The mike had gone dead, and Walter skittered backwards, away from the mob that was forming. “And MEANWHILE,” he shouted, “WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES! AND WIPE OUT EVERY OTHER LIVING THING ALONG THE WAY! IT IS A PERFECT FUCKING WORLD AS LONG AS YOU DON’T COUNT EVERY OTHER SPECIES IN IT! WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANET! A CANCER ON THE PLANET!”

Here he was slugged in the jaw by Coyle Mathis himself. He reeled sideways, his vision filling with magnesium-flare insects, his glasses lost, and decided that perhaps he’d said enough. He was now surrounded by Mathis and a dozen other men, and they began to inflict really serious pain. He fell to the floor, trying to escape through a forest of legs kicking him with their Chinese-made sneakers. He curled into a ball, temporarily deaf and blind, his mouth full of blood and at least one broken tooth, and absorbed more kicks. Then the kicks subsided and other hands were on him, including Lalitha’s. As sound returned, he could hear her raging, “Get away from him! Get away from him!” He gagged and spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor. She let her hair fall in the blood as she peered into his face. “Are you all right?”

He smiled as well as he could. “Starting to feel better.”

“Oh, my boss. My poor dear boss.”

“Definitely feeling better.”

It was the season of migration, of flight and song and sex. Down in the neotropics, where diversity was as great as anywhere on earth, a few hundred bird species grew restless and left behind the several thousand other species, many of them close taxonomic relatives, that were content to stay put and crowdedly coexist and reproduce at their tropical leisure. Among the hundreds of South American tanager species, exactly four took off for the United States, risking the disasters of travel for the bounty of things to eat and places to nest in temperate woods in summer. Cerulean warblers winged their way up along the coasts of Mexico and Texas and fanned into the hardwoods of Appalachia and the Ozarks. Ruby-throated hummingbirds fattened themselves on the flowers of Veracruz and flew eight hundred miles across the Gulf, burning up half their body weight, and landed in Galveston to catch their breath. Terns came up from one subarctic to the other, swifts took airborne naps and never landed, song-filled thrushes waited for a southern wind and then flew nonstop for twelve hours, traversing whole states in a night. High-rises and power lines and wind turbines and cellphone towers and road traffic mowed down millions of migrants, but millions more made it through, many of them returning to the very same tree they’d nested in the year before, the same ridgeline or wetland they’d been fledged on, and there, if they were male, began to sing. Each year, they arrived to find more of their former homes paved over for parking lots or highways, or logged over for pallet wood, or developed into subdivisions, or stripped bare for oil drilling or coal mining, or fragmented for shopping centers, or plowed under for ethanol production, or miscellaneously denatured for ski runs and bike trails and golf courses. Migrants exhausted by their five-thousand-mile journey competed with earlier arrivals for the remaining scraps of territory; they searched in vain for a mate, they gave up on nesting and subsisted without breeding, they were killed for sport by free-roaming cats. But the United States was still a rich and relatively young country, and pockets full of bird life could still be found if you went looking.

Which Walter and Lalitha, at the end of April, in a van loaded with camping equipment, set out to do. They had a free month before their work with Free Space commenced in earnest, and their responsibilities to the Cerulean Mountain Trust had ended. As for their carbon footprint, in a gas-thirsty van, Walter took some comfort in having commuted on bicycle or on foot for the last twenty-five years, and in no longer owning any residence besides the little closed-up house at Nameless Lake. He felt he was owed one petroleum splurge after a lifetime of virtue, one nature-filled summer in payment for the summer he’d been deprived of as a teenager.

While he’d still been in the Whitman County hospital, having his dislocated jaw and split-open face and bruised ribs attended to, Lalitha had desperately spun his outburst as a trazodone-induced psychotic break. “He was literally sleepwalking,” she pleaded to Vin Haven. “I don’t know how many trazodones he took, but it was more than one, and just a few hours earlier. He literally didn’t know what he was saying. It was my fault for letting him make the speech. You should fire me, not him.”

“Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying,” Vin replied, with surprisingly little anger. “It’s a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.”

Vin had organized a conference call with his trustees, who had rubber-stamped his proposal to terminate Walter immediately, and he’d instructed his lawyers to exercise his repurchase option on the Berglunds’ condominium portion of the mansion in Georgetown. Lalitha notified the applicants for Free Space internships that her funding had been cut off, that Richard Katz was withdrawing from the project (Walter, from his hospital bed, had finally prevailed on this), and that the very existence of Free Space was in doubt. Some of the applicants e-mailed back to cancel their applications; two of them said they still hoped to volunteer; the rest did not reply at all. Because Walter was facing eviction from the mansion and refused to speak to his wife, Lalitha called her for him. Patty arrived with a rented van a few days later, while Walter hid out at the nearest Starbucks, and packed up the belongings she didn’t want put in storage.

It was at the end of that very unpleasant day, after Patty had departed and Walter had returned from caffeinated exile, that Lalitha checked her BlackBerry and found eighty new messages from young people all over the country, inquiring whether it was too late to volunteer for Free Space. Their e-mail addresses had more piquant flavors than the liberalkid@expensivecollege.edus of the earlier applicants. They were freakinfreegan and iedtarget, they were pornfoetal and jainboy3 and jwlindhjr, @gmail and @cruzio. By the following morning, there were a hundred more messages, along with offers from garage bands in four cities-Seattle, Missoula, Buffalo, and Detroit-to help organize Free Space events in their communities.

What had happened, as Lalitha soon figured out, was that the local TV footage of Walter’s rant and the ensuing riot had gone viral. It had lately become possible to stream video over the internet, and the Whitmanville clip (CancerOnThePlanet.wmv) had flashed across the radical fringes of the blogosphere, the sites of 9/11-conspiracy-mongers and the tree-sitters and the Fight Club devotees and the PETA-ites, one of whom had then unearthed the link to Free Space on the Cerulean Mountain Trust’s website. And overnight, despite having lost its funding and its musical headliner, Free Space acquired a bona-fide fan base and, in the person of Walter, a hero.

It was a long time since he’d done much giggling, but he was giggling all the time now, and then groaning because his ribs hurt. He went out one afternoon and came home with a used white Econoline van and a can of green spray paint and crudely wrote free space on the van’s flanks and rear end. He wanted to go ahead and spend his own money, from the impending proceeds of the house sale, to fund the group through the summer, to print up literature and pay a pittance to the interns and offer some prize money to the battling bands, but Lalitha foresaw potential divorce-related legal issues and wouldn’t let him. Whereupon Joey, altogether unexpectedly, after learning of his father’s summer plans, wrote Free Space a check for $100,000.