Barry regarded Lawrence bitterly. "We can run the laboratories five more years, Lawrence! Five years! We have almost nine hundred people in this valley right now. Most of them are children, being trained to forage for us, to find those things we need to survive. And they won't find them on the banks of your tamed rivers! They're going to have to make expeditions to New York, to Philadelphia, to New Jersey. And who's going to go before them and clear back the woods for them? We train those children now to cope with the woods, or we'll die, all of us!"

"It was a mistake to rush into this," Lawrence said. "We should have waited until we knew how much we could find and get back to the valley before we got into this so deeply."

Barry nodded. "You can't have it both ways," he said. "We made the decision. Every year we wait, the less there is for us to forage in the cities. And we have to salvage what we can. Without it we die anyway, more slowly perhaps than with the timetable we now have, but in the end it would be the same. We can't exist without the tools, the hardware, the information that's in the cities. And now we're committed to this path, and we have to do our best to see that these children are equipped as well as possible to survive when we send them out."

Five years, he thought, that's all they needed. Five years to find a source of laboratory equipment—tubing, stainless steel tanks, centrifuges… Computer components, wiring, wafers… They knew the things they needed had been stored carefully, they had the papers to prove that. They would find the right warehouses, weathertight, dry, with acres of well-stacked shelves. It was a gamble, producing so many children in so short a time, but a gamble they had taken knowingly, aware of the consequences if anything went wrong along the way. They might be hungry before the five years were over; whether or not the valley could adequately feed over a thousand people had been endlessly debated. For the kind of restocking they required, they needed a lot of people, and in five years they would know if they had gambled foolishly.

Four hundred fifty children between five and eleven years, that was what was in the kitty, Barry thought. That was the extent of the gamble. And in four years the first eighty of them would leave the valley, possibly forever, but if they returned, if even a few of them returned with materials, with information about Philadelphia or New York, with anything of value, the gamble would have paid off.