ten days have elapsed without contact, he realizes that something has gone wrong with the portal that was supposed to recover them, leaving them stranded. Rod and Jack start recruiting other survivors to build a settlement for long-term habitation, and Rod becomes the de facto leader of a community that eventually grows to around 75 people. Disagreements reveal the need to elect a government for the new town. Rod has no taste for politics or administration and is happy to have Grant Cowper, an older college-student and born politician, elected as mayor. Grant proves to be much better at talking than at getting things done. Despite disagreeing with many of Grant's policies, Rod supports him. Grant ignores Rod's warning that they are living in a dangerously hard-to-defend location and that they should move to a cave system that he has found. When an indigenous species that the humans had regarded as harmless suddenly changes its behavior and stampedes through the camp, the settlement is devastated and Grant is killed. The citizens elect Rod as their new mayor. Heinlein tracks the social development of the frontier community of educated young Westerners deprived of technology, followed by their society's abrupt dissolution when Earth reestablishes contact. After nearly two years of isolation, the culture shock experienced by the survivors highlights for them and the reader the pain and uncertainty of becoming an adult by reversing the process abruptly. Each of the students returns from being a self-responsible member of an autonomous community to being regarded as a youth. All of the students go back to Earth willingly enough except for Rod, who has great difficulty reverting from the status of head of a small but sovereign state to a teenager whom the adult rescuers casually brush aside. However, his teacher (and now brother-in-law) and his sister persuade him to change his mind. His teacher also informs Rod that his warning against "stobor" ("robots" spelled backwards) was just a way of personalizing the dangers of an unknown planet to instil fear and caution in the students, as all students receive the same warning, regardless of the planet they are sent to for the final exam. Years later, the final scene of the story briefly depicts Rod accomplishing his heart's desire: preparing to lead a formal colonization party to another planet. Themes As in Lord of the Flies, which had been published a year earlier,