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.