Suddenly she tucked her arm in his. He looked down at her arm, then into her eyes. After that, they walked up to A deck together.
Henry, following them, knew the answer. Far from being romance, it was an expression of the present situation. They were confronted with the Unknown. Their own world with its mores, complexities and inhibitions was behind them. Beneath that veneer, in real people, lay a human frankness, and a gregarious instinct. If rough waters lay ahead, Valerie Roagland preferred to have a man like Uncle Andy around. No strings. No innuendos.
But what lay beneath the civilized veneers of other people on board?
Take Scarface, for example. Why was he carrying a loaded gun?
"Well, it didn't take us long, did it?" Uncle Andy cast his line once more into the swelling waves and squinted against the eternal light of day.
"What do you mean?" queried Henry. His shoes were off and he wriggled his toes in the warm light of the sky as he sat precariously on the edge of the great rock that jutted out from the land ten feet above the sea. He looked at Uncle Andy's fishing rod and thought: That's all we got out of the survival gear. Everybody just _grabbed_.
"I mean--" Uncle Andy wound in fast. "It's only been two weeks since our crash landing, and our little human colony has divided itself into separate groups." The fish hook was empty--of fish, and of bait.
Henry handed him another "bush worm"--a two-inch long greenish thing with tentacles all over it. It squirmed but was harmless otherwise.
"It's like a glass jar they showed us once at the orphanage," he answered. "There were big pebbles, little pebbles, and sand. You shook the jar awhile and pretty soon you had each size and type seeking its own level. That's like people."
Uncle Andy smiled around the edges of his pipe stem and cast out again, with the fresh bait. "You always hit the nail on the head, Henry. You're an unusual human being. I wish I knew more about your actual parentage. They told me a story about you. You were a year old child when they found you naked on the Normandie beach. You're probably French, all right. But who your parents were will probably never be known--especially now."
"And you skip around a lot," retorted Henry. "We were talking about the people back at the camp." He had built up a wall of inhibition against the pain of not knowing about his parents. He resented any probing into that isolated cyst of longing.