Parent said, "I repeat, Dr. Foreman. If you kill McCarthy, you have to kill me too. That's why I'm standing."

"Me too," someone else said, I didn't see who. "And me-"

"And me too-"

And then the whole room was shouting it. "Me too!" Foreman waited patiently.

He stepped back to his table and took a drink of water before he continued. For just the briefest of moments, I wondered at the incredible physical demands that this job must make on him-and yet, he still looked like the most alive person in the room.

He turned around and faced the trainees again. They were still shouting.

After a while, Foreman held up a hand. He did not look concerned. In fact, he grinned. "I appreciate the clarification." He sighed, long and loudly. "But it would be excessive, not to mention counterproductive. It's not the way we do the process. You can all sit down."

They remained standing. All of them. Every single one. It was a wonderful disobedience.

Foreman did not look displeased. Somehow I had the feeling he'd seen this response before.

"Look," he said. "There's no glory in dying en masse. In fact, it's a rather stupid thing to do. The logical, rational thing to do would be to make it as hard as possible for someone to kill you-that's survival. But, you want to notice that what you're doing here now is something that most of you would call 'defending a principle.' Most of you, if we found the right principle and the right circumstance, would die to defend it. We call this 'being a martyr.' It's a great way to be right. Your body may die, but your principle lives on.

"This is what happens when your mind gets confused, when it starts making false connections, when it invests a significant part of its identity into family, nation, or species. It's especially true when the mind identifies itself with noble ideas and principles. Suddenly, the survival of the concept is more important than the survival of the individual. This is called a 'moral victory.'

"So, here we are. You're all willing to die to be right. You should be laughing right now. Don't you get the joke your minds have just played on you? You're so invested with survival of your identity that you as an individual will die to guarantee the survival of your identity. Talk about confusion. . . . " He gave us all that sideways skeptical look; it was the kind of look that made you wonder if your philosophical fly was open.

"So, you're saying that principles and family and nation are the wrong things to die for?" someone hollered accusingly.

"I said nothing of the kind. I said that your mind has such an investment in the survival of your identity that you will die rather than let that identity be destroyed. You have invested your identity in principles and family and nation and species. Whether it's right or wrong is totally irrelevant; you'll do it anyway. You did it before you came in here. You'll do it when you leave. The only difference is, you'll know you're doing it. You won't be doing it unconsciously-and that will affect the decisions you make. You'll consider your choices in a totally different context."

"Just the same," said Parent. "If you kill McCarthy, you have to kill me too."

"That's not the way we do the process," said Foreman quietly. He picked up the gun, opened it and withdrew the round. He held it up for all to see. "We have only the one bullet. That's all." He looked out over the roomful of trainees. "You can sit down now. You've made your point. But, you don't get to vote on things that you don't get to vote on, no matter how often you vote on them. The universe doesn't care. Rocks are hard. Water is wet. So what? Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. The only choice you get is whether or not you're going to accept that this is the way the universe works.

"The process continues until you die."

Parent sat down, reluctantly-and I was alone again.

Later, after we'd bathed them and tucked them away for naps, Betty-John, still damp from the creek, came up and leaned on my shoulder, momentarily exhausted, but exhilarated too.

She looked up at me. "Are you beginning to get it now, Jim? I mean, about working with their psychoses?"

"Yeah, I guess so. I don't know. Maybe."

"Come on," she said. "Bar's open in my office. I'll buy you a drink. You looked so silly trying to give that lump of teddy bear a bath without really getting him wet."

"Yeah, well, I had to. You saw how Alec trusted me." I followed her up the hill.

The drink turned out to be lemonade. I should have known. "I would have had iced tea," B-Jay said; with one foot she kicked shut the door of the tiny refrigerator she kept next to her desk, "but the prices are ridiculous." She sighed and ran one hand through her fading hair, then realized what she had done and patted it back into place. "Stupid, isn't it? I should care how I look." She went back to muttering about prices as she pushed some papers around on her desk. "On the black market we can get bread for only ninety-five cents a loaf-can you believe that? And even beef. I know we shouldn't, but we haven't had roast beef here for . . . you know, I can't remember how long it's been, but other things, like tea and coffee and sugar, we just can't afford them any more, white or black market."

"Is it that serious?"

"It is if you're accustomed to those kinds of things. The kids won't miss it. God knows what most of them have been surviving on. I mean, this is a step up. We've got milk and potatoes and bread and what vegetables we can grow ourselves, so we're okay. We were supposed to get a truckload of canned goods salvaged from Sacramento, but it never arrived. Probably hijacked; we'll be able to buy the stuff on the black market next week." She sighed and sank back in her chair. The chair sank back too. It creaked and squeaked and swung so far backward that for a moment, I thought she was falling, but she was only putting her feet up on the desk. Both shoes had holes in the bottoms.

"You need new shoes," I pointed out, sipping my lemonade.

"I know. I need a lot of things." She rubbed her forehead tiredly, and for just a moment, she looked old.

I didn't know what to say. I said, "Pretty good group of kids, aren't they?"

She grunted.

"I mean, they're not as bad as I thought they would be. I mean, you were telling me about their psychoses. I expected them to be pretty screwed up."

B-Jay shook her head. "No, not this bunch. Most of these kids have been under some kind of human guidance. They're still human, at least. But just barely."

"Oh." I finished the lemonade and put the glass down on her desk. "Where exactly did all of them come from? This little boy, Alec, for instance, the one with the bear."

"I don't know. Orphans, like everybody else, I guess. When you kill off three-quarters of the human race, all you have left are orphans. Who has relatives any more?" She sniffed and wiped her nose. "Their papers haven't come over the wire yet. God knows when they will. It would help. Supposedly a team of caseworkers have worked these kids; we're supposed to get their reports. Don't hold your breath. In the meantime, we'll just have to start figuring them out from scratch all over again." She looked over at me. "There's something going on with every single one of these kids, Jim, don't ever doubt it, no matter how good they look. They're just as badly damaged as the rest of us, probably more so, still reeling from the plagues and the aftereffects. We're all going to be living with it for the rest of our lives, and so will the next umpteen generations until the world gets back to normal-if ever. The wounds may not always show, and maybe not in ways we can easily recognize, but they're there; that's why we've all got to be super-careful. We might be rubbing salt in them without ever knowing it. That's why I didn't insist on washing hands and faces this morning before lunch; it was more important to get them to trust us by giving them food than to confuse them by giving them another set of rules to learn. They could have seen washing as a condition necessary to having lunch, and we had to show them that lunch-and our love-has no conditions attached. You'd better keep an eye on that Alec kid, by the way. I'm surprised they sent him up here."