Kate Wilhelm - Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Barry was too tired to care, and Anthony merely grunted. At least, Barry thought, stretching out by the fire, they were too tired at night to listen for strange noises, and that was good. He fell asleep even as he was thinking this.

On the fourth day Mark stopped and pointed ahead. At first Barry could see no difference, but then he realized they were looking at the kind of stunted growth Mark had talked about. Anthony unpacked the Geiger counter and it began to register immediately. It became more insistent as they moved ahead, and Mark led them to the left, keeping well back from the radioactive area.

“They went in, didn’t they?” Barry said.

Mark nodded. They were keeping their distance from the contaminated ground, and when the counter sounded its warning, they moved south again until it became quieter. That night they decided to keep moving west until they were able to get around the radioactive area, and enter Philadelphia from that direction, if possible.

“We’ll run into the snowfields that way,” Mark said.

“Not afraid of snow, are you?” Barry said.

“I’m not afraid.”

“Right. Then we go west tomorrow, and if we can’t turn north by night, we come back and try going east, see if we pick up a trail or anything that way.”

They traveled all day through an intermittent rain, and hourly the temperature fell until it was near freezing when they made camp that night.

“How much farther?” Barry asked.

“Tomorrow,” Mark said. “You can smell it from here.” Barry could smell only the fire, the wet woods, the food cooking. He studied Mark, then shook his head.

“I don’t want to go any farther,” Anthony said suddenly. He was standing by the fire, too rigid, a listening look on his face.

“It’s a river,” Mark said. “It must be pretty close. There’s ice on all the rivers, and it hits the banks now and then. That’s what you hear.”

Anthony sat down, but the intent look didn’t leave his face. The next morning they headed west again. By noon they were among hills, and now they knew that as soon as they got high enough to see over the trees they would be able to see the snow, if there was any snow to see.

They stood on the hill and stared, and Barry understood Mark’s nightmares. The trees at the edge of the snow were stark, like trees in the middle of winter. Beyond them other trees had snow halfway up their trunks, and their naked branches stood unmoving, some of them at odd angles, where the pressure had already knocked them over and the snow had prevented their falling. Up higher there were no trees visible at all, only snow.

“Is it still growing?” Barry asked in a hushed voice. No one answered. After a few more minutes, they turned and hurried back the way they had come. As they circled Philadelphia heading east, the Geiger counter kept warning them to stay back, and they could get no closer to the city from this direction than they had been able to from the west. Then they found the first bodies.

Six boys had come out together. Two had fallen near each other; the others had left them, continued another half-mile and collapsed. The bodies were all radioactive.

“Don’t get near them,” Barry said as Anthony started to kneel by the first bodies. “We don’t dare touch them,” he said.

“I should have stayed,” Mark whispered. He was staring at the sprawled bodies. There was mud on their faces. “I shouldn’t have left. I should have kept after them, to make sure they didn’t go on. I should have stayed.”

Barry shook his arm, and Mark kept staring, repeating over and over, “I should have stayed with them. I should . . .” Barry slapped him hard, then again, and Mark bowed his head and stumbled away, reeling into trees and bushes as he rushed away from the bodies, away from Barry and Anthony. Barry ran after him and caught his arm.

“Mark! Stop this! Stop it, do you hear me!” He shook him hard again. “Let’s get back to Washington.”

Mark’s cheeks were glistening with tears. He pulled away from Barry and started to walk again, and he didn’t look back at the bodies.

Barry and Bruce waited for Anthony and Andrew, who had requested, demanded, time to talk to them. “It’s about him again, isn’t it?” Bruce said.

“I suppose.”

“Something’s got to be done,” Bruce said. “You and I both know we can’t let him go on this way. They’ll demand a council meeting next, and that’ll be the end of it.”

Barry knew. Andrew and his brother entered and sat down. They both looked grim and angry.

“I don’t deny he had a bad time during the summer,” Andrew said abruptly. “That isn’t the point now. But whatever happened to him has affected his mind, and that is the point. He’s behaving in a childish, irresponsible way that simply cannot be tolerated.”

Again and again since summer these sessions had been held. Mark had drawn a line of honey from an ant hill up the wall into the Andrew brothers’ quarters, and the ants had followed. Mark had soaked every match he could get his hands on in a salt solution, dried them carefully, and restacked them in the boxes, and not one of them had lighted, and he had sat with a straight face and watched one after another of the older brothers try to get a fire. Mark had removed every nameplate from every door in the dormitories. He had tied the Patrick brothers’ feet together as they slept and then yelled to them to come quickly.

“He’s gone too far this time,” Andrew said. “He stole the yellow Report to Hospital tags, and he’s been sending dozens of women to the hospital to be tested for pregnancy. They’re in a panic, our staff is overworked as it is, and no one has time to sort out this kind of insanity.”

“We’ll talk to him,” Barry said.

“That’s not good enough any longer! You’ve talked and talked. He promises not to do that particular thing again, and then does something worse. We can’t live with this constant disruption!”

“Andrew, he had a series of terrible shocks last summer. And he’s had too much responsibility for a boy his age. He feels a dreadful guilt over the deaths of all those children. It isn’t unnatural for him to revert to childish behavior now. Give him time, he’ll get over it.”

“No!” Andrew said, standing up with a swift, furious motion. “No! No more time! What will it be next?” He glanced at his brother, who nodded. “We feel that we are his targets. Not you, not the others; we are. Why he feels this hostility toward me and my brothers I don’t know, but it’s here, and we don’t want to have to worry about him constantly, wondering what he’ll do next.”

Barry stood up. “And I say I’ll handle it.”

For a moment Andrew faced him defiantly, then said, “Very well. But, Barry, it can’t go on. It has to stop now.”

“It will stop.”

The younger brothers left, and Bruce sat down. “How?”

“I don’t know how. It’s his isolation. He can’t talk this out with anyone, doesn’t play with anyone . . . We have to force him to participate in those areas where the others would accept him.”

Bruce agreed. “Like the Winona sisters’ coming-of-age party next week.”

Later that day Barry told Mark he was to attend the party. Mark had never been formally accepted into the adult community, and would not be honored by a party just for him.

He shook his head. “No, thank you, I’d rather not.”

“I didn’t invite you,” Barry said grimly. “I’m ordering you to attend and to participate. Do you understand?”

Mark glanced at him quickly. “I understand, but I don’t want to go.”

“If you don’t go, I’m hauling you out of this cozy little room, away from your books and your solitude, and putting you back in our room, back in the lecture rooms when you’re not in school or at work. Now do you understand?”