"Why didn't you come to us about it?" Barry asked bitterly. "What made you think shock treatment like that would take care of the problem?"

"I knew you'd say leave him alone. You say that about everything he does. Leave him alone, it'll take care of itself. I didn't think it would."

Barry went to the window and looked out at the black, cold night. The snow was several feet deep, and the temperature dropped to near zero almost every night.

"He'll come back when he gets cold enough," Andrew said. "He'll come back furious with all of us, and with me in particular. But he will come back. We're all he has." He left abruptly.

"He's right," Bruce said. He sounded tired. Barry looked quickly at his brother, then at the others, who had remained silent while Andrew reported. They were as worried about the boy as he was, and as tired as he was of the apparently endless stream of troubles caused by him.

"He can't go to the old house," Bruce said after a moment. "He knows he'd freeze there. The chimney's plugged, he can't have a fire. That leaves the woods. Even he can't survive in the woods at night in this weather."

Andrew had sent a dozen of the younger brothers to search all the buildings, even the breeders' quarters, and another group had gone to the old house to look. There was no sign of Mark. Toward dawn the snow started again.

Mark had found the cave by accident. Picking berries on the cliff over the farmhouse one day, he had felt a cold draft of air on his bare legs and had found the source. A hole in the hill, a place where two limestone rocks came together unevenly. There were caves throughout the hills. He had found several others before this one, and there was the cave where the laboratories were.

He had dug carefully behind one of the limestone slabs, and gradually had opened the mouth of the cave enough to get through it. There was a narrow passage; then a room, another passage, another larger room. Over the years since finding it he had taken in wood to burn, clothes, blankets, food.

That night he huddled in the second room and stared dry-eyed into the fire he had made, certain no one would ever find him. He hated them all, Andrew and his brothers most of all. As soon as the snow melted, he would run away, forever. He would go south. He would make a longer canoe, a seventeen-foot one this time, and steal enough supplies to last him and he would keep going until he reached the Gulf of Mexico. Let them train the boys and girls themselves, let them find the warehouses, find the dangerous radioactive places if they could. First he would burn down everything in the valley. And then he would go.