The only thing he could work out was that it was groups of people--societies--rather than individual creatures, who were now trying to out-reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was plenty of room for someone who didn't have kids as long as he was up to something useful.

Alan and Rudy and Lawrence rode south, anyway, looking for the Pine Barrens. After a while the towns became very far apart, and the horse farms gave way to a low stubble of feeble, spiny trees that appeared to extend all the way to Florida--blocking their view, but not the head wind. "Where are the Pine Barrens I wonder?" Lawrence asked a couple of times. He even stopped at a gas station to ask someone that question. His companions began to make fun of him.

"Vere are ze Pine Barrens?" Rudy inquired, looking about quizzically.

"I should look for something rather barren-looking, with numerous pine trees," Alan mused.

There was no other traffic and so they had spread out across the road to pedal three abreast, with Alan in the middle.

"A forest, as Kafka would imagine it," Rudy muttered.

By this point Lawrence had figured out that they were, in fact, in the Pine Barrens. But he didn't know who Kafka was. "A mathematician?" he guessed.

"Zatis a scary sing to sink of," Rudy said.

"He is a writer," Alan said. "Lawrence, please don't be offended that I ask you this, but: do you recognize any other people's namesat all? Other than family and close friends, I mean."

Lawrence must have looked baffled. "I'm trying to figure out whether it all comes from in here," Alan said, reaching out to rap his knuckles on the side of Lawrence's head, "or do you sometimes take in new ideas from other human beings?"

"When I was a little boy, I saw angels in a church in Virginia," Lawrence said, "but I think that they came from inside my head."