What the Elder had meant by the first years was never made clearer, but O'Hara, remembering the long-forgotten books of those musty Oxford cellars--the books that had so fascinated him in school--concluded that the first years meant the decades immediately after the establishment of the Atomic Curtain, an historic milestone that these mountain clansmen no longer understood, now lost to them after the rapid succession of many generations, one each ten years. But concerning the sickness of the lowlands, the Elder was better informed. For it was a continuing thing, present among the atomic peoples even now, and the constant dread and loathing of the clansmen. "What they eat," said the Elder, "is abomination. It grows in the lowlands in those immense systems of colored objects that are like pipes--if you did not see them from your flying thing I will take you to a peak from which you can see them. And these pipes are contaminated, making their food a poisonous stuff--yet they no longer have any other way to feed. Nor do they wish to feed in any other way. For everything is done for them by atomic power--" "Who does these things by this power for them?" "These things are fixed. No one needs to do them." "They are automatic?" "We do not know your word, but no one needs to do things for the atomic peoples. Everything is done. They have contrivances to work for them--the colored pipes to grow their food, and the water that they drink and that flows in these pipes they draw from the ocean that is said to be beyond the mountains toward the west, but the water also is contaminated. The earth itself--the soil of the lowlands--is contaminated, soaked with atomic wastes. Their cities--" "What about their cities?" "None of us has seen them, but we have heard that they exist. Our fathers' fathers told these things--once they built places out of stones and metals, like mountains with many caves, but they fled from them in the first years. That was before our people left. They were driven by the sickness--" "How does the sickness injure them?" "It is in their get." "Only in their get?" "Only in their get--it does not injure those already born, but their get become different. Each generation they become more and more like animals. Undeniably animals, though once they were like us. Now their arms are much longer than ours and their feet are different, their jaws are thrust out, their heads are shaped oddly, sloping back above the brows of their eyes--" "Like apes?" "Apes?" asked the Elder, puzzled. "Never mind. You say this sickness comes from what they eat and drink and the cities that they live in?" "From everything that is about their lives. The Tubes, the Sun Beneath the Earth--" "What are these?"