When he came upon the deformed underbrush late that afternoon, he backed up a hundred feet, squatted, and studied the woods before him.

He was at least another day’s distance from New York, he suspected, twenty miles, maybe even more. The woods here were too thick to be able to see if the deformities were localized. He retreated half a mile, made camp, and thought about the days ahead. He would not enter any place that he thought had been irradiated. How many days was he willing to detour? He didn’t know. Time had stopped for him, and he couldn’t be certain now how long he had been in the woods, how long since the paddle wheel had entered Washington. He wondered if the others were all right, if they had found the warehouses, had brought out the stuff they were to collect. He thought how they might blindly stumble through the poisoned areas in Philadelphia, through the poison here. He shuddered.

He followed the edge of the poisoned area for three days, sometimes going north, then west, then north again. He got no nearer the city. A ring of death surrounded it.

He came to a vast swamp where dead trees lay rotting and nothing grew; he could go no farther. The swampy land extended westward as far as he could see; it smelled of salt and decay, like mud flats when the tide went out. He touched the water to his tongue and then turned back. Sea water. That night the temperature plummeted, and the next day the trees and bushes stood blackened. Now he ate his corn and beef hungrily, and wondered if he would find any wild food again. His supply was running low, his raisins were gone, his dried apples nearly gone. He knew he wouldn’t starve, but it would be pleasant to have fresh vegetables and fruit, more of the hot flaky fish, or oysters, or a clam broth thick with chewy bits of white meat . . . Resolutely he turned his thoughts away from food and walked a little faster.

He traveled quickly, his own trail easily followed, the blaze marks on the trees like roadmarks — turn here, this way, straight ahead. When he got back to his canoe he went west on the Delaware to satisfy his curiosity about the diminished flow and the ice, which was thicker than before. The rain must have broken more of it loose, he thought. It was difficult going against the swift current, and the floating chunks of ice made the river more hazardous. The land here was flat. When the change came, he knew it instantly. The river became faster, and now there was the white water of rapids, and there was a definite rise in the land on either side of the river. It had cut a channel here, another deeper one farther on. When the rapids became too dangerous for the small boat to navigate, he took the canoe from the water and stored it safely, then continued on foot.

A hill rose before him, barely covered with scrub growth and loose rocks. Carefully he picked his way up it. It was very cold. The trees here looked as they would in early March, or even late February. There were bud swellings, but no leaves, no green, only the black-green of the spruces, still in their winter needles. At the top of the hill he drew in his breath sharply. Before him was a vast sheet of snow and ice, blinding in the sunlight.

In some places the snowfield came to the banks of the river, in others it started a good distance back, and up there, about a mile away, the river was almost jammed with ice. It was a narrow black ribbon winding its way through the glare.

Southward the trees blocked his view, but he could see for miles to the north and west, and there was only snow and ice. White mountains climbed to the clear blue sky, and the valleys had been rounded at the bottoms as the snow accumulated there. The wind shifted and blew into Mark’s face, and the cold was numbing, bringing tears to his eyes. The sun seemed to have no warmth here. He was sweating under his leather shirt, but the sight of all that snow, and the chill of the wind when it swept across it, created the illusion that the sun had failed. The illusion made him shiver violently. He turned and hurried down the steep hillside, sliding the last twenty feet or more, aware even as he started the slide that it was dangerous, that he would cause rocks to follow him, that he might be hit by them, injured too badly to move out of the way. He rolled at the bottom and jumped to his feet and ran. He ran a long time, and could hear the rocks crashing behind him.

In his mind the sound was that of the glacier advancing, rolling toward him inexorably, grinding everything to powder.

Chapter 25

Mark was flying. It was glorious to swoop and dive high over the trees and rivers. He soared higher and higher until his body tingled with excitement. He swerved to avoid flying through a billowing white cloud. When he straightened out, there was another white cloud before him; again he swerved, and then again and again. The clouds were everywhere, and now they had joined to form a wall, and the great white wall was advancing on him from every direction. There was no place he could go to avoid being overtaken. He dived, and the dive became a fall, faster and faster. There was nothing he could do to stop it. He fell through the whiteness . . .

Mark came wide awake, shivering hard, his body covered with sweat. His fire was a feeble glow in the blackness. He fed it carefully, blew on his chilled hands while he waited for the scrapings of punk to burn, and then added twigs, and finally branches. Although it would be dawn soon and he would have to extinguish the fire, he fed it until it blazed hot and bright. Then he sat huddled before it. He had stopped shivering, but the nightmare vision persisted and he wanted light and warmth. And he wanted not to be alone.

He traveled very swiftly the next four days, and on the afternoon of the fifth he approached the landing area in Washington where the paddle wheel had docked and the brothers and sisters had set out for the warehouses.

The Peter brothers ran to meet him, helped with the canoe, took his pack, talking all the while.

“Gary said you should go to the warehouse the minute you got in,” one of them said.

“We had six accidents so far,” another one said excitedly. “Broken arms, legs, stuff like that. Nothing like the other groups had in the past. We’re making it!”

“Gary said we’ll start for Baltimore or Philadelphia by the end of this week.”

“We have a map to show you which warehouse they’re doing now.”

“We have at least four boatloads of stuff already . . .”

“We’ve been taking turns. Four days down here getting stuff ready for the boat, cooking, all that, then four days in the warehouses finding stuff . . .”

“It’s not bad here, not like we thought it would be. I don’t know why the others had so much trouble.”

Mark followed them wearily. “I’m hungry,” he said. “There’s soup cooking now for dinner,” one of them said. “But Gary said . . .”

Mark moved past them to the building they were using for their quarters. Now he could smell the soup. He helped himself, and before he finished eating he began to feel too sleepy to keep his eyes open. The boys kept talking about their successes. “Where are the beds?” Mark asked, interrupting one of them again.

“Aren’t you going to the warehouse like Gary said?”

“No. Where are the beds?”

“We’ll start for Philadelphia in the morning,” Gary said with satisfaction. “You did a good job, Mark. How long will it take us to get to Philadelphia?”

Mark shrugged. “I didn’t walk, so I don’t know. I’ve shown you where it’s all marshy, maybe impassable by foot. If you can get through, probably eight to ten days. But you need something to measure the radioactivity.”

“You were wrong about that, Mark. There can’t be any radioactivity. We weren’t at war, you know. No bombs were used here. Our elders would have warned us.”