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 ............