"Those of you who want to look over the charts and records, please do so. I have given you the barest summary, not our methods. We can reproduce indefinitely through cloning. We have finally solved the problem that has plagued us from the beginning, the problem of the fifth-generation decline. The fifth, sixth, tenth, one-hundredth, they'll all be perfect now."

"But only those clones from our youngest people survive," Miriam said drily.

"We'll work that out too," Andrew said impatiently. "In manipulating the enzymes there are some organisms that react with what appears to be almost an allergic collapse. We'll find out why and take care of it."

Miriam was looking very old, Barry realized suddenly. He hadn't noticed it before, but her hair was white and her face was thin, with fine lines around her eyes, and she looked tired unto death.

She looked at Andrew with a disarming smile. "I expect you to be able to solve the problem you have created, Andrew," she said, "but will the younger doctors be able to?"

"We shall continue to use the breeders," Andrew said with a touch of impatience. "We'll use them to clone those children who are particularly intelligent. We'll go to implantations of clones using the breeders as hosts to ensure a continuing population of capable adults to carry on affairs…"

Barry found his attention wandering. The doctors had gone over it all before the council meeting; nothing new would come out here. Two castes, he thought. The leaders, and the workers, who were always expendable. Was that what they had foreseen in the beginning? He knew it was not possible to find any answers to his question. The clones wrote the books, and each generation had felt free to change the books to conform to their own beliefs. He had made a few such changes himself, in fact. And now Andrew would change them again. And this would be the final change; none of the new people would ever think of altering anything.

"… even more costly in terms of manpower than we expected," Andrew was saying. "The glaciers are moving into Philadelphia at an accelerating rate. We may have only two or three more years to bring out what is salvageable, and it is costing us dearly. We will need hundreds of foragers to go south and east to the coastal cities. We now have some excellent models—the Edward brothers proved especially adept at foraging, as did your own little sisters, the Ella sisters. We'll use them."

"My little Ella sisters couldn't transcribe a landscape to a map if you strung them by the heels and threatened to slice them inch by inch until they did," Miriam said sharply. "That's exactly what I'm talking about. They can do only those things they have been taught, exactly as they've been taught."