All of the brides were pregnant. In tacit accordance with the dictates of expediency in frontier settlements all through man’s history on Earth and, more lately, on Mars, a marriage was not a marriage until offspring were on the way. When a couple decided to mate, it was only necessary for them to sign a register and share quarters as provisional husband and wife. The arrangement would remain in force as long as it gave satisfaction to both parties. If it failed divorce became merely a matter of signing another registry. But once a child had been conceived, casualness vanished, for the bringing of Martian children back to Mars was a major factor in the effort to populate the planet. Such children were its hope, its future, against the time when man should have conquered his new environment, and child-bearing no longer necessitated a hasty return to Earth. For the rest, Mars was populated by expert technicians, officials and the halves of genetically induced identical twins--of which Lynne and Revere Fenlay were unusually gifted examples. The purpose of this plan was to give the new planet Earth’s hereditary best without stripping the home planet of its most promising young folk. One twin, conditioned for Earth, stayed at home--the other, carefully trained from infancy to endure and triumph over the hardships of life on the Red Planet, went to Mars. Lynne was one of the few Earth-trained twins ever sent to Mars to join her brother. Her telepathic genius, of a range and sensitivity almost unknown on the home planet, with its dense atmosphere and other inhibiting factors, had been urgently needed in a desperate crisis when the telepathic lateral communications of Mars had been threatened with destruction by strange electronically-revivified survivals of the original Martians. She had been needed, and once the crisis had been conquered, she had stayed on to aid in new telepathic research. She had stayed on, and now--she was rebellious and homesick. There was a gaunt, stripped-down, machine-shop look to the great hall. In New Samarkand, the planetary capital where the ceremonies were being conducted, the established ritual never varied. The marrying officer stood on a low platform, and at his back rose a portable altar surmounted by the symbol of universal faith. This consisted of a cross for Christianity, in a circle representing the “wheel of life” religions, and outside its circumference smaller crosses with their ends bent at right angles to represent the symbol of still older faiths. It had been battered by constant usage, and one of the tips was rudely broken off. Recalling the symbolic beauty of the ritual that still enhanced marriage ceremonies on Earth, and contrasting it with the crude matter-of-factness of Martian multiple weddings Lynne wished, and not for the first time, that she had not permitted Rolf Marcein to talk her into coming to Mars.