So Rolf Marcein had been sent for with orders to make her want to leave Earth with him, by fair means or foul. And he had not hesitated to employ the foul. She felt her whole body blush as she recalled some of the brazen suggestions he had made, some of her responses, especially to his embraces earlier that evening. It was going to be a very interesting session, she decided, as she followed the girl into the single small but beautifully compact central lounge or saloon that space requirements permitted on the Mars-ship. She looked around but failed to see his tall figure and saturnine face--treacherous face, she thought--among the half-dozen passengers already reclining in plastolounges, watching the amazing panorama projected on the ceiling from the viewplate recorders in the prow and stern of the huge space-vessel. She followed Joanna to a chair, tried to share the girl's tremulous excitement. After all, she thought, she had felt much the same on emerging from the seminary to take her first position as a data-recording supplement for the biggest of all cybernetics machines, the "brain" that occupied six thousand acres of the Sahara Desert. "Look!" the girl whispered enthusiastically. "There's X-Three, the last of the derelict space-stations." Lynne watched the oddly complex structure, that resembled a pair of unrooted pyramids fastened point to point, as it revolved slowly across and out of the plane of vision. "What do they use it for now, Joanna?" she murmured. "Nothing," the girl said with a trace of scorn. Lynne knew she should have known about that. She recalled now a vidar newscast in which the abandonment of the last of the space-stations had been mentioned. In the years before A-engines were finally perfected space-stations were vitally necessary as change-over stops for interplanetary rocket flights. But once fuel ceased to be a problem they had been used merely as meteor-warning points and weather stations. In the first function they had proved useless--in fact one of them had been destroyed by a large space-missile--and weather forecasting and control were practised far more efficiently by electronic mastery of the Heaviside Layer. Lynne shouldn't have forgotten--but when she heard it the matter of space-stations had been utterly unimportant in her life. A steward in space-black bolo and clout offered them vari-flavored colafizzes from a rack strapped about his waist. Lynne wondered at this mode of serving the drinks while she sipped hers but decided not to ask Joanna. She didn't want to appear a total numbskull to a girl whose whole life had consisted of conditioning for Mars. She found out soon enough when Rolf Marcein walked into the saloon before she had finished sipping her drink. She rose to greet him, to haul him off somewhere so they could talk alone--and as she did so she automatically dropped her colafizz in the receptacle ready to receive it in one arm of her plastolounge.