Lynne acted without volition for the first time since early babyhood. She picked up the plastisaucer in front of her and flung it across the neoplast tabletop at him. He ducked and for a moment his dark eyes blazed with laughter and then he sensed her distress and helped her with the atocleaner. She tried to apologize but the words refused to come. And he never mentioned the incident afterward. Instead he took her for a walk through the park and talked to her of the more feral beauties of his own planet. "It's far wilder than this," he told her, gesturing at the neat clusters of trees and flowers, the perfectly clipped hedges about them. "Wilder and deadlier and far more beautiful." "This is perfection," she told him. "And perfection is death," was his reply. "I thought Mars pretty much a dead planet," she said. "It's a vast mausoleum," he said, his eyes lighting. "A mausoleum visited by new life, a mausoleum in which the very souls of the dead themselves seem beginning to stir. It's raw new life burgeoning on the old." He talked on and she felt the beginnings of small responses stir within her and frighten her. For she had been conditioned to Earth and to wish for Mars was wrong. Finally he stopped and faced her and captured both her hands in his incredibly strong ones. "Lynne," he said. "I haven't much longer here. I want to take you back home with me. Will you come?" "Home--on _Mars_?" she countered. The idea was impossible. Yet, somewhere within herself, she wanted to go. Then the reasons, the millions of reasons why she couldn't say yes, came flooding up within her. Surely Rolf knew them--or did he? "You know the system and the reasons behind it," she reminded him. "You have a twin right here in the city. I've talked to him--it was he who gave me my walking papers from the group-machine." "He told me," said Rolf quietly. "He told me a lot about you. Enough so I wanted to see you and get to know you. Now that I do know you I want you to go back with me. Can't you see, darling? There's little use for telepaths on Earth. On Mars we need them desperately. I think I can arrange a transfer." "But my brother is already there," she told him a little desperately. "I--we--they can't leave two of us on one planet. And what right have I to ask him to come to Earth? He's not conditioned." "But maybe he'd like to come back," Rolf suggested. "Maybe he's not happy on Mars." "It's not just that," she said miserably. Nor was it. For the first time the entire system by which the Mars project was functioning seemed to her vastly unfair. Until that moment she had accepted it, considered it as immutable as the need for the sun itself. The Earth Government, which was what the U.N. had evolved into after its first tortured half-century of birth, was determined not to repeat upon alien planets the mistakes of imperialism and colonization that had caused the home planet all but to tear itself to pieces during the twentieth century.