dried grass.

She moved into the larger cabin, discovered a dozen roof leaks during
the first hard rain they'd had; got them patched, began molding clay
into dishes and containers, started pressuring the boys to build her a
ceramics kiln, began to think about how their clothes would eventually
wear out and how she would have to find some way to weave cloth to
replace them. Day by day she was less irritable, as the boys settled
into a routine.

"I do believe," she said to herself one day, "I would be disappointed if
they found a way back!" She straightened up and almost spilled the
container of wild rice she had been garnering from the swampy spot at
the upper reaches of the lake. "Why! The very idea of saying such a
thing, Katheryn Kittredge!" But her heart was not in the self chiding.

But what reason, in heaven's name, would they have for staying here?
Three people, marooned, growing old, dying one by one. There was no
chance for Man's survival here. From the evidence about them, they had
come to the conclusion that on this New Earth, in the tree of evolution,
the bud to grow into a limb of primates had never formed.

She turned and looked at the tall, straight pines ahead of her. She saw
the deciduous hardwoods, now gold and red, to one side of her. Behind
her the lake was teeming with fish. The spicy smell of fall was all
around her, and a stray breeze brought a scent of grapes she had
overlooked when she was gathering all she could find to make a wine to
pleasantly surprise the boys.

She thought of the flock of wild chickens which had learned to hang
around the cabin for scraps of food, the grunting lazy pigs, grown quite
tame, begging her to find their acorns for them, the nanny goat with two
half-grown kids Lt. Harper had brought back from a solitary walk he had
taken.

New Earth was truly a paradise--and all to be wasted if there were not
Man to appreciate it truly.

A thought knocked at her mind, but she resolutely shut it out, refused
it even silent verbalization.

Yet, while she stooped over again and busied her hands with stripping
the rice from the stalks without cutting them on the sharp dry leaves,
she found herself thinking about Mendelian law. Line breeding from
father to daughter, or brother to sister--in domestic animals, of
course--was all right in fixing desirable traits, providing certain
recessives in both the dam and the sire did not thus become dominant.

"There, Katheryn Kittredge,