For a moment they were both silent. "It's the separation, isn't it?" Lewis looked south, toward home. "No one predicted anything like this. We're not like them! We have to scrap the past, the history books, everything. No one predicted this," he said again quietly. "If we get back, we have to make them understand whathappens to us away from our own kind."

"We'll get back," Ben said. "And that's why I need Thomas. Who could have foreseen this? Now that we're aware of how different we are from them, we'll be looking harder. I wonder where else differences will show up when we're not expecting them to."

Lewis stood up. "Coming back?"

"In a minute."

He watched Lewis slip down the embankment and board the boat; then he looked at the sky once more. Men had gone out there, he thought in wonder, and he couldn't think why. Singly and in small groups they had gone into strange lands, across wide seas, had climbed mountains where no human foot had ever trod. And he couldn't think why they had done those things. What impulse had driven them from their own kind to perish alone, or among strangers? All those ruined houses they had seen, like the old Sumner house in the valley, designed for one, two, three people, lived in by so few people, deliberately isolating themselves from others of their own kind. Why?

The family used isolation for punishment. A disobedient child left alone in a small room for ten minutes emerged contrite, all traces of rebellion eradicated. They had used isolation to punish David. The doctors knew the full story of the last months that David had lived among them. When he became a threat, they had isolated him permanently, punishment enough. And yet those other men of the distant past had sought isolation, and Ben couldn't think why.

Chapter 13

For two days it had been raining; the wind was gusting at thirty knots and increasing. "We have to get the boat out of the water," Lewis said.

They had covered the entire boat with oiled canvas, but water seeped in through cracks and now and then a wave lapped over the side and spilled down into the boat. More and more frequently something heavy rubbed against the boat or crashed into it.

Molly pumped and visualized the river behind them. There had been a bank hours back, but since then there had been no place they could land safely.

"An hour," Lewis said, as if answering her thoughts. "Shouldn't take more than an hour to get to that low bank."

"We can't go back!" Thomas shouted.

"We can't stay here!" Harvey snapped at him. "Don't be an idiot! We're going to get rammed!"

"I won't go back!"

"What do you think, Ben?" Lewis asked.