"What do you mean?" queried Henry. His shoes were off and he wriggled his toes in the warm light of the sky as he sat precariously on the edge of the great rock that jutted out from the land ten feet above the sea. He looked at Uncle Andy's fishing rod and thought: That's all we got out of the survival gear. Everybody just grabbed.
"I mean—" Uncle Andy wound in fast. "It's only been two weeks since our crash landing, and our little human colony has divided itself into separate groups." The fish hook was empty—of fish, and of bait.
Henry handed him another "bush worm"—a two-inch long greenish thing with tentacles all over it. It squirmed but was harmless otherwise.
"It's like a glass jar they showed us once at the orphanage," he answered. "There were big pebbles, little pebbles, and sand. You shook the jar awhile and pretty soon you had each size and type seeking its own level. That's like people."
Uncle Andy smiled around the edges of his pipe stem and cast out again, with the fresh bait. "You always hit the nail on the head, Henry. You're an unusual human being. I wish I knew more about your actual parentage. They told me a story about you. You were a year old child when they found you naked on the Normandie beach. You're probably French, all right. But who your parents were will probably never be known—especially now."
"And you skip around a lot," retorted Henry. "We were talking about the people back at the camp." He had built up a wall of inhibition against the pain of not knowing about his parents. He resented any probing into that isolated cyst of longing.
"Yes, I know." The line was taut now, and Uncle Andy was fighting a catch. "Take the English clan—that Cyril Rollins or whatever his name is, and your Lady Dewitt and the governess and the two Crispin sisters and that old retired sea captain, Langham. Colonization is a tradition with them. By God, if they had a flag they'd unfurl it in the name of the Queen! They can't quite swallow the concept of complete severance with the world they knew. It's a sort of mental defense mechanism, I guess. And no criticism, either. Merely a sign of their own particular character as a people. But that's just an example of the grouping that's going on."
The catch came in—a two foot lizard, glaring scarlet with blue and yellow gills and black eyes that pierced one with a deadly stare of murderous hate.
"Hm-m-m. That biologist, Doctor Singer, will have to see this." Uncle Andy held it beneath his foot studying it. "This certainly is a different type of world. Entirely different evolution. All the fauna and flora we've seen yet are different than anything we've known. Hundreds of millions of years—maybe much more. I'd swear we're still on Earth. It feels like Earth. But what happened to our own time? Did the world start over again, somewhat unthinkably long ago? Where are we? At the dawn or at the end of Creation?"
Henry reflected that there were five mental cases back in camp—all raving idiots. They, too, had tried to find an answer, but their minds were not as well balanced as others. He pinned his faith on minds like Uncle Andy, his own—and Martia's. He couldn't see Martia yet—not alone, that is. Sooner or later, though, after the Lady Dewitt extracted herself from her delusions—