“And I’m getting fed up with being an engineering genius fifty million miles away while a lot of politicians check endless brain-team coordinates to make sure E-power on Earth won’t upset their wretched little _ferkab_ arrangements. Also, _vinral_, I miss you _farbly_.” “Doubled in diamonds,” said Lynne warmly. Before she could add further words of affection her transmission time expired and she was cut off from her husband for another Earth-week. The fact that Lynne Marcein was pregnant was no small thing on the Red Planet. From the very first, when pioneering space ranging humanity sought to colonize Mars, the combination of rarefied atmosphere and light gravity had rendered child-bearing impossible. Since the rigors of settling a planet alien to humanity demanded the highest-level young minds and bodies, the genetic solution had originally been through induced identical twins and a better solution had not been found. From birth one twin was conditioned and trained for life on the Red Planet, while the other was trained for life on Earth. Thus, Earth was not stripped of its most gifted and adventurous young men and women, and Mars was equally favored. Both Rolf and Lynne were the products of such training. But Lynne was especially remarkable. She had not only been one of a pair of identical twins of opposite sexes--she had been trained for life on Earth, while her brother, Revere, had been the Mars-bred one. And yet, here she was, a Martian in the fullest sense. “Once a freak, always a freak,” she told herself wryly, as she left the Earth-Mars communications chamber and walked slowly across the courtyard of Nampura Depot Center. Her objective was the residence wing where both she, and Rolf--and the Willises--had their apartments. Rough lichen-shrubs, a triumph of creative botany, bordered a smooth pathway that had a short while previously been as bare of foliage as the aluminum, cold-resistant coverall that housed both Lynne and the unborn life within her. She halted for a moment to look upward at the incredible blaze of the night heavens in the black-velvet sky, noting the brilliant passage of Deimos, one of Mars’ two small moons, as it slowly blacked out of the three-starred belt of Orion. Since she had become partially inured to the rarefied atmosphere that had made breathing difficult on her first landing, and since she hadn’t far to go, she did not bother to use her oxyrespirator. The cold air stung her nostrils like fine sand and caused her to inhale deeply. She was grateful for the air’s lack of density, since its very sparseness enabled the heavens to blaze without atmospheric hindrance. She would never, being Earth-conditioned, cease wondering at the incredible splendor of the Martian skies.