d all her
life to take care of the unexpected; and for the experimentals something
unexpected was always happening.

Under her influence, and maybe a little under his, Jed acknowledged, now
that he'd been set straight by Martha's example, everybody began to
settle down a little, like they would after the first shock of a fire or
flood. It was all over. Now it was time to start picking up the pieces,
rebuilding.

Only it wasn't all over.

That's when they found out they couldn't build a fire.

Easiest way, without matches, is to string a bow and twirl a stick in a
hole punched into another stick. Next easiest way is to find a piece of
flint, strike two pieces together to make sparks and hope one will set a
wad of punk on fire. If no other way, rubbing two dry sticks together
will do it if you can rub them fast enough, get them hot enough to make
the powdered fibers burst into flame. Or if they'd had some of those
quartz crystals from the top of the mountain to focus sun rays....

But they couldn't make a bow, or strike two stones together, or rub two
sticks together. It couldn't be done. Well, Cal had seen for himself
what happened when it was tried. All the men were trying it, and for a
little bit everybody thought it was only happening to him, that he must
have lost the knack, or something. For a little bit there the men were
more worried about how their wife would bring it up for weeks or
months, how he had let the rest of the men show him up when it came to
building a fire.

One of the men tore it then.

He yelled out that somebody he couldn't see was watching him over his
shoulder, that it wasn't meant they should have fire.

Cal looked quickly at Louie at that point of the story. Louie was
staring, with mouth open, at Jed; and in his eyes was confirmation of
that same feeling. But Jed didn't notice the effect, and went on with
the telling.

Everybody stopped and listened to the man, because they were having the
same feeling. Jed knew it. Him, too. The crowd might have panicked right
there if the man had let it rest, but he started explaining it, the way
a man does, and makes himself ridiculous.

He kept on yelling how the men shouldn't listen to the women. That it
was in the first Garden of Eden that man had made the mistake of
listening to woman; that it was Eve who had egged Adam into eating that
apple because a woman was never satisfied to leave well enough alone.
And now, he said, in this new Eden,