brothers and sisters.”

They didn’t question his conclusions. Each of them, given his direct observations, would have come up with the same conclusions.

“I think we can devise a few simple tests,” Barry said. “I made some sketches this afternoon.” He showed them: a stick figure of a man running, climbing stairs, sitting down; a sun symbol, a circle with rays extending from it; a tree symbol, a cone with a stick in the base; a house made of four lines, two parallel, an angle for the roof; a disc moon; a bowl with steam rising from it in wavy lines . . .

“We could have them finish a story,” Bruce said. “Keep it as simple as the drawings. A three- or four-line story without an ending, which they must supply.”

Barry nodded. They knew what he was after. If the children lacked the imagination to abstract, to fantasize, to generalize, they had to know it now and try to compensate. Within a week their fears were realized. The children under nine or ten could not identify the line drawings, could not complete a simple story, could not generalize a particular situation to a new situation.

“So we teach them everything they’ll need to know to survive,” Barry said harshly. “And be grateful they seem able to learn whatever we teach.”

They would need different lesson material, he knew. Material from the old books in the farmhouse, lessons in survival, in how to build simple lean-tos, how to make fires, how to substitute what was at hand for what was missing . . .

Barry and his brothers went to the old farmhouse with crowbars and hammers, ripped off the boarding at the front entrance, and went inside. While the others examined the yellowed, crumbly books in the library, Barry climbed the stairs to Molly’s old rooms. Inside, he stopped and took a deep breath.

There were the paintings, as he remembered them, and more, there were small objects made out of clay. There were wood carvings, a head that had to be Molly, done in walnut, done cleanly, expertly, like but unlike the Miriam sisters. Barry couldn’t explain how it differed, but knew it was not like them, and was like Molly. There were works done in sandstone, in limestone, some of them complete, most of them rough, as if he had started them and lost interest. Barry touched the carved likeness of Molly and for no reason he could name, he felt tears forming. He turned abruptly and left the room, closing the door carefully behind him.

He didn’t tell his brothers, and he didn’t understand the reason for not telling them any more than he had understood the tears he had shed over a piece of wood hacked out by a child. Later that night when images of the head kept intruding when he tried to sleep, he thought he knew why he hadn’t told. They would be forced to find and seal off the secret entrance Mark used to enter the house. And Barry knew he couldn’t do that.

Chapter 24

The paddle-wheel boat was bedecked with bright ribbons and flowers; it dazzled under the early morning sun. Even the wood pile was decorated. The steam engine gleamed. The troops of young people filed aboard with much laughter and gaiety. Ten of these, eight of those, sixty-five in all. The boat crew stood apart from the young explorer-foragers, watching them warily, as if afraid the carnival spirit of the morning might damage the boat somehow.

And indeed the infectious exuberance of the young people was dangerous in its spontaneity, drawing into itself the onlookers ashore. The gloom of the past expeditions was forgotten as the boat made ready to churn its way downriver. This was different, the mood cried, these young people had been specially bred and trained for this mission. It was their life fulfillment they sought. Who had a better right to rejoice at seeing life’s goal within reach?

Tied securely to the side of the paddle boat was a fourteen-foot canoe made of birch bark, and standing protectively by it was Mark. He had boarded before the others, or had slept there, perhaps; no one had seen him arrive, but he was there with his canoe that could outrun anything else on the river, even the big paddle wheel. Mark watched the scene impassively. He was slender, not tall, but his slim body was well muscled and his chest was deep. If he was impatient to be under way, he showed no sign of it. He might have stood there for an hour, a day, a week . . .

The elder members of the expedition now came aboard, and the cheering and singing ashore grew in volume. Nominally the leaders of the expedition, the Gary brothers nodded to Mark and took their places in the stern.

Standing on the dock, Barry watched smoke puff up from the stack as the boat started to foam the water, and he thought about Ben and Molly, and those who had not come back, or had come back only to go into the hospital and never emerge. The children were almost hysterically happy, he thought. They might be going to a circus, or a tournament, or to enlist in the king’s service, or to slay dragons . . . His gaze sought Mark’s. The bright blue eyes didn’t waver, and Barry knew that he at least understood what they were doing, what the dangers were, the prizes. He understood this mission meant the end of the experiment, or a new beginning for them all. He knew, and he, like Barry, was not smiling.

“The terrible heroics of children,” Barry muttered.

At his side Lawrence said, “What?” and Barry shrugged and said it was nothing. Nothing.

The boat pulled away steadily now, leaving a wide wake that spread from shore to shore and made waves that broke against the dock. They watched until the boat was out of sight.

The river was swift and muddy, high with runoff from the mountains. Crews had been out for over a month clearing the rapids, marking safe channels among the boulders, repairing the winter damage to the dock at the head of the falls, working on the overland detour. The paddle wheel made good time, and they arrived at the falls shortly after lunch. All afternoon they worked at unloading the boat to transport the supplies to the shelter.

The building at the foot of the falls was a duplicate of the dormitories in the valley, and inside it the large group of travelers found it easy to forget this building was isolated, that it was separate from the others. Each evening the road crew assembled in the building, and the boatmen gathered there, and no one was left outside in the black woods. Here at the shelter the woods had been pushed back to the edge of the hills that rose precipitously behind the clearing. Soybeans and corn would be planted later, when the weather warmed enough. Fertile land was not to be wasted, and those people stationed in the shelter were not to be idle during the weeks between the arrivals and departures of the paddle wheels.

The following day the new expeditionary force loaded the big boat at the foot of the falls, and that night they slept in the shelter. At dawn they would embark on the second phase of the trip to Washington.

Mark allowed no one to handle his pack, or his canoe, which he secured to the second boat. This was the fourth canoe he had made, the largest, and he felt no one else understood the mixture of fragility and strength that combined to make this canoe the only safe way to travel the rivers. He had tried to interest some of the others in canoes, but failed; they didn’t want to think about traveling the wild rivers alone.

The Potomac was rougher than the Shenandoah, and there were ice floes in it. No one had mentioned ice floes, Mark thought, and wondered about the source this late in the year. It was mid-April. The forests screened the hills here, and he could only guess there was still snow and ice in the high country. The paddle wheel moved slowly down the river, its crew busy and alert to the dangers of the wide, swift stream. By dark they were well into the Washington area, and tied up that night to a bridge foundation that jutted from the water, a sentinel left behind when the rest of the bridge yielded to the intolerable pressures of water, wind, and age.

Early the next morning they began to unload, and it was here that Mark was to leave the others. It was hoped he would return within two weeks, with good news about the accessibility of a route to Philadelphia and/or New York.

Mark unloaded his own belongings, unslung the canoe and carefully lifted it off the paddle wheel, and then shrugged his backpack into place. He was ready. A long knife was sheathed at his thigh, a rope hung from his braided steerhide belt; he was dressed in hide trousers, moccasins, and a soft leather shirt. The ruined city was oppressive to him; he was eager to be back on the river. Already the transfer was being made; supplies were unloaded, and stacks of materials that had been found and put in storage near the river were being taken aboard. For a few moments Mark watched, then silently he lifted his canoe, swung it over his head, and began to walk.

Throughout the day he walked amid the ruins, always keeping to a northeast direction that eventually would see him clear of the city, into the forest again. He found a small stream and floated his canoe, following the meandering waterway for several hours before it turned south, where he shouldered the canoe and took to the forest. Now the forest was thick and silent, familiar for all its strangeness. Before dark he found a place to camp, and made a fire and cooked his dinner. His supply of dried food was sufficient for two to three weeks, if he didn’t find other food to supplement it, but he knew he would find wild food. No forest failed to yield fern tips, or asparagus shoots, or a variety of other edible greens. Here nearer the coast, there was less frost damage than inland.

As the light faded he dug a shallow trench and filled it with soft pine needles, spread his poncho over them, pulled the canoe into position to make a cover, and stretched out on the bed he had made. His worse enemy would be the spring rains, he knew. They could be heavy, and unexpected. He made a few sketches and notes, then rolled on his side and watched the dying fire until it was a glow in the blackness, and soon he was asleep.

The next day he entered Baltimore. It had burned, and there was evidence of a great flood. He didn’t explore the ruins. He launched his canoe in Chesapeake Bay and started north. The forest came to the water’s edge here, and from the water there were no traces of any of man’s works. There was a strong current, the effects of an outgoing tide combined with the flow from the Susquehanna River. Mark fought it for several minutes, then headed for shore to wait for low tide. He should cross the bay, he thought, and hug the shoreline there. As he drew nearer the delta of the Susquehanna the water would be rougher and it might be impossible to get the small boat through at all. There were ice floes here, not large, and mostly flat, as if they had broken away from a river that had frozen over and was only now thawing.

He stretched out on the ground and waited for the tide to turn. Occasionally he checked the water level, and when it stopped falling he sat on the shore and watched until sticks he threw into the water started to float northward, and then he set out once again. This time he started to paddle northeast, heading for open water and the other shore.

The turbulence was minor near the shore, but as he drew nearer the center of the bay he could feel the force of the tide meeting the rush of the river and, although little of the fierce battle showed on the surface of the water, it was transmitted through the boat; he could feel it in the oar, in the way the small boat pulled to one side, then the other. His arms strained at the paddle, he could feel the tautness of his back and legs as he fought the current and the tide, and he felt only exhilaration at being in the battle.

Abruptly he was through it, and now the tide carried him strongly northward, and he had only to steer and search the shoreline for the best place to make a landing. It was sandy, with sparse growth; the danger there would be hidden rocks that could pierce the bottom of the canoe. The sun was very low when he felt the first gentle scraping of boat on sandy beach, and he sprang out into the cold water and pulled the canoe ashore.

With his canoe safe on high ground, he stood on the beach and looked back the way he had come. Forests, black, solid-looking, the green-blue water streaked with the muddy water of the river, deep blue sky, the sun low in the west, and nowhere another person, nowhere a sign of human life, no buildings, no roads, nothing. Suddenly he threw his head back and laughed, a joyous, almost childish laugh of triumph. It was his. All of it. No one else wanted it. No one was there to contest his ownership, and he claimed it all.

He whistled as he made a fire of driftwood. It burned with incredible colors: greens, blues, copper flames, scarlet. He cooked his dried corn and beef in sea water and marveled at the taste, and when he fell asleep before the last light had faded, he was smiling.

By dawn the next morning he was ready to follow the shoreline north, searching for the old intercoastal waterway that joined Chesapeake Bay with Delaware Bay. When he found it, little remained of the canal; now there was a wide marsh with cattails and marsh grasses hiding the land and water alike. Immediately on entering the marsh the grasses closed in about him and he was cut off from the world. At times the water deepened and no grasses grew in those places, and he was able to move ahead faster, but most of the day he pushed his canoe through the tough stems, using them, clumps of roots, whatever he could find, to propel himself eastward. The sun rose higher and he took off his shirt. No wind moved among the grasses. The sun lowered and the air became cold and he put his shirt back on. He paddled when he could, pushed against the grasses when he could not use the paddle any other way, and slowly he made his way through the marsh. He didn’t stop to eat or rest all day; he knew he didn’t want to be among the high grasses when the sun went down, when darkness came.

The shadows were very long when he finally felt the difference in the water beneath the boat. He began to move faster now; each dip of his paddle made the boat glide forward in a more natural response, not impeded by the rough, grasping stems that had held him back all day. The grasses parted, thinned out, then disappeared, and there was turbulent, freely moving water before him. He knew he was too tired to fight yet another current, and he let it take him downstream, to land on the shore of Delaware Bay.

The next morning he saw fish. Moving carefully, he opened his pack and found the net he had made the previous winter, to the amusement of the other children. The net was five feet square, and although he had practiced throwing it in the river in the valley, he knew he was inexpert with it, that his first throw would probably be the only chance he would have. He knelt in the canoe, which had begun to drift as soon as he stopped paddling, and waited until the fish swam closer. Closer, he whispered at them, closer. Then he threw, and for a moment the canoe rocked dangerously. He felt the heaviness of the weighted net increase, and jerked and tugged hard and began to pull it in. He gasped when he saw his catch: three large, silvery fish.

He sat back on his heels and studied the fish flopping about, and for a time his mind was a blank about what to do with them. Slowly he began to remember what he had read about cleaning them, how to sun-dry them, or roast them over an open fire . . .

On shore he cleaned the three fish and spread them in the sun on flat rocks to dry. He sat looking at the water and wondered if there were shellfish here also. He took the canoe out again, this time keeping very close to shore. He came to a half-submerged rock where he found a bed of oysters, and on the bottom of the sandy bay there were clams, which disappeared when he disturbed the water. By late afternoon he had gathered many of the oysters and dug pounds and pounds of clams. His fish were not dry, and he knew they would spoil if he didn’t do something else. He pondered, staring at the bay, and he realized the ice floes were the answer.

Once more he went out into the water, and this time he maneuvered close enough to one of the larger slabs of ice to get his rope around it and tow it back to shore. He wove a shallow basket of pine branches, put the clams on the bottom, then the oysters, and on top of them the fish. He put the basket on the flat ice, hacked off pieces of the ice with his knife, and put them over everything. Then he relaxed. He had used up almost the whole day in gathering the food, making sure it would not spoil before he could eat it. But he didn’t care. Later when he ate roasted fish and wild asparagus, he knew he had never eaten any food half as good.

From where he camped, the Delaware was a black hole in the dark forest. Now and then the blackness was broken by a pale shadow that moved without a sound, as if floating in air. Ice. The river was very high; on the banks some trees were standing in water; there might be others invisible until too late, or rocks, or other perils. Mark considered the hazards of that black river and felt only contentment, and the next morning he entered it and headed for Philadelphia.

It was the cities that depressed him, he thought, staring at the gray ruins on either side of the Schuylkill River. As far as he could see in any direction there was the same vista of gray ruins. The city had burned, but not to the ground as Baltimore had. Some buildings seemed almost intact here, but everywhere the same grayness persisted, the same ugliness of destruction. Trees had started to grow here, but even they were ugly, stunted, sickly-looking.

Mark felt here the same fear that others spoke of feeling in the forest. There was a presence here, and it was malign. He found himself looking back over his shoulder again and again, and determinedly paddled ahead. Soon he would stop and make some sketches of the buildings he could see from the river. Probably he should make some token explorations on foot, he thought reluctantly. He paddled more slowly and examined a grove of trees. They were so badly formed it was hard to determine what kind of trees they were. Aspens, he decided. He tried to imagine their roots searching in the concrete and metal beneath the streets for sustenance, finding only more concrete and metal.

But there had been trees in Washington, he thought, paddling harder to avoid a large, ragged chunk of ice. Those trees had been normal-looking, but these . . . They were less than half full size, misshapen, their branches few and grotesquely twisted. Abruptly Mark pulled up. Radiation, he thought with a chill. This is what radiation poisoning did. Before his mind’s eye appeared descriptions and photographs of various kinds of animal and vegetable life deformed by radioactivity.

He turned the canoe and raced back downriver to the juncture with the Delaware. He still had several hours before darkness forced him to stop. For a moment he hesitated, then turned northward once more, this time keeping a wary eye open for deformed plant growth, as well as for chunks of ice, which had become more numerous.

He passed one more place with badly deformed plant life. He kept to the far side of the river and continued to paddle.

Philadelphia went on and on, the ruins more or less uniform. Occasionally there were blocks of buildings that seemed virtually untouched, but now he suspected that was because those areas had been blocked off when they became radioactive. He didn’t investigate any of them. Most of the immense buildings were skeletons, but there were still many standing, enough to make a full-scale expedition worthwhile, if the buildings were not contaminated. He knew that problem would have to be solved by Barry or his younger brothers. He continued on. The forests were taking over again, and the trees were well developed here, thick, luxuriant; in some places where the river narrowed, the canopies met overhead, and it was like passing through a tunnel where only his paddle in the water made a sound and the rest of the world held its breath in the twilight stillness.

There was another puzzle here, he thought, studying the banks of the river. The flow was very swift, but the water was low and the banks in places rose several feet to the land above. The river could have been partially dammed; he knew he would have to find out before he returned to Washington.

Daily the weather had become colder, and that night there was frost. The next day he went through Trenton, and as in Philadelphia, the ruins were ubiquitous, the growth stunted and malformed.

Although it took him several miles out of his way, he went through the city in his canoe, and didn’t leave it until the woods looked normal again. Then he carried the boat to high ground and secured it and headed north on foot. The Delaware turned west here, and he was bound for New York. That afternoon the rains started. Mark blazed a trail now; he didn’t want to have to make a search for the canoe when he returned. He traveled steadily through the heavy rain, protected by his great poncho, which covered him from crown to feet.

He could find no dry wood for a fire that night, and he chewed his cold beef and wished he had another of the succulent fish instead.

The rain was undiminished the next day, and now he knew that to continue was foolish, that he might lose his direction completely in a world whose boundaries had been erased, with no sky, no sun to plot his course. He searched for a spruce grove and crept under the largest of the trees and huddled in his poncho, dozing, waking, dozing again throughout the day and night. The sighing of the trees wakened him and he knew the rain was over; the trees were shaking off the water, murmuring together about the terrible weather, wondering about the boy who slept among them. He had to find a sunny place, dry out his pack, the poncho, his clothes, dry and oil his moccasins . . . He crawled out from under the spruce, whispered a thank you, and began to search for a good place to dry out everything, make a fire, have a good meal.

When he came upon the deformed underbrush late that afternoon, he backed up a hundred feet, squatted, and studied the woods before him.

He was at least another day’s distance from New York, he suspected, twenty miles, maybe even more. The woods here were too thick to be able to see if the deformities were localized. He retreated half a mile, made camp, and thought about the days ahead. He would not enter any place that he thought had been irradiated. How many days was he willing to detour? He didn’t know. Time had stopped for him, and he couldn’t be certain now how long he had been in the woods, how long since the paddle wheel had entered Washington. He wondered if the others were all right, if they had found the warehouses, had brought out the stuff they were to collect. He thought how they might blindly stumble through the poisoned areas in Philadelphia, through the poison here. He shuddered.

He followed the edge of the poisoned area for three days, sometimes going north, then west, then north again. He got no nearer the city. A ring of death surrounded it.

He came to a vast swamp where dead trees lay rotting and nothing grew; he could go no farther. The swampy land extended westward as far as he could see; it smelled of salt and decay, like mud flats when the tide went out. He touched the water to his tongue and then turned back. Sea water. That night the temperature plummeted, and the next day the trees and bushes stood blackened. Now he ate his corn and beef hungrily, and wondered if he would find any wild food again. His supply was running low, his raisins were gone, his dried apples nearly gone. He knew he wouldn’t starve, but it would be pleasant to have fresh vegetables and fruit, more of the hot flaky fish, or oysters, or a clam broth thick with chewy bits of white meat . . . Resolutely he turned his thoughts away from food and walked a little faster.

He traveled quickly, his own trail easily followed, the blaze marks on the trees like roadmarks — turn here, this way, straight ahead. When he got back to his canoe he went west on the Delaware to satisfy his curiosity about the diminished flow and the ice, which was thicker than before. The rain must have broken more of it loose, he thought. It was difficult going against the swift current, and the floating chunks of ice made the river more hazardous. The land here was flat. When the change came, he knew it instantly. The river became faster, and now there was the white water of rapids, and there was a definite rise in the land on either side of the river. It had cut a channel here, another deeper one farther on. When the rapids became too dangerous for the small boat to navigate, he took the canoe from the water and stored it safely, then continued on foot.

A hill rose before him, barely covered with scrub growth and loose rocks. Carefully he picked his way up it. It was very cold. The trees here looked as they would in early March, or even late February. There were bud swellings, but no leaves, no green, only the black-green of the spruces, still in their winter needles. At the top of the hill he drew in his breath sharply. Before him was a vast sheet of snow and ice, blinding in the sunlight.

In some places the snowfield came to the banks of the river, in others it started a good distance back, and up there, about a mile away, the river was almost jammed with ice. It was a narrow black ribbon winding its way through the glare.

Southward the trees blocked his view, but he could see for miles to the north and west, and there was only snow and ice. White mountains climbed to the clear blue sky, and the valleys had been rounded at the bottoms as the snow accumulated there. The wind shifted and blew into Mark’s face, and the cold was numbing, bringing tears to his eyes. The sun seemed to have no warmth here. He was sweating under his leather shirt, but the sight of all that snow, and the chill of the wind when it swept across it, created the illusion that the sun had failed. The illusion made him shiver violently. He turned and hurried down the steep hillside, sliding the last twenty feet or more, aware even as he started the slide that it was dangerous, that he would cause rocks to follow him, that he might be hit by them, injured too badly to move out of the way. He rolled at the bottom and jumped to his feet and ran. He ran a long time, and could hear the rocks crashing behind him.

In his mind the sound was that of the glacier advancing, rolling toward him inexorably, grinding everything to powder.

Chapter 25

Mark was flying. It was glorious to swoop and dive high over the trees and rivers. He soared higher and higher until his body tingled with excitement. He swerved to avoid flying through a billowing white cloud. When he straightened out, there was another white cloud before him; again he swerved, and then again and again. The clouds were everywhere, and now they had joined to form a wall, and the great white wall was advancing on him from every direction. There was no place he could go to avoid being overtaken. He dived, and the dive became a fall, faster and faster. There was nothing he could do to stop it. He fell through the whiteness . . .

Mark came wide awake, shivering hard, his body covered with sweat. His fire was a feeble glow in the blackness. He fed it carefully, blew on his chilled hands while he waited for the scrapings of punk to burn, and then added twigs, and finally branches. Although it would be dawn soon and he would have to extinguish the fire, he fed it until it blazed hot and bright. Then he sat huddled before it. He had stopped shivering, but the nightmare vision persisted and he wanted light and warmth. And he wanted not to be alone.

He traveled very swiftly the next four days, and on the afternoon of the fifth he approached the landing area in Washington where the paddle wheel had docked and the brothers and sisters had set out for the warehouses.

The Peter brothers ran to meet him, helped with the canoe, took his pack, talking all the while.

“Gary said you should go to the warehouse the minute you got in,” one of them said.

“We had six accidents so far,” another one said excitedly. “Broken arms, legs, stuff like that. Nothing like the other groups had in the past. We’re making it!”

“Gary said we’ll start for Baltimore or Philadelphia by the end of this week.”

“We have a map to show you which warehouse they’re doing now.”

“We have at least four boatloads of stuff already . . .”

“We’ve been taking turns. Four days down here getting stuff ready for the boat, cooking, all that, then four days in the warehouses finding stuff . . .”

“It’s not bad here, not like we thought it would be. I don’t know why the others had so much trouble.”

Mark followed them wearily. “I’m hungry,” he said. “There’s soup cooking now for dinner,” one of them said. “But Gary said . . .”

Mark moved past them to the building they were using for their quarters. Now he could smell the soup. He helped himself, and before he finished eating he began to feel too sleepy to keep his eyes open. The boys kept talking about their successes. “Where are the beds?” Mark asked, interrupting one of them again.

“Aren’t you going to the warehouse like Gary said?”

“No. Where are the beds?”

“We’ll start for Philadelphia in the morning,” Gary said with satisfaction. “You did a good job, Mark. How long will it take us to get to Philadelphia?”

Mark shrugged. “I didn’t walk, so I don’t know. I’ve shown you where it’s all marshy, maybe impassable by foot. If you can get through, probably eight to ten days. But you need something to measure the radioactivity.”

“You were wrong about that, Mark. There can’t be any radioactivity. We weren’t at war, you know. No bombs were used here. Our elders would have warned us.”

Again Mark shrugged.

“We trust you to get us through,” Gary said, smiling now. He was twenty-one.

“I’m not going,” Mark said.

Gary and his brothers exchanged glances. Gary said, “What do you mean? That’s your job.”

Mark shook his head. “My job was to find out if the cities are there, if anything’s left in them. I know I reached them by water. I don’t know if they can be reached on foot. I know there’s been radioactivity, and I’m going back to the valley to report that.”

Gary stood up and began to roll the map they had been using to mark the swamps, the changed coastline, the marsh that had been the intercoastal waterway. Not looking directly at Mark, he said, “Everyone in this expedition is under my command, you know. Everyone.”

Mark didn’t move.

“I order you to go with us,” Gary said, and now he looked at Mark.

Mark shook his head. “You won’t make it there and back before the weather changes,” he said. “You and your brothers don’t know anything about the forests. You’ll have the same trouble the early expeditions had in coming to Washington. And the boys can’t do anything without someone to tell them what to do. What if all the stuff in Philadelphia is radioactive? If you bring it back, you’ll kill everyone with it. I’m going back to the valley.”

“You’re going to take orders just like everyone else!” Gary shouted. “Keep him here!” He motioned to two of his brothers, and they hurried from the room. The other three remained with Mark, who was still sitting cross-legged on the floor where he had been from the beginning of the meeting.

In a few minutes Gary returned; he carried several long strips of birch bark. Now Mark stood up and reached for the bark. It was from his canoe.

Gary thrust the scraps at him. “Now you understand, I hope. We leave in the morning. You’d better get some rest.”

Wordlessly Mark left them. He went to the river and examined the ruined boat. Afterward he built a small fire, and when it was burning brightly he put one end of the boat in the flames, and as it burned he pushed it forward until it was totally consumed.

The next morning when the boys assembled to start the trek to Philadelphia, Mark was not among them. His pack was gone, he could not be found. Gary and his brothers consulted angrily and decided to start without him. They had good maps that Mark himself had corrected. The boys were all well trained. There was no reason to feel dependent on a fourteen-year-old. They started off, but there was a pall over them now.

Mark watched from a distance, and throughout the day he kept them in sight. When they camped that night, their first night in the open forest, he was in a tree nearby.

The boys were all right, he thought with satisfaction. As long as their groups were not separated, they would be all right. But the Gary brothers were clearly nervous. They started at noises.

He waited until the camp was still, and then, high in a tree where he could look down on them without being seen, he began to moan. At first no one paid any attention to the noises he made, but presently Gary and his brothers began to peer anxiously at the woods, at one another. Mark moaned louder. The boys were stirring now. Most of them had been asleep when he started. Now there was a restless movement among them.

“Woji!” Mark moaned, louder and louder. “Woji! Woji!” He doubted anyone was still asleep. “Woji says go back! Woji says go back!” He kept his voice hollow, muffled by his hand over his mouth. He repeated the words many times, and ended each message with a thin, rising moan. After a time he added one more word. “Danger. Danger. Danger.”

He stopped abruptly in the middle of the fourth “Danger.” Even he was aware of the listening forest now. The Gary brothers took torches into the forest around the camp, looking for something, anything. They stayed close to one another as they made the search. Most of the boys were sitting up, as close to the fires as they could get. It was a long time before they all lay down to try to sleep again. Mark dozed in the tree, and when he jerked awake, he repeated the warning, again stopping in the middle of a word, though he wasn’t certain why that was so much worse than just stopping. Again the futile search was made, the fires were replenished, the boys sat upright in fear. Toward dawn when the forest was its blackest Mark began to laugh a shrill, inhuman laugh that seemed to echo from everywhere at once.

The next day was cold and drizzly with thick fog that lifted only slightly as the day wore on. Mark circled the straggling group, now whispering from behind them, now from the left, the right, from in front of them, sometimes from over their heads. By midafternoon they were barely moving and the boys were talking openly of disobeying Gary and returning to Washington. Mark noted with satisfaction that two of the Gary brothers were siding with the rebellious boys now.

“Ow! Woji!” he wailed, and suddenly two groups of the boys turned and started to run. “Woji! Danger!”

Others turned now and joined the flight, and Gary shouted at them vainly, and then he and his brothers were hurrying back the way they had come.

Laughing to himself, Mark trotted away. He headed west, toward the valley.

Bruce stood over the bed where the boy lay sleeping. “Is he going to be all right?”

Bob nodded. “He’s been half awake several times, babbling about snow and ice most of the time. He recognized me when I examined him this morning.”

Bruce nodded. Mark had been sleeping for almost thirty hours. Physically he was out of danger, and probably hadn’t been in real danger at all. Nothing rest and food couldn’t cure anyway, but his babblings about the white wall had sounded insane. Barry had ordered everyone to leave the boy alone until he awakened naturally. Barry had been with him most of the time, and would return within the hour. There was nothing anyone could do until Mark woke up.

Later that afternoon Barry sent for Andrew, who had asked to be present when Mark began to talk. They sat on either side of the bed and watched the boy stir, rousing from the deep sleep that had quieted him so thoroughly that he had appeared dead.

Mark opened his eyes and saw Barry. “Don’t put me in the hospital,” he said faintly, and closed his eyes again. Presently he opened his eyes and looked about the room, then back to Barry. “I’m in the hospital, aren’t I? Is anything wrong with me?”

“Not a thing,” Barry said. “You passed out from exhaustion and hunger, that’s all.”

“I would like to go to my own room then,” Mark said, and tried to rise.

Barry gently restrained him. “Mark, don’t be afraid of me, please. I promise you I won’t hurt you now or ever. I promise that.” For a moment the boy resisted the pressure of his hands, then he relaxed. “Thank you, Mark,” Barry said. “Do you feel like talking yet?”

Mark nodded. “I’m thirsty,” he said. He drank deeply. He began to describe his trip north. He told it completely, even how he had frightened Gary and his brothers and routed the expedition to Philadelphia. He was aware that Andrew tightened his lips at that part of the story, but he kept his eyes on Barry and told them everything.

“And then you came back,” Barry said. “How?”

“‘Through the woods. I made a raft to cross the river.” Barry nodded. He wanted to weep, and didn’t know why. He patted Mark’s arm. “Rest now,” he said. “We’ll get word to them to stay in Washington until we dig up some radiation detectors.”

“Impossible!” Andrew said angrily outside the door. “Gary was exactly right in pressing on to Philadelphia. That boy destroyed a year’s training in one night.”

“I’m going too,” Barry had said, and he was with Mark now in Washington. Two of the younger doctors were also with them. The young expedition members were frightened and disorganized; the work had come to a stop, and they had been waiting in the main building for someone to come give them new instructions.

“When did they start out again?” Barry demanded.

‘The day after they got back here,” one of the young boys said.

“Forty boys!” Barry muttered. “And six fools.” He turned to Mark. “Would we accomplish anything by starting after them this afternoon?”

Mark shrugged. “I could alone. Do you want me to go after them?”

“No, not by yourself. Anthony and I will go, and Alistair will stay here and see that things get moving again.”

Mark looked at the two doctors doubtfully. Anthony was pale, and Barry looked uncomfortable.

“They’ve had about ten days,” Mark said. “They should be in the city by now, if they didn’t get lost. I don’t think it would make much difference if we leave now or wait until morning.”

“Morning, then,” Barry said shortly. “You could use another night’s sleep.”

They traveled fast, and now and again Mark pointed out where the others had camped, where they had gone astray, where they had realized their error and headed in the right direction again. On the second day his lips tightened and he looked angry, but said nothing until late in the afternoon. “They’re too far west, getting farther off all the time,” he said. “They might miss Philadelphia altogether if they don’t head east again. They must have been trying to bypass the swamps.”

Barry was too tired to care, and Anthony merely grunted. At least, Barry thought, stretching out by the fire, they were too tired at night to listen for strange noises, and that was good. He fell asleep even as he was thinking this.

On the fourth day Mark stopped and pointed ahead. At first Barry could see no difference, but then he realized they were looking at the kind of stunted growth Mark had talked about. Anthony unpacked the Geiger counter and it began to register immediately. It became more insistent as they moved ahead, and Mark led them to the left, keeping well back from the radioactive area.

“They went in, didn’t they?” Barry said.

Mark nodded. They were keeping their distance from the contaminated ground, and when the counter sounded its warning, they moved south again until it became quieter. That night they decided to keep moving west until they were able to get around the radioactive area, and enter Philadelphia from that direction, if possible.

“We’ll run into the snowfields that way,” Mark said.

“Not afraid of snow, are you?” Barry said.

“I’m not afraid.”

“Right. Then we go west tomorrow, and if we can’t turn north by night, we come back and try going east, see if we pick up a trail or anything that way.”

They traveled all day through an intermittent rain, and hourly the temperature fell until it was near freezing when they made camp that night.

“How much farther?” Barry asked.

“Tomorrow,” Mark said. “You can smell it from here.” Barry could smell only the fire, the wet woods, the food cooking. He studied Mark, then shook his head.

“I don’t want to go any farther,” Anthony said suddenly. He was standing by the fire, too rigid, a listening look on his face.

“It’s a river,” Mark said. “It must be pretty close. There’s ice on all the rivers, and it hits the banks now and then. That’s what you hear.”

Anthony sat down, but the intent look didn’t leave his face. The next morning they headed west again. By noon they were among hills, and now they knew that as soon as they got high enough to see over the trees they would be able to see the snow, if there was any snow to see.

They stood on the hill and stared, and Barry understood Mark’s nightmares. The trees at the edge of the snow were stark, like trees in the middle of winter. Beyond them other trees had snow halfway up their trunks, and their naked branches stood unmoving, some of them at odd angles, where the pressure had already knocked them over and the snow had prevented their falling. Up higher there were no trees visible at all, only snow.

“Is it still growing?” Barry asked in a hushed voice. No one answered. After a few more minutes, they turned and hurried back the way they had come. As they circled Philadelphia heading east, the Geiger counter kept warning them to stay back, and they could get no closer to the city from this direction than they had been able to from the west. Then they found the first bodies.

Six boys had come out together. Two had fallen near each other; the others had left them, continued another half-mile and collapsed. The bodies were all radioactive.

“Don’t get near them,” Barry said as Anthony started to kneel by the first bodies. “We don’t dare touch them,” he said.

“I should have stayed,” Mark whispered. He was staring at the sprawled bodies. There was mud on their faces. “I shouldn’t have left. I should have kept after them, to make sure they didn’t go on. I should have stayed.”

Barry shook his arm, and Mark kept staring, repeating over and over, “I should have stayed with them. I should . . .” Barry slapped him hard, then again, and Mark bowed his head and stumbled away, reeling into trees and bushes as he rushed away from the bodies, away from Barry and Anthony. Barry ran after him and caught his arm.

“Mark! Stop this! Stop it, do you hear me!” He shook him hard again. “Let’s get back to Washington.”

Mark’s cheeks were glistening with tears. He pulled away from Barry and started to walk again, and he didn’t look back at the bodies.

Barry and Bruce waited for Anthony and Andrew, who had requested, demanded, time to talk to them. “It’s about him again, isn’t it?” Bruce said.

“I suppose.”

“Something’s got to be done,” Bruce said. “You and I both know we can’t let him go on this way. They’ll demand a council meeting next, and that’ll be the end of it.”

Barry knew. Andrew and his brother entered and sat down. They both looked grim and angry.

“I don’t deny he had a bad time during the summer,” Andrew said abruptly. “That isn’t the point now. But whatever happened to him has affected his mind, and that is the point. He’s behaving in a childish, irresponsible way that simply cannot be tolerated.”

Again and again since summer these sessions had been held. Mark had drawn a line of honey from an ant hill up the wall into the Andrew brothers’ quarters, and the ants had followed. Mark had soaked every match he could get his hands on in a salt solution, dried them carefully, and restacked them in the boxes, and not one of them had lighted, and he had sat with a straight face and watched one after another of the older brothers try to get a fire. Mark had removed every nameplate from every door in the dormitories. He had tied the Patrick brothers’ feet together as they slept and then yelled to them to come quickly.

“He’s gone too far this time,” Andrew said. “He stole the yellow Report to Hospital tags, and he’s been sending dozens of women to the hospital to be tested for pregnancy. They’re in a panic, our staff is overworked as it is, and no one has time to sort out this kind of insanity.”

“We’ll talk to him,” Barry said.

“That’s not good enough any longer! You’ve talked and talked. He promises not to do that particular thing again, and then does something worse. We can’t live with this constant disruption!”

“Andrew, he had a series of terrible shocks last summer. And he’s had too much responsibility for a boy his age. He feels a dreadful guilt over the deaths of all those children. It isn’t unnatural for him to revert to childish behavior now. Give him time, he’ll get over it.”

“No!” Andrew said, standing up with a swift, furious motion. “No! No more time! What will it be next?” He glanced at his brother, who nodded. “We feel that we are his targets. Not you, not the others; we are. Why he feels this hostility toward me and my brothers I don’t know, but it’s here, and we don’t want to have to worry about him constantly, wondering what he’ll do next.”

Barry stood up. “And I say I’ll handle it.”

For a moment Andrew faced him defiantly, then said, “Very well. But, Barry, it can’t go on. It has to stop now.”

“It will stop.”

The younger brothers left, and Bruce sat down. “How?”

“I don’t know how. It’s his isolation. He can’t talk this out with anyone, doesn’t play with anyone . . . We have to force him to participate in those areas where the others would accept him.”

Bruce agreed. “Like the Winona sisters’ coming-of-age party next week.”

Later that day Barry told Mark he was to attend the party. Mark had never been formally accepted into the adult community, and would not be honored by a party just for him.

He shook his head. “No, thank you, I’d rather not.”

“I didn’t invite you,” Barry said grimly. “I’m ordering you to attend and to participate. Do you understand?”

Mark glanced at him quickly. “I understand, but I don’t want to go.”

“If you don’t go, I’m hauling you out of this cozy little room, away from your books and your solitude, and putting you back in our room, back in the lecture rooms when you’re not in school or at work. Now do you understand?”

Mark nodded, but didn’t look at Barry again. “All right,” he said sullenly.

Chapter 26

The party had started already when Mark entered the auditorium. They were dancing at the far end, and between him and the dancers a group of girls stood whispering. They turned to look at him, and one of them left the group. There was giggling behind her, and she motioned her sisters to stop, but the giggling continued.

“Hello, Mark,” she said. “I’m Susan.”

Before he realized what she was doing she had slipped off her bracelet and was trying to put it over his hand. There were six little bows on the bracelet.

“No,” Mark said hurriedly, and jerked away. “I . . . No. I’m sorry.” He backed up a step, turned and ran, and the giggling started again, louder than before.

He ran to the dock and stood looking at the black water. He shouldn’t have run. Susan and her sisters were seventeen, maybe even a little older. In one night they would have taught him everything, he thought bitterly, and he had turned and run. The music grew louder; soon they would eat and then leave in couples, in groups, everyone but Mark, and the children too young for the mat play. He thought of Susan and her sisters and he was first hot, then cold, then flushing hot again.

“Mark?”

He stiffened. They wouldn’t have followed him, he thought in panic. He whirled around.

“It’s Rose,” she said. “I won’t give you my bracelet unless you want it.”

She came closer, and he turned his back and pretended to be looking at something in the river, afraid she would be able to see him in the dark, see the redness he could feel pounding in his neck and cheeks, sense his wet palms. Rose, he thought, his age, one of the girls he had trained in the woods. For him to blush and become bashful before her was more intolerable than running from Susan had been.

“I’m busy,” he said.

“I know. I saw you before. It’s all right. They shouldn’t have done that, not all of them together. We all told them not to.”

He didn’t reply, and she moved to his side. “There’s nothing to see, is there?”

“No. You’ll get cold out here.”

“You will too.”

“What do you want?”

“Nothing. Next summer I’ll be old enough to go to Washington or Philadelphia.”

He turned angrily. “I’m going to my room.”

“Why did I make you mad? Don’t you want me to go to Washington? Don’t you like me?”

“Yes. I’m going now.”

She put her hand on his arm and he stopped; he felt he couldn’t move. “May I go to your room with you?” she asked, and now she sounded like the girl who had asked in the woods if the mushrooms were all dangerous, if the things in the trees had told him how to find his way, if he really could become invisible if he wanted to.

“You’ll go back to your sisters and laugh at me like Susan did,” he said.

“No!” she whispered. “Never! Susan wasn’t laughing at you. They were scared, that’s why they were all so nervous. Susan was most scared of all because she was picked to put the bracelet on you. They weren’t laughing at you.”

As she spoke she released his arm and took a step back from him, then another. Now he could see the pale blur of her face. She was shaking her head as she talked.

“Scared? What do you mean?”

“You can do things no one else can do,” she said, still speaking very softly, almost in a whisper. “You can make things no one ever saw, and you can tell stories no one ever heard, and you can disappear and travel through the woods like the wind. You’re not like the other boys. Not like our elders. Not like anyone else. And we know you don’t like any of us because you never choose anyone to lie with.”

“Why did you come after me if you’re so afraid of me?”

“I don’t know. I saw you run and . . . I don’t know.” He felt the hot flush race through him again, and he began to walk. “If you want to go with me, I don’t care,” he said roughly, not looking back. “I’m going to my room now.” He could not hear her footsteps for the pounding in his ears. He walked swiftly, making a wide berth of the auditorium, and he knew she was running to keep up. He led her around the hospital, not wanting to walk down the brightly lighted corridor with her at his heels. At the far end he opened the door and glanced inside before he entered. He let the door go and almost ran to his room, and he heard her quick footsteps as she came after him.

“What are you doing?” she asked at the doorway.

“I’m putting the cover over the window,” he said, and his voice sounded angry even to him. “So no one can look at us. I put it there a lot.”

“But why?”

He tried not to look at her when he climbed down from the chair, but again and again he found himself watching. She was unwinding a long sash that had gone around her neck, criss-crossed at her breasts, and circled her waist several times. The sash was violet, almost the color of her eyes. Her hair was a pale brown. He remembered that during the summer it had been blond. There were freckles across her nose, on her arms.

She finished with the sash and now lifted her tunic, and with one motion took it off. Suddenly Mark’s fingers seemed to come to life and without his willing it they began to pull off his tunic.

Later she said she had to go, and he said not yet, and they dozed with his arms tight about her. When she again said she had to go, he woke up completely. “Not yet,” he said. When he woke the second time it was daylight and she was pulling on her tunic.

“You have to come back,” Mark said. “Tonight, after dinner. Will you?”

“All right.”

“Promise. You won’t forget?”

“I won’t forget. I promise.”

He watched her wind the sash, and when she was gone he reached out and yanked the cover from the window and looked for her. He didn’t see her; she must have gone through the building, out the other end. He rolled over and fell asleep again.

And now, Mark thought, he was happy. The nightmares were gone, the sudden flashes of terror that he couldn’t explain stopped sweeping over him. The mysteries had been answered, and he knew what the books meant when the authors spoke of finding happiness, as if it were a thing that perseverance would lead one to. He examined the world with new eyes, and everything he saw was beautiful and good.

During the day while studying, he would stop, think with terrible fear that she was gone, lost, had fallen into the river, something. He would drop what he was doing and race from building to building searching for her, not to speak to her, just to see her, to know she was all right. He might find her in the cafeteria with her sisters at such times, and from a distance he would count them and then search for the one with the special something that separated her from all others.

Every night she came to him, and she taught him what she had been taught by her sisters, by the other men, and his joy intensified until he wondered how the others had stood it before him, how he could stand it.

In the afternoons he ran to the old house, where he was making her a pendant. It was the sun, two inches in diameter, made of clay. It had three coats of yellow paint, and he added a fourth. In the old house he read again the chapters on physiology, sexual responses, femininity, everything he could find that touched on his happiness in any way

She would say no one night soon, and he would give her the pendant to show he understood, and he would read to her. Poetry. Sonnets from Shakespeare or Wordsworth, something soft and romantic. And afterward he would teach her to play chess, and they would spend platonic evenings together learning all about each other.

Seventeen nights, he thought, waiting for her. Seventeen nights so far. The cover was over the window, his room was clean, ready. When his door opened and Andrew stood there, Mark jumped up in a panic.

“What’s wrong? Has something happened to Rose? What happened?”

“Come with me,” Andrew said sternly. Behind him one of his brothers watched.

“Tell me what’s wrong!” Mark yelled, and tried to run past them.

The doctors caught his arms and held him. “We’ll take you to her,” Andrew said.

Mark stopped trying to yank away, and a new coldness seemed to enter him. Wordlessly they walked through the building, out the far end, and along the pathways cleared in the snow to one of the dormitories. Now he struggled again, but briefly, and he permitted them to lead him to one of the rooms. At the door they all stopped, and then Andrew gave Mark a slight push and he entered alone.

“No!” he cried. “No!”

There was a tangle of naked bodies, doing all the things to one another she had told him about. At his scream of anguish she raised her head, as they all did, but he knew it was Rose his eyes had picked out of all the rest. She was on her knees, one of the brothers behind her; she had been nuzzling one of her sisters.

He could see their mouths moving, knew they were talking, yelling. He turned and ran. Andrew got in front of him, his mouth opening, closing, opening. Mark doubled his fist and hit blindly, first Andrew, then the other doctor.

“Where is he?” Barry demanded. “Where did he go this time of night?”

“I don’t know,” Andrew said sulkily. His mouth was swollen and it hurt.

“You shouldn’t have done that to him! Of course he went wild with his first taste of sex. What did you think would happen to him? He’s never had it with anyone at all! Why did that foolish girl come to you?”

“She didn’t know what to do. She was afraid to tell him no. She tried to explain everything to him, but he wouldn’t listen. He ordered her back night after night.”

“Why didn’t you come to us about it?” Barry asked bitterly. “What made you think shock treatment like that would take care of the problem?”

“I knew you’d say leave him alone. You say that about everything he does. Leave him alone, it’ll take care of itself. I didn’t think it would.”

Barry went to the window and looked out at the black, cold night. The snow was several feet deep, and the temperature dropped to near zero almost every night.

“He’ll come back when he gets cold enough,” Andrew said. “He’ll come back furious with all of us, and with me in particular. But he will come back. We’re all he has.” He left abruptly.

“He’s right,” Bruce said. He sounded tired. Barry looked quickly at his brother, then at the others, who had remained silent while Andrew reported. They were as worried about the boy as he was, and as tired as he was of the apparently endless stream of troubles caused by him.

“He can’t go to the old house,” Bruce said after a moment. “He knows he’d freeze there. The chimney’s plugged, he can’t have a fire. That leaves the woods. Even he can’t survive in the woods at night in this weather.”

Andrew had sent a dozen of the younger brothers to search all the buildings, even the breeders’ quarters, and another group had gone to the old house to look. There was no sign, of Mark. Toward dawn the snow started again.

Mark had found the cave by accident. Picking berries on the cliff over the farmhouse one day, he had felt a cold draft of air on his bare legs and had found the source. A hole in the hill, a place where two limestone rocks came together unevenly. There were caves throughout the hills. He had found several others before this one, and there was the cave where the laboratories were.

He had dug carefully behind one of the limestone slabs, and gradually had opened the mouth of the cave enough to get through it. There was a narrow passage; then a room, another passage, another larger room. Over the years since finding it he had taken in wood to burn, clothes, blankets, food.

That night he huddled in the second room and stared dry-eyed into the fire he had made, certain no one would ever find him. He hated them all, Andrew and his brothers most of all. As soon as the snow melted, he would run away, forever. He would go south. He would make a longer canoe, a seventeen-foot one this time, and steal enough supplies to last him and he would keep going until he reached the Gulf of Mexico. Let them train the boys and girls themselves, let them find the warehouses, find the dangerous radioactive places if they could. First he would burn down everything in the valley. And then he would go.

He stared at the flames until his eyes felt afire. There were no voices in the cave, only the fire crackling and popping. The firelight flickered over the stalagmites and stalactites, making them appear red and gold. The smoke was carried away from his face and the air was good; it even felt warm after the cold night air. He thought about the time he and Molly had hidden on the hillside near the cave entrance while Barry and his brothers searched for them. At the thought of Barry, his mouth tightened. Barry, Andrew, Warren, Michael, Ethan . . . All doctors, all the same. How he hated them!

He rolled in his blanket and when he closed his eyes, he saw Molly again, smiling gently at him, playing checkers, digging mud for him to model. And suddenly the tears came.

He never had explored the cave past the second room, but in the days that followed, he began a systematic exploration. There were several small openings off the room, and one by one he investigated them, until he was brought up by a sealed passage, or a drop-off, or a ceiling so high he couldn’t get to any of the holes there might be up there. He used torches, and his steps were sometimes reckless, but he didn’t care if he fell or not, if he got trapped or not. He lost track of how many days he had been in the cave; when he was hungry he ate, when he was thirsty he went to the entrance, scooped up snow, and took it back with him to melt. When he was sleepy he slept.

On one of his last exploratory trips he heard water running, and he stopped abruptly. He had traveled far, he knew. Over a mile. Maybe two miles. He tried to remember how long his torch had been when he started. Almost full length, and now it was less than a third of that. Another torch hung on his belt, just in case he needed it, but he never had gone so far that he had needed a second torch to get back.

He had lighted the second torch before he came upon the cave river. Now he felt a new excitement as he realized this had to be the same water that ran through the laboratory cave. It was one system, then, and even if no opening existed other than the one cut by the river, the two sections were linked.

He followed the river until it vanished into a hole in the cave wall; he would have to swim to go any further. He squatted and stared at the hole. The river appeared in the laboratory cave from just such a hole.

Another time he would come back with his rope and more torches. He turned to go back to his large room with the fire and food, and now he paid attention to his torch so he could estimate how far he traveled, how far that wall was from his familiar section of the cave. But he knew where he was. He knew on the other side of that wall there was the laboratory, and beyond it the hospital and the dormitories.

He slept one more time in the cavern, and the next day he left it to return to the community. He had eaten very little for the past few days; he felt half starved and was very tired.

The snow was inches deeper than it had been, and it was snowing when he arrived in the valley once more. It was nearly dark by the time he got to the hospital building and entered. He saw several people but spoke to no one and went straight to his room, where he pulled off his outer clothes and fell into bed. He was nearly asleep when Barry appeared in the doorway.

“Are you all right?” Barry asked.

Mark nodded silently. Barry hesitated a moment, then entered. He stood over the bed. Mark looked up at him without speaking, and Barry reached down and touched his cheek, then his hair.

“You’re cold,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

Mark nodded.

“I’ll bring you something,” Barry said. But before he opened the door he turned once more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Mark, I’m truly sorry.” He left quickly.

After he was gone Mark realized they had thought he was dead, and the look he had seen on Barry’s face was the same look he could remember seeing on Molly’s face a long time ago.

He didn’t care, he thought. They couldn’t do anything now to make up for what they had done to him. They hated him and thought he was weak, thought they could control him the way they controlled the clones. And they were wrong. It wasn’t enough for Barry to say he was sorry; they would all be sorry before he was done.

When he heard Barry returning with food, he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep, not willing to see again that soft, vulnerable look.

Barry left the tray, and when he was gone, Mark ate ravenously. He pulled the cover over him and before he fell asleep he thought again of Molly. She had known he’d come to feel like this and she had said to wait, wait until he was a man, to learn everything he could first. Her face and Barry’s face seemed to blend together, and he fell asleep.

Chapter 27

Andrew had called the meeting, was in charge from start to finish. No one disputed his authority now to take control of the council meetings. Barry watched him from a side chair and tried to feel some of the excitement the younger brother showed.

“Those of you who want to look over the charts and records, please do so. I have given you the barest summary, not our methods. We can reproduce indefinitely through cloning. We have finally solved the problem that has plagued us from the beginning, the problem of the fifth-generation decline. The fifth, sixth, tenth, one-hundredth, they’ll all be perfect now.”

“But only those clones from our youngest people survive,” Miriam said drily.

“We’ll work that out too,” Andrew said impatiently. “In manipulating the enzymes there are some organisms that react with what appears to be almost an allergic collapse. We’ll find out why and take care of it.”

Miriam was looking very old, Barry realized suddenly. He hadn’t noticed it before, but her hair was white and her face was thin, with fine lines around her eyes, and she looked tired unto death.

She looked at Andrew with a disarming smile. “I expect you to be able to solve the problem you have created, Andrew,” she said, “but will the younger doctors be able to?”

“We shall continue to use the breeders,” Andrew said with a touch of impatience. “We’ll use them to clone those children who are particularly intelligent. We’ll go to implantations of clones using the breeders as hosts to ensure a continuing population of capable adults to carry on affairs . . .”

Barry found his attention wandering. The doctors had gone over it all before the council meeting; nothing new would come out here. Two castes, he thought. The leaders, and the workers, who were always expendable. Was that what they had foreseen in the beginning? He knew it was not possible to find any answers to his question. The clones wrote the books, and each generation had felt free to change the books to conform to their own beliefs. He had made a few such changes himself, in fact. And now Andrew would change them again. And this would be the final change; none of the new people would ever think of altering anything.

“. . . even more costly in terms of manpower than we expected,” Andrew was saying. “The glaciers are moving into Philadelphia at an accelerating rate. We may have only two or three more years to bring out what is salvageable, and it is costing us dearly. We will need hundreds of foragers to go south and east to the coastal cities. We now have some excellent models — the Edward brothers proved especially adept at foraging, as did your own little sisters, the Ella sisters. We’ll use them.”

“My little Ella sisters couldn’t transcribe a landscape to a map if you strung them by the heels and threatened to slice them inch by inch until they did,” Miriam said sharply. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. They can do only those things they have been taught, exactly as they’ve been taught.”

“They can’t draw maps, but they can return to where they’ve been,” Andrew said, no longer trying to conceal his displeasure at the turn the meeting had taken. “That’s all we require of them. The implanted clones will do the thinking for them.”

“Then it’s true,” Miriam said. “If you change the formula, you can produce only those clones you are talking about.”

“Right. We can’t handle two different chemical processes, two formulae, two kinds of clones. We’ve decided this is the best way to proceed at this time, and meanwhile we’ll be working on the process, I can assure you. We shall wait until the tanks are empty, in seven months, then make the changes. And we are working out a timetable to plan for the best time to clone the council members and those others who are needed in leadership capacities. We are not rushing into a new procedure without considering every aspect, I promise you, Miriam. At each step we will inform this group of our progress . . .”

In a tightly thatched lean-to near the mill Mark rested on his elbow and looked at the girl at his side. She was his age, nineteen. “You’re cold,” he said.

She nodded. “We won’t be able to do this much longer.”

“You could meet me in the old farmhouse,” he said.

“You know I can’t.”

“What happens if you try to cross the line? A dragon comes out and breathes fire on you?”

She laughed

“Really, what happens? Have you ever tried?”

Now she sat up and hugged her arms about her bare body. “I’m really cold. I should get dressed.”

Mark held her tunic out of reach. “First tell me what happens.”

She snatched, missed, and fell across him, and for a moment they lay close together. He pulled a cover over her and stroked her back. “What happens?”

She sighed and drew away from him. “I tried it once,” she said. “I wanted to go home, to my sisters. I cried and cried, and that didn’t help. I could see the lights, and knew they were just a few hundred feet away. I ran at first, then I began to feel strange, faint, I guess. I had to stop. I was determined to get to the dorm. I walked then, not very fast, ready to grab something if I started to faint. When I got closer to the off-limits line — it’s a hedge, you know, just a rose hedge, open at both ends so it’s no trouble at all to go around. When I got close to it, the feeling came over me again and everything began to spin. I waited a long time and it didn’t stop, but I thought, if I kept my eyes on my feet and didn’t pay any attention to anything else, I could walk anyway. I began to walk again.” She was lying rigidly beside him now, and her voice was almost inaudible when she went on. “And I started to vomit. I kept vomiting, until I didn’t have anything left in me, and then I threw up blood. And I suppose I really did faint. I woke up back in the breeders’ room.”

Gently Mark touched her cheek and drew her close to him. She was trembling violently. “Shh, shh,” Mark soothed her. “It’s all right. You’re all right now.”

No walls held them in, he thought, stroking her hair. No fence restrained them, yet they could not approach the river; they could not get nearer the mill than she was now; they could not pass the rose hedge, or go into the woods. But Molly did it, he thought grimly. And they would too.

“I have to go back,” she said presently. The haunted look had come over her face. The emptiness, she had called it. “You wouldn’t know what it means,” she said, trying to explain. “We aren’t separate, you see. My sisters and I were like one thing, one creature, and now I’m a fragment of that creature. Sometimes I can forget it for a short time, when I’m with you I can forget for a while, but it always comes back, and the emptiness comes again. If you turned me inside out, there wouldn’t be anything at all there.”

“Brenda, I have to talk to you first,” Mark said. “You’ve been here four years, haven’t you? And you’ve had two pregnancies. It’s almost time again, isn’t it?”

She nodded and pulled on her tunic.

“Listen, Brenda. This time it won’t be like before. They plan to use the breeders to clone themselves through implantations of cloned cells. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She shook her head, but she was listening, watching.

“All right. They’ve changed something in the chemicals they use for the clones in the tanks. Now they can keep on cloning the same person over and over, but he’s a neuter. The new clones can’t think for themselves; they can’t conceive, can’t impregnate, they’ll never have children of their own. And the council members are afraid they’ll lose the scientific skills, the craftsmanship, Miriam’s skill at drawing, her eidetic visual memory — all that might be lost if they don’t ensure it in the next generation through cloning. Since they can’t use the tanks, they’ll use the fertile women as hosts. They’ll implant you with clones, triplets. And in nine months you’ll have three new Andrews, or three new Miriams, or Lawrences, or whatever. They’ll use the strongest, healthiest young women for this. And they’ll continue to use artificial insemination for the others. When they produce another new talent they can use, they’ll clone him several times, implant the clones in your bodies and produce more of him.”

She was staring at him now, openly puzzled by his intensity. “What difference does it make?” she asked. “If that’s how we can best serve the community, that’s what we have to do.”

“The new babies from the tanks won’t even have names,” Mark said. “They’ll be the Bennies, or the Bonnies, or the Annes, all of them, and their clones will be called that, and theirs.”

She laced her sandal without speaking.

“And you, how many sets of triplets do you think your body can produce? Three? Four?”

She was no longer listening.

Mark climbed the hill over the valley and sat on a limestone rock, looking at the people below, at the sprawling farm that had grown year by year until it filled the whole valley all the way to the bend in the river. Only the old house was an oasis of trees in the autumn fields, which looked like a desert now. Livestock were moving slowly toward the large barns. A group of small boys swept into view, playing something that involved a lot of running, falling down, and running again. Twenty or more of them played together. He was too far away to hear them, but he knew they were laughing.

“What’s wrong with it?” he said aloud, and was surprised by the sound of his voice. The wind stirred the trees, but there were no words, no answer.

They were content, happy even, and he, the outsider, in his discontent would destroy that to satisfy what had to be selfish desires. In his loneliness he would disrupt an entire community that was thriving and satisfied.

Below him the Ella sisters came into view, ten of them, each a physical carbon copy of his mother. For a moment the vision of Molly peeking out from behind a bush, laughing with him, came to mind. It vanished, and he watched the girls walk toward the dormitory. Three of the Miriam sisters came out, and the two groups stopped and talked.

Mark remembered how Molly had made people come to life on paper, a touch here, another there, an eyebrow raised too much, a dimple drawn too deep, always something not just right, but which made the sketch take on life. They couldn’t do that, he knew. Not Miriam, not her little Ella sisters, none of them. That was gone, lost forever maybe. Each generation lost something; sometimes it couldn’t be regained, sometimes it couldn’t be identified immediately. Everett’s little brothers couldn’t cope with a new emergency with the computer terminal; they couldn’t improvise long enough to save the growing fetuses in the tanks if the electricity failed for several days. As long as the elders could foresee the probable troubles that might arise and train the young clones in how to handle them, they were safe enough, but accidents had a way of not being foreseen, catastrophes had a way of not being predictable, and a major accident might destroy everything in the valley simply because none of them had been trained to deal with that specific situation.

He remembered a conversation he had had with Barry. “We’re living on the top of a pyramid,” he had said, “supported by the massive base, rising above it, above everything that has made it possible. We’re responsible for nothing, not the structure itself, not anything above us. We owe nothing to the pyramid, and are totally dependent on it. If the pyramid crumbles and returns to dust, there is nothing we can do to prevent it, or even to save ourselves. When the base goes, the top goes with it, no matter how elaborate the life is that has developed there. The top will return to dust along with the base when the collapse comes. If a new structure is to rise, it must start at the ground, not on top of what has been built during the centuries past.”

“You’d drag everyone back into savagery!”

“I would help them down from the point of the pyramid. It’s rotting away. The snow and ice from one direction, weather and age from the others. It will collapse, and when it does, the only ones who can survive will be those who are free from it, in no way dependent on it.”

The cities are dead; Molly had told him, and it was true. Ironically, the technology that made life in the valley possible might be able to sustain that life only long enough to doom any chance of recovery after the pyramid started to tilt. The top would slide down one of the sides and sink into the debris at the bottom, along with all the other technologies that had seemed perfect and infinite.

No one understood the computer, Mark thought, just as no one but the Lawrence brothers understood the paddle-wheel boat and the steam engine that drove it. The younger brothers could repair it, restore it to its original condition, as long as the materials were at hand, but they didn’t know how either one worked, the computer or the boat, and if a screw was missing, none of them would be able to fashion a substitute. In that fact lay the inevitable destruction of the valley and everyone in it.

But they were happy, he reminded himself, as lights began to come on in the valley. Even the breeders were content; they were well cared for, pampered compared to the women who foraged each summer and those who worked long hours in the fields and gardens. And if they became too lonely, there was the comfort of drugs.

They were happy because they didn’t have enough imagination to look ahead, he thought, and anyone who tried to tell them there were dangers was by definition an enemy of the community. In disrupting their perfect existence, he had become an enemy.

His restless gaze moved over the valley, and finally stopped on the mill, and like his ancestor before him he understood that was the weak spot, the place where the valley was vulnerable.

Wait until you’re a man, Molly had said. But she hadn’t realized that each day he was in more danger, that each time Andrew and his brothers discussed his future they were less inclined to grant him a future. He studied the mill broodingly. It was weathered almost silver, surrounded by russets and browns and golds, and the permanent green of the pines and spruces. He would like to paint it; the thought came suddenly, and he laughed and stood up. No time for that. Time had become the goal; he had to have more time, and they might decide any day that allowing him time was endangering them all. Abruptly he sat down once more, and now when he studied the mill and the surrounding area his eyes were narrowed in thought, and there was no smile on his face.

The council meeting had gone on most of the day, and when it ended Miriam asked Barry to walk with her. He looked at her questioningly, but she shook her head. They walked by the river, and when they were out of sight of the others she said, “I would like you to do me a favor, if you will. I would like to visit the old farmhouse. Can you get inside?”

Barry stopped in surprise. “Why?”

“I don’t know why. I keep thinking I want to see Molly’s paintings. I never did see them, you know.”

“But why?”

“Can you get in?”

He nodded, and they started to walk again. When do you want to go?”

“Is it too late now?”

The rear door of the farmhouse was loosely boarded. They didn’t even need a crowbar to open it. Barry led the way up the stairs, carrying the oil lamp high, casting strange shadows on the wall beside him. The house felt very empty, as if Mark had not been there for a long time.

Miriam looked at the paintings quietly, not touching them, holding her hands tightly clasped before her as she went from one to another. “They should be moved,” she said finally. “They will rot away to nothing in here.”

When she came to the carving of Molly that Mark had made, she touched it, almost reverently. “It is she,” she said softly. “He has her gift, doesn’t he?”

“He has the gift,” Barry said.

Miriam rested her hand on the head. “Andrew plans to kill him.”

“I know.”

“He has served his purpose, and now he is a threat and must go.” She ran her finger down the cheek of walnut. “Look, it’s too high and sharp, but that makes it more like her instead of less. I don’t understand why that is, do you?”

Barry shook his head.

“Will he try to save himself?” Miriam asked, not looking at him, her voice tightly controlled.

“I don’t know. How can he? He can’t survive alone in the woods. Andrew won’t allow him to remain in the community many more months.”

Miriam sighed and withdrew her hand from the carved head. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and it was not clear whether she spoke to him or to Molly.

Barry went to the window overlooking the valley and looked through the peephole Mark had made in the boards. How pretty it was, he thought, the gathering dusk, with pale lights glowing in the distance and the black hills encircling it all. “Miriam,” he asked, “if you knew a way to help him, would you?”

For a long time she was silent, and he thought she would not answer. Then she said, “No. Andrew is right. He is not a physical threat now, but his presence is painful. It is as if he is a reminder of something that is too elusive to grasp, something that is hurtful, even deadly, and in his presence we try to regain it and fail over and over. We will stop feeling this pain when he is gone, not before then.” She joined him at the window. “In a year or two he will threaten us in other ways. That is what is important,” she said, nodding toward the valley. “Not any individual, even if his death kills us both.”

Barry put his arm about her shoulder then, and they stood looking out together. Suddenly Miriam stiffened and said, “Look, a fire!”

There was a faint line of brightness that grew as they watched, spreading in both directions, becoming two lines, moving downward and upward. Something erupted, blazed brightly, then subsided, and the lines moved onward.

“It will burn down the mill!” Miriam cried, and ran from the window to the stairs. “Come on, Barry! It’s just above the mill!”

Barry stood by the window as if transfixed by the moving lines of fire. He had done it, Barry thought. Mark was trying to burn down the mill.

Chapter 28

Hundreds of people spread out over the hillside putting out the brush fire. Others patrolled the grounds surrounding the generating plant to make certain no sparks were blown in by the wind. Hoses were put into service to wet down the bushes and trees, to soak the roof of the large wooden building. Only when the water pressure failed did anyone realize they had a second serious problem on their hands.

The flow of water in the swift stream that ran the plant had dwindled to a trickle. All over the valley the lights blinked out as the system compensated for the sudden loss and diverted the electricity to the laboratory. The auxiliary system took over and the lab continued to function, but on reduced power. Everything was turned off except the circuits directly tied into the tanks containing the clones.

Throughout the night the scientists, doctors, and technicians worked to meet the crisis. They had drilled often enough to know exactly what to do in this emergency, and no clones were lost, but the system had been damaged by the uncontrolled stoppage.

Other men began to wade upstream to find the cause of the diminished flow of water. In the first light of morning they stumbled upon a landslide that had almost dammed the small river, and work was started immediately to clear it.

“Did you try to burn down the mill?” Barry demanded.

“No. If I wanted to burn it down, I would have lighted a fire at the mill, not in the woods. If I wanted to burn it down, I would burn it down.” Mark stood before Barry’s desk, not defiant, not frightened. He waited.

“Where were you all night?”

“In the old house. I was reading about Norfolk, studying maps . . .”

“Never mind about that.” Barry drummed his fingers on his desk, pushed back the charts he had been studying, and stood up. “Listen to me, Mark. Some of them think you’re responsible for the fire, the dam, everything. I made the point you just made: if you had tried to burn down the mill, you could have done it easily enough without going through all that. The question is still open. The mill is off limits to you. So is the laboratory, and the boat works. Do you understand?”

Mark nodded. Explosives for river clearing were kept in the boat-works building.

“I was at the old house when the fire started,” Barry said suddenly, and his voice was very cold and hard. “I saw a curious thing. It looked like an eruption of some sort. I’ve thought a lot about it. It could have been an explosion, enough to start the landslide. Of course, no one could have seen it from the valley, and whatever noise it made would have been masked if it were underground even a little bit, and by the noise everyone was making fighting the fire.”

“Barry,” Mark said, interrupting him. “A few years ago you said something to me that was very important, and I believed you then and still believe you. You said you wouldn’t hurt me. Do you remember?” Barry nodded, still cold and watchful. “I say that to you now, Barry. These people are my people too, you know. I promise you I won’t ever try to hurt them. I have never done anything purposely to harm any of them, and I never will. I promise that.”

Barry watched him distrustfully, and Mark smiled softly. “I’ve never lied to you, you know. No matter what I had done, I admitted it if you asked. I’m not lying now.”

Abruptly Barry sat down again. “Why were you looking up Norfolk? What is Norfolk?”

“There was a naval base there, one of the biggest on the East Coast. When the end was coming, they must have put hundreds of ships into dry dock. The ocean levels have been dropping. Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, it will be low there too, and those ships are high and dry — they called it mothballing them. I began to think of the metal in the ships. Stainless steel, copper, brass . . . Some of those ships held crews of a thousand men, with supplies for that many, medicines, test tubes, everything.”

Barry felt the doubts fading, and the nagging feeling of something not cleared up vanished as they talked of the possibilities of manning an expedition to Norfolk early in the spring. Only much later did he realize he had not asked the crucial questions: Had Mark started the fire, for whatever reason, and had he blasted loose the rocks that had slid down into the stream, for whatever reason?

And if he had, why had he? They had lost time; it would take several months to clean up the mess completely, but they had planned to discontinue the cloning anyway until they were ready to start the mass production later in the spring. Nothing had been changed in their plans, except that now they would work on the stream, make it failproof, set up a new auxiliary system of generating power and improve everything generally.

Only the human implantations would be delayed beyond the target date already set for them. The preliminary work of cloning the cells, all done in the laboratory, would have to wait until spring when the lab was cleaned, the computer programmed anew . . . Why, then, had Mark been so self-satisfied? Barry couldn’t answer that question, nor could his brothers when they discussed it.

Throughout the winter Mark made his plans for the expedition to the coast. He would not be allowed to take any of the experienced foragers, who were needed to finish clearing out the warehouses in Philadelphia. He began training his group of thirty fourteen-year-olds while snow was still on the ground, and by March he said they would be ready to start as soon as the snow melted. He presented his provisions list to Barry for his approval; Barry didn’t even glance at it. The children would carry oversized packs, so that if they found salvageable items they could bring back as much as they could carry. Meanwhile, the other, more important forces who were going to Philadelphia were also being readied, and more attention was being paid to their needs than to Mark.

The laboratory was ready to operate again, the computer reprogrammed, when it was discovered the water flowing through the cave was contaminated. Somehow coliform bacteria had infiltrated the pure cave water, and its source had to be found before they could start operations.

It had been one thing after another, Barry and Bruce agreed. The fire, the landslide, missing supplies, misplaced drugs, now the contaminated water.

“They aren’t accidents,” Andrew said furiously. “Do you know what people are saying? It’s the work of the forest spirits! Spirits! It’s Mark! I don’t know how or why, but it’s all his doing. You’ll see, as soon as he leaves with his group, it will all stop. And this time when he comes back, if he does, we terminate him!”

Barry didn’t object; he knew it would be useless. They had determined that Mark, now a man of twenty, could not be allowed to exert his influence any longer. If he hadn’t come up with his plan to scout the shipyards at Norfolk, it would have been done sooner. He was a disturbing element. The young clones followed him blindly, took his orders without question, and looked on him with reverential awe. Worse, no one could anticipate what he might do, or what might stir him into action of some sort. He was as alien to them as a being of another species; his intelligence was not like theirs, his emotions were not like theirs. He was the only one who had wept over the deaths of the radiation victims, Barry remembered.

Andrew was right, and there was nothing he could do to change that. At least, if Mark was responsible for the series of accidents, they would stop and there would be peace for a while in the valley. But the day Mark led his group out on foot, it was found that the corral had broken down at the far end and the livestock had wandered out and scattered. They were all rounded up except two cows and their calves and a few sheep. And then the accidents did stop, exactly as Andrew had predicted.

The forest became thicker each day, the trees more massive. This had been a park, protected from cutting, Mark knew, but even he was awed by the size of the trees, some of them so large that a dozen youngsters grasping hands could hardly reach around them. He named those he knew: white oak, silverbell, maple, a grove of birches . . . The days were warm as they headed south. On the fifth day they turned west by southwest, and no one questioned his directions. They did what they were told to do cheerfully and quickly and asked nothing. They were all strong, but their packs were heavy, and they were very young, and it seemed to Mark they were going at a crawl when he wanted to run, but he didn’t push them too fast. They had to be in good shape when they arrived at their destination. In the middle of the afternoon of the tenth day, he told them to stop, and they looked at him, waiting.

Mark surveyed the wide valley. He had known from studying the maps that it was here, but he hadn’t realized how beautiful it would be. There was a stream, and on either side of it the land rose enough not to be in danger of flooding, but not so steeply that it would be difficult to get water. This was the fringe of the national forest; some of the trees were the giants they had been seeing for days now, others were younger, and would make the logs they would need for their buildings. There was level ground for their crops, grazing ground for the livestock. He sighed, and when he faced his followers he was smiling broadly.

That afternoon and the following day he started them building lean-tos for temporary shelter; he laid out the corners of the buildings he ordered them to erect, tagged the trees they were to cut and use for the buildings and their campfires, paced off the fields they were to clear, and then, content they had enough to keep them busy until he returned, he told them he was leaving and would return in a few days.

“But where are you going?” one of them asked, glancing about now as if questioning for the first time what they were doing.

“It’s a test, isn’t it?” another asked, smiling.

“Yes,” Mark said soberly. “You could call it a test. In survival. Are there any questions about any of my instructions?” There were none. “I’ll return with a surprise for you,” he said, and they were content.

He trotted effortlessly through the forest toward the river, and then he followed the river north until he reached the canoe he had hidden in the undergrowth weeks before. In all, it took him four days to return to the valley. He had been gone over two weeks, and he was afraid it might have been too long.

He approached from the hillside above the valley and lay down in some bushes to watch and wait for darkness. Late in the afternoon the paddle wheel came into view, and when it docked people swarmed out and lined up shoulder to shoulder to unload the boat, passing the salvage from one to the next, onto the shore, and into the boathouse. When lights came on, Mark moved. He started down to the old house, where he had hidden the drugs. Two-thirds of the way down he paused and dropped to his knees. To his right, a hundred yards away, was the cave entrance; the ground had been trampled, the limestone slabs had been covered with dirt. They had found his entrance and sealed it off.

He waited until he was certain no one was below him watching the house, and then he cautiously made his way down the rest of the way, bellied under the bushes that grew thick about the house, and slid down the coal chute to the basement. He didn’t need a light to find the package, cached behind bricks he had pried loose months earlier. There too was the bottle of wine he had hidden. Working quickly, he added the stolen sleeping pills to the wine and shook it vigorously.

It was dark when he climbed the hillside once more and hurried toward the breeders’ quarters. He had to get there after they were in their rooms, but before they were asleep. He crept to the building and watched outside the windows until the night nurse made her rounds with the tray. When she had left the dorm room where Brenda and five other women slept, he tapped lightly on the window.

Brenda grinned when she saw him. She opened the window quickly, and he climbed in and whispered, “Turn off the light. I have wine. We’ll have a party.”

“They’ll have your skin if they catch you,” one of the women said. They were pleased at the prospect of a party, and already they were dragging out the mat, and one of them was winding her hair up out of the way.

“Where’s Wanda and Dorothy?” Mark asked. “They should be here, and maybe a couple of others. It’s a big bottle of wine.”

“I’ll tell them,” Loretta whispered, stifling her laughter.

“Wait until Nurse is out of sight.” She peeked out, shut the door, and pressed her finger to her lips. After waiting a moment, she looked again, then slipped out.

“After the party, maybe you and I can get out for a little while?” Brenda said, rubbing her cheek against his.

Mark nodded. “Any glasses in here?”

Someone produced glasses, and he began to pour the wine. Others joined them, and now there were eleven of the younger women on the mat drinking the golden wine, muffling giggles and laughter. When they began to yawn, they wandered off to their beds, and those who had come from the other room stretched out on the mat. Mark waited until they were all sleeping soundly, then left quietly. He went to the dock, made certain no one had remained aboard the paddle wheel, and then returned and began to carry the women out, one by one, wrapped like cocoons in their blankets. On his last trip he gathered as many clothes as he could find, closed the window of the dorm, and, panting with fatigue, made his way back to the boat.

He untied the mooring ropes and let the boat glide with the current, using a paddle to keep it close to the shore. Downriver, nearly opposite the old house, he snagged a rock and drew the boat into shore and tied it securely. One more thing, he thought, very tired now. One more thing.

He ran to the old house and slid down the chute, then hurried upstairs. He didn’t use a light, but went straight to the paintings and started to pick up the first one. Behind him a match flared, and he froze.

“Why did you come back?” Barry asked roughly. “Why didn’t you stay out there in the woods where you belong?”

“I came back for my things,” Mark said, and turned. Barry was alone. He was lighting the oil lamp. Mark made a motion toward the window, and Barry shook his head.

“It won’t do any good. They wired the stairs. If anyone comes up here, it rings an alarm in Andrew’s room. They’ll be on their way in a minute or two.”

Mark scooped up the painting, then another and another. “Why are you here?”

“To warn you.”

“Why? Why did you suspect I’d come back?”

“I don’t know why. I don’t want to know why. I’ve been sleeping downstairs, in the library. You won’t have time to get them all,” he said urgently as Mark picked up more paintings. “They’ll be here fast. They think you tried to burn down the mill, dam the stream, poison the clones in the tanks. They won’t stop to ask any questions this time.”

“I didn’t try to kill the clones,” Mark said, not looking at Barry. “I knew the computer would sound an alarm before the contaminated water was used. How did they find out?”

“They sent some of the boys down into the water, and a couple of them actually managed to swim out the other side, and after that, it wasn’t hard. Four were killed in the attempt,” he said without inflection.

“I’m sorry,” Mark said. “I didn’t want that.”

Barry shrugged. “You have to go.”

“I’m ready.”

“You’ll die out there,” Barry said, in the same dead voice. “You and those children you took with you. They won’t be able to breed, you know. Maybe one girl, maybe two, but then what?”

“I’ve taken some of the women from the breeders’ compound,” Mark said.

Now Barry registered shock and disbelief. “How?”

“It doesn’t matter how. I have them. And we’ll make it. I planned it very carefully. We’ll make it.”

“That’s what it was all for?” Barry said. “The fire, the dam, the contaminated water, the seed grains you took? That’s what it was all for?” he said again, this time not looking at Mark, but searching the remaining paintings as if they held the answer. “You even have livestock,” he said.

Mark nodded. “They’re safe. I’ll get them in a week or two.”

“They’ll track you down,” Barry said slowly. “They think you’re a menace, they won’t rest until they find you.”

“They can’t find us,” Mark said. “The ones who could are in Philadelphia. By the time they get back there won’t be any signs of us anywhere.”

“Have you thought what it will be like?” Barry cried, suddenly losing the rigid control he had achieved. “They’ll fear you and hate you! It isn’t fair to make them all suffer. And they’ll come to hate you for it. They’ll die out there! One by one, and each one will make the survivors hate more. In the end you’ll all die mean and miserable deaths.

Mark shook his head. “If we don’t make it,” he said, “there won’t be anyone at all left on earth. The pyramid is tilting. The pressure from the great white wall is bearing down on it, and it cannot stand.”

“And if you make it, you’ll sink back into savagery. It will be a thousand years, five thousand, before a man can climb out of the pit you’re digging him. They’ll be animals!”

“And you’ll be dead.” Mark glanced swiftly about the room, then hurried to the door. He paused there and looked at Barry steadily. “You won’t understand this. No one’s alive but me who could understand it. I love you, Barry. You’re strange to me, alien, not human. All of you are. But I didn’t destroy them when I could have and wanted to because I loved you. Good-bye, Barry.”

For a moment they continued to look at each other, and then Mark turned and ran lightly down the stairs. Behind him he heard the sound of something breaking, but he didn’t stop. He left by the back door, and was through the trees and into the field when Andrew and his companions drew near. Mark stopped and listened.

“He’s still up there,” someone said. “I can see him.”

Barry had broken the boards on the window so he could be seen. He was buying time for him, Mark realized, and keeping low, he began to run toward the river.

“That’s what it was all for,” Barry whispered again, and now he addressed himself to the walnut head that was Molly. He held the head between his hands and sat down at the exposed window with the lamp behind him. “That’s what it was all for,” he said one more time, and he wondered if Molly had always been smiling. He didn’t look up when flames started to crackle through the house, but he held the carved head tighter against his chest as if to protect it.

Far down the river Mark stood in the paddle wheel watching the flames, and he wept. When the boat bumped a rock, he began to fire the engine and then, under power, continued downriver. When he reached the Shenandoah he turned south and followed it until the big boat could go no farther. It was almost dawn. He sorted the clothes he had gathered together in the women’s quarters and made up packs of the boat’s provisions; they would need everything they could carry.

When the women began to stir, he would give them tea and cornbread, and get them ashore. He would take the boat out to the middle of the river and let it float downstream again. They would need it back in the valley. Then he and the women would start through the forests toward home.