How? Barry wondered. Not isolation; he thrived on it, sought it out at every turn. Not extra work; he was still working off his last escapade. Only three months ago he had gotten inside the girls' rooms and mixed up their ribbons and sashes so that no group had anything matching. It had taken hours for them to get everything back in place. And now this, and this time it would take weeks for the ink to wear off.

Lawrence spoke again, his voice thoughtful, a slight frown on his face. "We should admit we made a mistake," he said. "There is no place for him among us. The boys his age reject him; he has no friends. He is capricious and willful, brilliant and moronic by turns. We made a mistake with him. Now his pranks are only that, childish pranks, but in five years? Ten years? What can we expect from him in the future?" He directed his questions at Barry.

"In five years he will be downriver, as you know. It is during the next few years that we have to find a way to manage him better."

Sara moved slightly in her chair, and Barry turned to her. "We have found that he is not made repentant by being isolated," Sara said. "It is his nature to be an isolate, therefore by not allowing him the privacy he craves we will have found the correct punishment for him."

Barry shook his head. "We discussed that before," he said. "It would not be fair to the others to force them to accept him, an outsider. He is disruptive among his peers; they should not be punished along with him."

"Not his peers," Sara said emphatically. "You and your brothers voted to keep him here in order to study him for clues in how to train others to endure separate existences. It is your responsibility to accept him among yourselves, to let his punishment be to have to live with you under your watchful eyes. Or else admit Lawrence is right, that we made a mistake, and that it is better to correct the mistake now than to let it continue to compound."

"You would punish us for the misdeeds of the boy?" Bruce asked.

"That boy wouldn't be here if it were not for you and your brothers," Sara said distinctly. "If you'll recall, at our first meeting concerning him, the rest of us voted to rid ourselves of him. We foresaw trouble from the beginning, and it was your arguments about his possible usefulness that finally swayed us. If you want to keep him, then you keep him with you, under your observation, away from the other children, who are constantly being hurt by him and his pranks. He is an isolate, an aberration, a troublemaker. These meetings have become more frequent, his pranks more destructive. How many more hours must we spend discussing his behavior?"