Considering this, O'Hara decided that in those first years these clansmen who had fled the fat and effortless life of the atomic regions had discovered that security had an inevitable price, and it had been a price that they would not pay. They had turned their backs upon it, fleeing from it, escaping the greatest of all scientific wonders because of the greatest of all scientific mistakes—an unforeseeable error that they grasped only by seeing its result, without understanding of the cause. Yet they must have known it once.
O'Hara knew it.
Atomic contamination, never quite deadly, low enough to be tolerated, nonetheless had wrought its havoc in the genes of the race.
It had reversed the process of evolution.
The people of the lowlands, the atomic peoples, were reverting, returning toward the ape, and at a pace incredibly speeded up by some mutation within the reproductive genes that forced maturity at ten years of age, a generation every decade, ten to a century—twenty-seven since the establishment of the Atomic Curtain! But the rate of retrogression was immeasurably swifter than had been the slow climb upward since the dawn of time. For with the reversal of the process of evolution, an atomic disaster within the genes, had also come the reversal of the law that only the fittest could survive—the perfect atomic state, with security for all, was preserving and multiplying the predominant strain, those who were unfit!
Even these mountain clans who had fled, they too had taken that first short stride back toward the dawn. They had got back to the simplicity of life and the magnificent stature of Cro-Magnon times. For even here, remote from the pipe farms and the reservoirs of distilled and contaminated sea water, the radioactive food and drink of the lowlands, the dangerously hot power plants—even here there was always a degree of radiation. O'Hara's scintillometer had shown .285 milliroentgens an hour just before his craft had crashed—not dangerous, as veterans of the International Patrol reckoned danger, but over a period of time a factor never fully evaluated.
Adults at ten! Old men at thirty! And, as the Elder said, even sooner in the lowlands.
The Elder had described the atomic peoples as animals—as apes—but O'Hara was puzzled by these accounts of scientific achievement, the atomic weapons, the vast pipe farms which were the sources of food, the distillation of oceans, and the Curtain itself. Surely these were not the product of inferior minds, and as surely there must be somewhere in the lowlands another people, a superior people who had conceived and who directed the operation of these superb contrivances. But if there was such a people, the Elder did not know of them.
"The people of the mountains and the Degraded—there are no others," he insisted. "There cannot possibly be others, for if they lived there, they too would have the sickness."
O'Hara could not believe this. Yet he confessed it did not seem to be a greater contradiction of the possible than that a cave-dwelling race should employ gunpowder and understand the lightning properties of petroleum.