day they bathed in the river, and as they
lay on white sand or grassy slopes to dry, they slept contentedly.

The phenomenon was not as startling to Cal as it might have seemed to
others.

On Earth, gradually learned through trial and error, experimental
colonists were not picked for their jobs because of flexible, incisive,
or brilliant minds. Quite the contrary. The basic test of a successful
colonist was endurance--the endurance of hardship, privation, the stoic
indifference to conditions of discomfort, monotony, pain, uncleanliness,
immodesty--conditions which would send a more imaginative or sensitive
temperament into a downward-spiraling syndrome of failure. They were the
kind of men and women who, on Earth in an earlier time, had been able to
endure the harshness of the sea, of arctic cold, jungle disease, desert
heat; to make those first steps in taming a hostile environment, so that
men with less endurance, but with more delicately poised and sensitive
minds, following them might then endure.

It was characteristic of such men and women, even under Earth
conditions, that they seldom questioned their reasons for these things.
They simply went, and endured, and tamed. Even on Earth, when the taming
had been done, they moved on. This was the stuff of the experimental
colonist.

Now, here, that temperament still persisted. They had fled in panic, but
now they had returned to their original purpose--to endure. It was
enough.

Louie was to learn, in disappointment, that failure to be curious about
scientific reasoning was usually accompanied by an equal failure to be
curious about philosophical implications. They listened idly to his
exhortations, but their eyes did not light with fire nor cloud with
doubt. They simply wandered away after a time and ate or slept.

In the evening of that second day, Cal sat with Tom and Jed down by the
bank of the river where the sky was clear and the stars beginning to
shine. They were talking quietly of home, of Eden, of the colonists who,
more and more, seemed to take on the character of a contented herd of
animals. So far there had been no attempt of the old males to drive the
young ones out of the herd, destroy them, but that might come in time;
as surely as the old males on Earth by tacit agreement on both sides,
were always able to work up a war for the purpose of weeding out and
destroying lusty young male competition.

They were talking of the curious fact that all th