"What was that?" Tony Willis asked politely. "Nothing--my clout slipped," she replied, embarrassed. Lynne was taken to a gaunt office whose chief piece of furniture was an immense Martian globe, upon which all the chief Martian cities, all the human settlements, all the communications posts were marked. She began to understand, from looking at it, how very different conditions upon the red planet were from the Earth norm. The home planet, heavily over-populated, was skilfully disguised to appear roomy. Virtually every inch of its land surface was devoted to giving crowded humanity the illusion of privacy. Aloneness was one of its most prized cultural assets. On Mars, with its scant million humans and solitude ever-present, all cultural efforts were bent the other way--to create the illusion of a large number of people that did not exist. Instead of seeking privacy the inhabitants gratefully crowded close together in their small communities, seeking strength through numbers. "We're making progress--tremendous progress," Tony told her seriously, tapping a point on the globe. "The more ground we get under cultivation the more atmosphere we reclaim through the plant-breathing process. What we actually need is a few hundred million more people--but the planet will barely support those we have. It's a slow and laborious process." "Operation bootstrap," said Lynne, wondering how she could even briefly have found this dedicated young man ridiculous. "Exactly," he told her. "I take it Rolf has briefed you a little about your job here." "A little," she said. "I'm to relieve my brother--right?" "Right." He nodded. "We can short-cut your training because you are his twin. Ordinarily we take a couple of weeks fitting each communications worker to his or her post--finding in just which their telepathic sensitivity will work the best. But since, in a way, we _know_ about you through Revere, we can save time." "Revere," she said, "what about him? Is he very sick?" Tony Willis shrugged. "It's periodic," he told her. "This whole business is so new and so sudden it hit most of them without warning. Since you know the score you ought to be able to fight it." "But mightn't I have my brother's weaknesses?" Lynne asked. "We're hoping not," was the reply. "In most cases women resist better than men. The suggestions these creatures make are so _swackably_ lewd they clash with the feminine propriety-barrier." "While men, being Casanovas, give in," she said, thinking again of Rolf and his thousand-and-two women. "Something like that," he replied, went on to tell her how telepathic messages were keyed and directed and addressed to reach the proper destinations. "You'll be here"--tapping a spot on the globe, a third of a world away from New Samarkand--"at Barkutburg, within mentarange of Zuleika, New Walla Walla and Cathayville. So here will be the code-keys for you to remember...."