Apparently, the Barrier did its job well. The crowds on both sides grew thicker up ahead, and the costumes wilder, but the mob stopped in a clump just north of the line of P-posts. Some of the Shirts and Skins were probably Citizens, but they kept on this side with their friends — out of politeness or perhaps as a protest.

The crowds were thickest just north of the Barrier. Here the Shirts and Skins shoved signs at quickly passing motorists.

Jacob kept in the guideway and looked about, shading his eyes from the glare and enjoying the show.

A young man on the left, wrapped in silver sateen from throat to toe, held up a placard that said, “Man-kind Was Uplifted Too: Let Our E.T. Cousins Out!”

Just across the roadway from him a woman held a banner tacked to a spearshaft: “We did it Ourselves… Eatees off Earth!”

There was the controversy in a nutshell. The whole world waited to see If the believers in Darwin or those who followed Von Daniken, were right. The Skins and Shirts were only the more fanatical fringes of a split that had divided humanity into two philosophical camps. The issue: how did Homo-Sapiens originate as a thinking being?

Or was that all the Shirts and Skins represented?

The former group took their love of aliens to almost a pseudo-religious frenzy. Hysterical Xenophilia?

The Neoliths, with their love of caveman garb and ancient lore; were their cries for “independence from E.T. influence” based on something more basic — fear of the unknown, the powerfully alien? Xenophobia?

Of one thing Jacob was sure. The Shirts and Skins shared resentment. Resentment of the Confederacy’s cautious compromise policy towards E.T.’s. Resentment of the Probation Laws which kept so many of them in a form of Coventry. Resentment of a world in which no man any longer knew his roots for certain.