Book One: The Thing Was, Chapter 1-Chapter 2 Summary

Leon Trout has been a ghost for a million years. His unique position allows him to chronicle the survival and evolution of the human race. In 1986, a pandemic causes all female humans to become infertile, and the species only survives because ten people become stranded on one of the Galapagos Islands away from the disease. Mary Hepburn, a widowed biology teacher, artificially inseminates the fertile females with the sperm of her lover, Captain Adolf von Kleist. For a million years, the offspring of the colonists are the only human survivors on the planet, and they evolve to fit their environment, with fur, flippers, and small brains for swimming and catching fish. Humanity has finally found paradise.

The novel begins a million years ago in 1986 A.D., in the seaport of Guayaquil...