But it could not come all at once, not while there remained the chore of cutting up the giant bear and gathering wood for the clan's fires burning on the floor of the chasm. The Elder talked as he worked, instructing the children--they were, O'Hara learned, considered the clan's children, not the children of individual couples, for the idea of the family had been expanded to include the entire clan. One family, with the Elder heading it, two hundred of them living communally, owning nothing. Even their weapons--Colts--were property of the clan, handed down from generation to generation. They worked as a unit, directed by the Elder, with strange little islands of technology in their otherwise crude culture. For instance, they knew about ores--they smelted metals and were expert in fashioning them, making the utensils of their working lives, the bowls and pots and knives they used, and the cartridges for Colt. Their mountains were rich in both copper and iron, and when later O'Hara saw their diggings, the evidence was there of long usage and a more advanced technology, much of which the clansmen no longer understood. Among the Elder's most treasured possessions was a large glass retort, once part of a rather extensive chemical laboratory that now lay in ruins, its purpose no longer known to the clansmen, who did not know the manufacture of glass. The Elder considered his retort a sacred vessel--sacred through antiquity alone, however. "Our fathers who came here from the lowlands understood these things," he explained. "It was a magic, perhaps, that they needed there--perhaps it saved them from the sickness. But we have not needed them and their use is forgotten. We no longer know the ceremonies for them." "This clan is the only one to escape the sickness of the lowlands?" "No, there are others. Many of us came together from the lowlands, fleeing together--some of us came here, others went to other ranges there, and beyond there," said the Elder, pointing. "And beyond there--many clans, but not so many as those who stayed in the lowlands and were lost." "You see these clans?" They never saw them. They were related peoples, but without any political or blood ties, for the constant incursion of the atomic peoples--the Degraded--made any close association of these mountain clans impossible. Always, the Elder said, the thousands of the Degraded swarmed up through the valleys, searching for the mountain people, hunting them. "For them, the Degraded, there is never any work--they do not need wood for fires or animals for food or copper for their utensils," said the Elder. "There is no risk in their lives, other than the risk of hunting us. They do not want to destroy us--they want only to take us to replenish their blood, to halt the sickness. But we wish death to mating with them. They are animals. Surely you know?" "I do not know."