"Why did they die, Walden?" He didn't expect an answer.
"Why does any race die, Eric?"
His own people, forever removed from him, linked to him only through the books, the pictures, and his own backward-reaching emotions.
"Walden, hasn't there ever been anyone else like me, since they died?"
Silence. Then, slowly, Walden nodded.
"I wondered how long it would be before you asked that. Yes, there have been others. Sometimes three or four in a generation."
"Then, perhaps...."
"No," Walden said. "There aren't any others now. We'd know it if there were." He turned away from Eric, to the plastic wall that looked out across the garden and the children playing and the long, level, flower-carpeted plain.
"Sometimes, when there's more than one of them, they go out there away from us, out to the hills where it's wild. But they're found, of course. Found, and brought back." He sighed. "The last of them died when I was a boy."
Others like him. Within Walden's lifetime, others, cut off from their own race, lonely and rootless in the midst of the new. Others like him, but not now, in his lifetime. For him there were only the books.