"That is permitted, yet it has never happened until you came. We saw you far above us, in that great flying thing you rode. We had never seen that thing before, but there are stories—myths the older people told when I was young—of the flying thing that men could ride across the skies in, as the condor does. Did you come in it from another mountain, beyond the regions of the Degraded?"
"From the north," said O'Hara. "Beyond the ice and the Curtain. But what are the Degraded?"
"The atomic people, if you can call them people. Those who live in the lowlands below the mountains."
"A different people?"
The Elder looked incredulous. "You must know these things. It is impossible not to know these things."
"But I do not know them," said O'Hara. "Beyond the Curtain we know nothing. Who are these atomic people and how are they different from you? And the sickness you mention. Tell me—"
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."