"Lindsay glanced at one wall and was paralyzed at the sight of his own clan's founder, Malcolm Lindsay. As a child, the dead pioneer's face, leering in ancestral wisdom from the tops of dressers and bookshelves, had filled him with dread. Now he realized with a painful leap of insight how young the man had been. Dead at seventy. The whole habitat had been slammed up in frantic haste by people scarcely more than children. He began laughing hysterically.
'It's a joke!' he shouted. The laughter was melting his head, breaking up a logjam of thought in little stabbing pangs.
[...]
'It's a joke,' Lindsay said. His tongue was loose now and the words gushed free. 'This is unbelievable. These poor fools had no idea. How could they? They were dead before they had a chance to see! What's five years to us, what's ten, a hundred—' "