"Apes?" asked the Elder, puzzled.
"Never mind. You say this sickness comes from what they eat and drink and the cities that they live in?"
"From everything that is about their lives. The Tubes, the Sun Beneath the Earth—"
"What are these?"
"We do not know. We have never seen them. They were devised after the first years, when our fathers' fathers fled. But the legends are that the Tubes run everywhere beneath the crust of the earth, as the trails lie across the mountains, and that somewhere among these Tubes there is a Sun that glows, giving heat and light and power—and something else that we do not understand, a strange protection, not against us, but against a great evil—"
"The Curtain!"
"You know what this evil is?"
"Perhaps. And I'll learn more. But tell me one thing now—why did your people flee this sickness?"
The Elder's dignity was impressive. "I've told you that—what happens to their get. It is better to fight and to struggle for your life. Man was not meant to exist, as a worm does, pallid and content beneath a log."
And that was as close to an expression of religious belief as O'Hara was to hear among these mountain clansmen. Security was evil in itself.