s a subject they had managed to avoid ever since that first day,
although the older women brought it up whenever he saw them.

"Mag says I must have a man," Lisa said. Her voice was tight. He
couldn't tell if she was crying because he couldn't bear to look at her.
He could only stare out over the canyon and listen and wait.

"She says if it isn't you I'll have to find someone else, later on, but
she says it ought to be you. Because _they're_ dangerous, and besides,
if it's you our children will be sure to be like us."

"What?" He swung around, startled. "Do you mean that if one parent were
normal the child might be too?"

"Yes," she said. "It might. They say that's happened. Sometimes. No one
knows why we're born. No one knows why some are one way and some
another."

"Lisa...." He stopped.

"I know. You don't want me. I've known that all the time."

"It isn't just that."

He tried to find the words to express what he felt, but anything he
might say would be cold and cruel and not quite true. He felt the
contentment drain out of him, and he felt annoyed, because he didn't
want to have to think about her problem, or about anything.

"Why do they want you to have a child?" he said roughly. "Why do they
want our kind to go on, living here like animals, or taken to the
valleys and separated from each other and put into institutions until we
die? Why don't they admit that we've lost, that the normals own the
Earth? Why don't they stop breeding and let us die?"

"Your parents were normal, Eric. If all of us died, others would be
born, someday."

He nodded and then he closed his eyes and fought against the despair
that rose suddenly within him and blotted out the last of the
contentment and the unreality. He fought against it and lost. And
suddenly Lisa was very real, more real even than the books had ever
been. And the dirty old women were suddenly people--individuals, not
savages. He tried to pity them, to retreat into his pity and his
loneliness, but he couldn't even do that.

The people he had looked for were imaginary. He would never find them,
because Mag and Nell and Lisa were his people. They were like him, and
the only difference between him and them was one of luck. They were
dirty and ignorant. They had been born in the mountains and hunted like
beasts. He was more fortunate; he had been born in the valley.

He was a snob. He had looked down on them, when all the time he was one
of them. If he had bee