The days that followed Rolf Marcein's arrival at Mother Weedon's became, to Lynne, a period of waiting. It was a period of waiting games as well. No summons came from the eightieth floor of the brain-station to give her a clue as to the nature of her next assignment. For the first time in her life she found herself hung in a vacuum with nothing definite to do or to look forward to. Naturally she wondered whether Rolf Marcein might not be the answer to this facet of her problem. But not even her growing telepathic abilities could pry a response out of his mind. He seemed to be visiting the home planet on the vaguest sort of business--something to do with development and transport of specially-bred plant and animal stock for the red planet. It seemed absurd on the face of it that such an obviously able adjustee should be returned to Earth on such a mission, especially with every gram of interplanetary ship-space at a premium. Yet either it was truth or Rolf had developed some method of screening his thoughts against telepathic probing--a frightening idea in itself. He hung around Mother Weedon's most of the time. As a result Lynne saw a lot of him throughout the days and evenings, a fact which both pleased and alarmed her unreasonably. It was during the third night of his stay that he invaded, or tried to invade, her nights as well. Before drifting off to sleep she found herself dwelling on him with relaxed reverie. Ray and Janet had had some sort of quarrel and the atmosphere that evening had been far from pleasant. It was a relief to lie alone, to let her thoughts roam and quest as they would. Rolf had talked of Mars during a stroll to the bazaar-mart during the afternoon. He had described a boar-hunt on Earth's sister-planet during a night when both Deimos and Phobos were describing their rapid orbits across the cloudless sky. The pig, as man's most adaptable food-animal, had been the first livestock imported to Mars less than three decades earlier. Now, according to Rolf, the animals had in large measure reverted to their feral state and constituted a menace to man and his works alike. "We used flashlights and small-arms paralyzers on that hunt," Rolf said. "We flushed a whole herd of them in an erosion-gully along the border of the Great Southern Canal--didn't get so much as a smell of the brutes until we were right on top of them. "At that we managed to nab a baker's dozen for de-tusking and redomestication. _Ferkab_, it was touch and go for a bit! One big brute slipped under my ray and if I hadn't been lucky enough to jam my flashlight tube into his mouth he'd have taken my leg off." "What does _ferkab_ mean?" Lynne asked, a little annoyed at feeling an atavistic thrill from the account of the primitive hunt. To her delight Rolf actually blushed beneath his tan. He began with, "I don't think you'd appreciate its meaning," then recalled her telepathic powers and shut up and blushed more deeply.