"What happened here?"
"They're gone. All gone."
"Yes, but what happened?"
"The Kumaji—"
"You're Kumaji."
"This is my town," the old man said. "I lived with the Earthmen. Now they're gone."
"But you stayed here—"
"To die," the old man said, without self-pity. "I'm too old to flee, too old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water."
Steve gave him another drink. "You still haven't told me what happened." Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy, Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government, so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions, almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.