Read Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang for Free Online Page B

joined into a separate pipe that led back into a large stainless steel apparatus covered with dials.
           Celia walked slowly down the aisle between the tanks, stopped once midway, and didn't move again for a long time. David took her arm. She was trembling slightly.
           "Are you all right?"
           She nodded. "I . . . it's a shock, seeing them. I . . . maybe I didn't quite believe it." There was a film of perspiration on her face.
           "Better take off the coat now," David said. "We have to keep it pretty warm in here. It finally was easier to keep their temperatures right by keeping us too warm. The price we pay," he said, smiling slightly.
           "All the lights? The heat? The computer? You can generate that much electricity?"
           He nodded. "That'll be our tour tomorrow. Like everything else around here, the generating system has bugs in it. We can store enough power for no longer than six hours, and we just don't let it go out for more than six hours. Period."
           "Six hours is a lot. If you stop breathing for six minutes, you're dead." With her hands clasped behind her, she stepped closer to the shiny control system at the end of the room. "This isn't the computer. What is it?"
           "It's a computer terminal. The computer controls the input of nutrients and oxygen, and the output of toxins. The animal room is on the other side of that wall. Those tanks are linked to it, too. Separate set of systems, but the same machinery."
           They went through the nursery for the animals, and then the nursery for the human babies. There was the dissection room, several small offices where the scientists could withdraw to work, the stockrooms. In every room except the one where the human clones were being grown, people were working. "They never used a Bunsen burner or a test tube before, but they have become scientists and technicians practically overnight," David said. "And thank God for that, or it never would have worked. I don't know what they think we're doing now, but they don't ask questions. They just do their jobs."
           Walt assigned Celia to work under Vlasic. Whenever David looked up to see her in the laboratory, he felt a stab of joy. She increased her workday to six hours. When David fell into bed exhausted after fourteen or sixteen hours, she was there to hold him and love him.
           In August, Avery Handley reported that his shortwave contact in Richmond warned of a band of marauders who were working their way up the valley. "They're bad," he said gravely. "They took over the Phillotts' place, ransacked it, and then burned it to the ground."
           After that they kept guards posted day and night. And that same week Avery announced that there was war in the Middle East. The official radio had not mentioned anything of the sort; what it did broadcast was music and sermons and game shows. Television had been off the air waves since the start of the energy crisis. "They're using the bomb," Avery said. "Don't know who, but someone is. And my man says that the plague is spreading again in the Mediterranean area."
           In September they fought off the first attack. In October they learned the band was grouping for a second attack, this time with thirty to forty men. "We can't keep fighting them off," Walt said. "They must know we have food here. They'll come from all directions this time. They know we're watching for them."
           "We should blow up the dam," Clarence said. "Wait until they're in the upper valley and flood them out."
           The meeting was being held in the cafeteria, with everyone present. Celia's hand tightened in David's, but she didn't protest. No one protested.
           "They'll try to take the mill," Clarence went on. "They probably think there's wheat there, or something." A dozen men volunteered to stand guard at the mill. Six more formed a group to set