"These things are fixed. No one needs to do them."
"They are automatic?"
"We do not know your word, but no one needs to do things for the atomic peoples. Everything is done. They have contrivances to work for them—the colored pipes to grow their food, and the water that they drink and that flows in these pipes they draw from the ocean that is said to be beyond the mountains toward the west, but the water also is contaminated. The earth itself—the soil of the lowlands—is contaminated, soaked with atomic wastes. Their cities—"
"What about their cities?"
"None of us has seen them, but we have heard that they exist. Our fathers' fathers told these things—once they built places out of stones and metals, like mountains with many caves, but they fled from them in the first years. That was before our people left. They were driven by the sickness—"
"How does the sickness injure them?"
"It is in their get."
"Only in their get?"
"Only in their get—it does not injure those already born, but their get become different. Each generation they become more and more like animals. Undeniably animals, though once they were like us. Now their arms are much longer than ours and their feet are different, their jaws are thrust out, their heads are shaped oddly, sloping back above the brows of their eyes—"
"Like apes?"