“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.