Even these mountain clans who had fled, they too had taken that first short stride back toward the dawn. They had got back to the simplicity of life and the magnificent stature of Cro-Magnon times. For even here, remote from the pipe farms and the reservoirs of distilled and contaminated sea water, the radioactive food and drink of the lowlands, the dangerously hot power plants--even here there was always a degree of radiation. O'Hara's scintillometer had shown .285 milliroentgens an hour just before his craft had crashed--not dangerous, as veterans of the International Patrol reckoned danger, but over a period of time a factor never fully evaluated. Adults at ten! Old men at thirty! And, as the Elder said, even sooner in the lowlands. The Elder had described the atomic peoples as animals--as apes--but O'Hara was puzzled by these accounts of scientific achievement, the atomic weapons, the vast pipe farms which were the sources of food, the distillation of oceans, and the Curtain itself. Surely these were not the product of inferior minds, and as surely there must be somewhere in the lowlands another people, a superior people who had conceived and who directed the operation of these superb contrivances. But if there was such a people, the Elder did not know of them. "The people of the mountains and the Degraded--there are no others," he insisted. "There cannot possibly be others, for if they lived there, they too would have the sickness." O'Hara could not believe this. Yet he confessed it did not seem to be a greater contradiction of the possible than that a cave-dwelling race should employ gunpowder and understand the lightning properties of petroleum. The petroleum remained for him a goal to be attained. The Elder was evasive, and Nedra, who would have told him anything she knew, considered it a mystery she neither comprehended nor cared about. "Why talk of their torches?" she demanded. "If we need them, they will give them to us. Am I not enough to amuse you?" "Yes, Nedra, but I want to know--" "Are you really one of us, O'Hara? You ask questions that could interest only an old man of thirty, yet you cannot be more than twelve. You are restless, you are unhappy with me. I am not beautiful to you." "No woman anywhere is quite as beautiful." "There is something that you want. Is it babies, O'Hara? Soon we will have them." "For the clan, I suppose?" "For the clan, of course. Would you like to take them with us and leave the clan, go to another mountain? Is that what you want? But the Degraded would catch us. Would you want your sons and daughter to breed with the Degraded? No, we must stay with the clan and our babies must be for the clan." "Our babies," he said, for he had forgotten that. There would be babies. And before he was an old man they would be older men. And Nedra--Nedra would be gone. "In the place that you came from in the flying thing, O'Hara," Nedra was saying, "are the people there like me?"