And yet, within minutes, neither band seemed to remember that they had ever been separated. By the time they had returned, it was apparent that Louie was succeeding where Jed had failed in finding the colonists. In the few hours that had elapsed, the nucleus had tripled in size. Louie's wandering through the brush, calling, pleading with them to follow him, promising there was no danger if they would allow him to watch over them, intercede for them with Those who had caused all this, had indeed coaxed them from their hiding places, calmed their fears. And still through the day he toiled, finding them, bringing them back into the fold, one and two and three at a time, until, at last, by Jed's count, all were there, no more missing. And yet, in spite of his success, there was a kind of hurt and disappointment in Louie's eyes. For once back, they not only forgot their fears, they seemed also to forget him. They coalesced into a placid herd, without memory of their panic. Without memory of the shepherd who had found the lost sheep and returned them to the fold. They wandered among the trees and bushes, picking fruit and nuts, eating leaves and stems and flowers of plants. They wandered down to the river to lie prone on the sand, dip their faces into the clear cold water to drink. During the heat of the 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.