"Two and three—with us they mature slowly. Among the Degraded they are old at twenty, older at twenty than I am at thirty."
"Tell me," asked O'Hara, "what is Nedra's age?"
"She has lived nine winters. This is the tenth of them."
O'Hara felt as if the earth had shuddered under his feet. Nedra was ten—for a moment he thought that possibly they reckoned time differently, but the Elder's own words refuted that reasoning—nine winters! She was in her tenth year, mature—in many ways much more mature than women of his own world at the mating age, certainly without the protective claptrap of sentimentality and romantic misconceptions. Was it, then, strange that the degenerated emotions of old age were absent from these people? Passion and ferocity, which were the attributes of youth, but not malice and tenderness. When the life span was cut so short there was not time for these. Returning later to his cavern, he entered with a sense of active guilt, of shame, but the intricately carved wooden club was lying on the floor, significantly, and Nedra was waiting with that look of adoration that he now recognized as the adoration of a child's mind, but she was not a child—she was magnificently dangerous, splendidly strong and quick, knowing what she wanted, and without absurd squeamishness about it.
"I am waiting for you, O'Hara."
"Yes—I see you are. But never mind that club. We'll get along without it—"
"How?" She asked it simply. She could not conceive of placid submission, nor, after that, could O'Hara. It was another turning point.
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?"