"The boy came in an aircar. I thought he was one of the normals--but he's not. Hasn't their ways. Good looking boy, too." "Is he?" Nell had reached them. She stopped and looked up, right into Eric's face, and for the first time he realized that she was blind. Her eyes were milky white, without pupils, without irises. Against the brown leather of her skin they looked moist and dead. "Speak, boy," she croaked. "Let me hear your voice." "Hello," Eric said, feeling utterly foolish and utterly confused. "I'm Eric." "Eric...." Nell reached out, touched his arm with her hand, ran her fingers up over his shoulders, over his chest. "It's been a long time since I've heard a man's voice," she said. "Not since Mag here was a little girl." "Have you been--here--all that time?" Eric asked, looking around him at the hut, and the meat hanging to dry, covered with flies, and the leather water bags, and the mounds of refuse, the huge, heaped mounds that he couldn't stop smelling. "Yes," Nell said. "I've been here longer than I want to remember, boy. We came here from the other mountains when Mag was only a baby." * * * * * They walked toward the hut, and as they neared it he smelled a new smell, that of stale smoke and stale sweat overlying the general odor of decay. "Let's talk out here," he said, not wanting to go inside. They sat down on the hard earth and the two women turned their faces toward him, Mag watching him intently, Nell listening, her head cocked to one side like an old crippled bird's. "I always thought I was the only one like me," Eric said. "The people don't know of any others. They don't know you exist. They wouldn't believe it." "That's the way we want it," Mag said. "That's the only way it can be." Nell nodded. "I was a girl in the other hills," she said, nodding toward the west, toward the museum. "There were several of us then. There had been families of us in my father's time, and in his father's time, and maybe before that even. But when I was a girl there was only my father and my mother and another wife of my father's, and a lot of children...." She paused, still looking toward the west, facing a horizon she could no longer see. "The normal ones came. We'd hidden from them before. But this time we had no chance to hide. I was hunting, with the boy who was my father's nephew. "They surrounded the hut. They didn't make any sound. They don't have to. I was in the forest when I heard my mother scream." "Did they kill her?" Eric cried out. "They wouldn't do that." "No, they didn't kill any of them. They dragged them off to the aircars, all of them. My father, my mother and the other woman, the children. We watched from the trees and saw them dragged off, tied with ropes, like wild animals. The cars flew away. Our people never came back." She stopped, sunken in revery. Mag took up the story. Her voice was matter-of-fact, completely casual about those long ago events.