"Is there no land on the other side of the fire mountains?"
"The hunting ground of the dead. It is not for us, the living."
When Baiel and I returned at dusk to the Olympus, I walked thoughtfully through the swirling snow, saying very little. For the first time I faced, without regret, the fact that we were doomed to live out our lives on this frozen, nameless world. I had found a purpose, and it seemed good.
This friendly, impoverished tribe was man himself, as he had been on the Earth in the remote darkness of our own uncharted past—man, clinging precariously to a hard-won savagery, plagued by ice and wind, threatened by a vanishing supply of food.
To the nearly insurmountable problems set by nature, this tribe had added one final prison of their own creation, the taboos and superstitions that penned them fast on the brink of the glacier. As things stood, the tribe would not survive. To become men as we were, they had to be freed of the weight of the gods, freed of superstition so they could deal with the facts of reality. With our help the tribe might eventually learn how to create a civilization. Without it, they were doomed.
Hesitantly I explained myself to Baiel.
"Of course," he said. "It's obvious. We can't allow nature to forget the proper chronology of the species, can we?"
"It will be slow work, but—"
"But not impossible. Their life span averages less than thirty years; ours exceeds a century. That's time enough."
He agreed with me at once and, I think, he was entirely sincere. We were simply using the same words to express two totally opposed ideas. Neither of us, I'm sure, was aware of the ambiguity.