Molly blinked and shut her eyes against the glare of a silver frost that covered everything. She stood still and tried to remember where she was, who she was, anything. When she opened her eyes again, the blinding glare still dazzled her. She felt as if she had awakened after a long, nightmare-haunted dream that was becoming more and more dim as she tried to recapture it. Someone nudged her.

“You’ll freeze out here,” someone said close by. Molly turned to look at the woman, a stranger. “Come on, get inside,” the woman said louder. Then she leaned forward and looked at Molly closely. “Oh, you’re back, aren’t you?”

She took Molly by the arm and guided her inside a warm building. Other women looked up idly and then bent down over their sewing again. Some of them were obviously pregnant. Some of them were dull-eyed, vacant-looking, doing nothing.

The woman helping Molly took her to a chair and stood by her side long enough to say, “Just sit still for a while. You’ll start remembering in a little bit.” Then she left and took her place at one of the machines and began stitching.

Molly looked at the floor and waited for memories to return, and for a long time there was nothing but the terror of nightmare remembered in emotions, not in details.

They had strapped her to a table, many times, she thought, and they had done things to her that she could not recall. There had been another time when some of the women had held her down and done things to her. She shuddered violently and closed her eyes. The memory receded. Mark, she thought suddenly, very clearly. Mark! She jumped up and looked about wildly. The woman who had befriended her hurried over and caught her arm.

“Look, Molly, they’ll put you under again if you make trouble. Understand? Just sit still until our break, and I’ll talk to you then.”

“Where is Mark?” Molly whispered.

The woman glanced about and said in an undertone, “He’s all right. Now sit down! Here comes a nurse.”

Molly sat down again and stared at the floor until the nurse glanced about the room and left once more. Mark was all right. There was ice on the ground. Winter. He was six, then. She remembered nothing of the late summer, the fall. What had they done to her?

The hours until the break passed painfully slowly. Occasionally one or another of the women would look at her and there was awareness, not the incurious glances that had been given her before. The word was spreading that she was back, and they were watching her, perhaps to see what she would do now, perhaps to welcome her, perhaps for some reason she couldn’t guess. She looked at the floor. Her hands were clenched, her nails digging into her palms. She relaxed them. They had taken her to a hospital room, but not the usual hospital, one in the breeder’s quarters. They had examined her thoroughly. She remembered injections, answering questions, pills . . . It was too blurred. Her hands had clenched again.

“Molly, come on. We’ll have tea and I’ll tell you what I can.”

“Who are you?”

“Sondra. Come on.”

She should have known, Molly thought, following Sondra. She remembered suddenly the ceremony given for Sondra, who was only three or four years older than she. She had been nine or ten, she thought.

The tea was a pale yellow drink she couldn’t identify. After one sip she put it down and looked across the lounge toward the uncovered window. “What month is this?”

“January.” Sondra finished her tea and leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Listen, Molly, they’ve taken you off the drugs and they’ll be watching you for the next few weeks to see how you behave. If you cause trouble, they’ll put you on something again. You’ve been conditioned. Just don’t fight it, and you’ll be all right.”

Molly felt she could understand only half of what Sondra was saying to her. Again she looked about the lounge; in here the chairs were comfortable and there were tables at convenient intervals. Women were in clusters of threes and fours, chatting, now and then glancing at her. Some of them smiled, one winked. There were thirty women in the room, she thought in disbelief. Thirty breeders!

“Am I pregnant?” she asked suddenly, and pressed her hands against her stomach.

“I don’t think so. If you are, it’s still awfully early, but I doubt it. They tried every month since you’ve been here and it didn’t take before. I doubt it took the last time either.”

Molly sagged against her chair and closed her eyes hard. That’s what they had done to her on the table. She felt tears form and roll down her cheeks and was not able to stop them. Then Sondra’s arm was about her shoulders, and she held her tightly.

“It hits all of us like that, Molly. It’s the separation, the being alone for the first time. You don’t get used to it, but you learn to live with it and it doesn’t hurt so much after a while.”

Molly shook her head, unable as yet to speak. No, she thought distinctly, it was not the separation, it was the humiliation of being treated like an object, of being drugged and then used, forced to cooperate in that procedure unquestioningly.

“We have to go back now,” Sondra said. “You won’t have to do anything for another day or two, long enough to collect your thoughts, get used to everything all over again.”

“Sondra, wait. You said Mark is all right? Where is he?”

“He’s in school with the others. They won’t hurt him or anything. They’re very good to all the children. You remember that, don’t you?”

Molly nodded. “Did they clone him?”

Sondra shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” She grimaced then and pressed her hand to her stomach. She looked very old and tired, and except for her bulging stomach, too thin.

“How many times have you been pregnant?” Molly asked. “How long have you been here?”

“Seven, counting now,” Sondra said without hesitation. “I was brought here twenty years ago.”

Molly stared at her then and shook her head. But she had been nine or ten when they mourned Sondra. “How long have I been here?” she whispered finally.

“Molly, not too fast. Try to relax this first day.”

“How long?”

“A year and a half. Now come on.”

All afternoon she sat quietly, and the memories became slightly less blurred, but she could not account for a year and a half. It was gone from her life as if a fold had been made and the two ends now touching excluded whatever had happened in the section that made up the loop, a year and a half.

He was seven, then. Seven, no longer an infant. She shook her head. In the afternoon one of the doctors strolled through the room, stopping to speak to several of the women. He approached Molly and she said, “Good afternoon, Doctor,” just as the others had done.

“How are you feeling, Molly?”

“Well, thank you.”

He moved on.

Molly looked at the floor again. She felt as if she had watched the small interlude from a great distance, unable to alter a nuance of it. Conditioning, she thought. That was what Sondra had meant. How else had they conditioned her? To spread her legs obligingly when they approached with their instruments, with the carefully hoarded sperm? She forced her fingers open again and flexed them. They were sore from gripping so hard.

Suddenly she looked up, but the doctor had gone. Who was he? For a moment she felt dizzy, then the room steadied again. She had called him Doctor, hadn’t even questioned the lack of a name. Had it been Barry? Bruce? Another part of her conditioning, she thought bitterly. The breeders were the lost, they no longer had the right to know one of the clones from another. The Doctor. The Nurse. She bowed her head once more.

The routine was easy after a few days. They were given soporifics at bedtime and stimulants at breakfast, all disguised in the thin yellow tea that Molly wouldn’t drink. Some of the women wept at night, others succumbed rapidly to the drugged tea and slept heavily. There was a lot of sexual activity; they had their mats, just as everyone else. Through the day they worked in the various departments of the clothing section. They had free time in the late afternoon, books to read, games in the lounge, guitars and violins available to them.

“It really isn’t bad,” Sondra said a few days after Molly’s awakening. “They take good care of us, the very best. If you prick your finger, they come running and watch over you like a baby. It’s not bad.”

Molly didn’t respond. Sondra was tall and heavy, in her sixth month; her eyes varied from brightly alert to dull and unseeing. They watched Sondra, Molly thought, and at the least sign of depression or emotional upset they changed the dosage and kept her operating on an even level.

“They don’t keep most of the new ones under as long as they did you,” Sondra said another time. “I guess that’s because most of us were only fourteen or fifteen when we came here, and you were older.”

Molly nodded. They had been children, easy to condition into breeding machines who thought it really wasn’t that bad a life. Except at night, when many of them wept for their sisters.

“Why do they want so many babies?” Molly asked. “We thought they were reducing the human babies, not increasing the number.”

“For workers and road builders, dam builders. They’re hurting for materials from the cities, chemicals mostly, I think. They’re making more............