Most everyone felt sort of surprised that things weren't back to normal,
with yesterday being something soonest forgot soonest mended. It takes
time for folks to realize--things.

Not having a hot drink for breakfast was another little hardship, a
reminder of how soft they'd got. But nobody complained. Seemed like
everybody had woke with a determination to make the best of things and
help one another do the same. Everybody was pitching in together to make
the best of things. Once they bit into the cool fruit on the trees
around them, even not having a hot drink to start the day didn't seem to
matter.

Some of the women got together and decided it would help things get back
to normal if the people covered their nakedness, or least parts of it.
It might be all right just among themselves, they said, because
everybody was in the same fix and knew what happened--but how would they
feel when the rescue ship landed and they had to walk out in front of
strange men with nothing on?

They picked some big green leaves without any trouble. But when they
strove to pin them together with thorns, the thorns just slipped out and
fell to the ground. Then they tried sewing the leaves together with
bindweed. Same thing. The bindweed slithered out and fell to the ground.

One woman figured to stick some leaves together with thick mud from the
river and paste them with more mud on her body. It wouldn't stick,
peeled right off like she was oiled. One man said he could do it without
leaves, just cover himself with mud. He lay down in a muddy pool and got
himself covered with wet clay.

He was a sight. All at once he looked vulgar, obscene. And nobody had,
before. That did it. Somebody said they were humans, not pigs, and if
the men on the rescue ship had never seen a naked body before it was
time they did. What was so wrong about the human body, anyhow?

They made the muddy man go bathe himself in the river, and gave up
trying to cover themselves. All at once the desire to cover themselves
was a nasty kind of thinking, something to be ashamed of.

Midmorning somebody got to wondering if the ten colonists who'd broken
off from the main colony and moved across the ridge were all right.

Soon as he reminded them, everybody began to laugh. What fools they'd
all been. Showed you how a bit of trouble could keep a man from thinking
straight. Here they'd been eating and sleeping like animals when, all
the while, just across the ridge there'd