The petroleum remained for him a goal to be attained. The Elder was evasive, and Nedra, who would have told him anything she knew, considered it a mystery she neither comprehended nor cared about.
"Why talk of their torches?" she demanded. "If we need them, they will give them to us. Am I not enough to amuse you?"
"Yes, Nedra, but I want to know—"
"Are you really one of us, O'Hara? You ask questions that could interest only an old man of thirty, yet you cannot be more than twelve. You are restless, you are unhappy with me. I am not beautiful to you."
"No woman anywhere is quite as beautiful."
"There is something that you want. Is it babies, O'Hara? Soon we will have them."
"For the clan, I suppose?"
"For the clan, of course. Would you like to take them with us and leave the clan, go to another mountain? Is that what you want? But the Degraded would catch us. Would you want your sons and daughter to breed with the Degraded? No, we must stay with the clan and our babies must be for the clan."
"Our babies," he said, for he had forgotten that. There would be babies. And before he was an old man they would be older men. And Nedra—Nedra would be gone.
"In the place that you came from in the flying thing, O'Hara," Nedra was saying, "are the people there like me?"