Rolf leered at Joanna and said, “I’ll be out to see you the first time Lynne’s not looking.” And Joanna threw back her head and laughed, revealing twin rows of flashing white teeth. Lynne knew the amorously mocking banter was harmless enough in itself. Rolf worked tirelessly, conscientiously for months on end, and surely he had a right to make love lightly with his eyes. But her Earth indoctrination would not permit her to approve of such uninhibited revelry as was the custom on Mars when the bars were let down. She thought of Rolf’s thousand women subordinates in his post as Communications Coordinator, and wondered how many of them.... _Watch yourself_, VINRAL, came his mocking thought. Lynne felt herself blush. She turned away and took a beaker of lichenwasser and downed it quickly. But it didn’t intoxicate her--it merely increased her physical discomfort and spiritual irritation. She said farewell to Revere’s bride, elected leader of the Barkutburg center, and then, when the others took off, roistering, for the spaceport, she stayed behind in the cloakroom. Though it was what she wanted, her wretchedness was not lessened by the fact that apparently no one missed her. Especially Rolf.... She decided to return to Nampura Depot alone, to reassure her ego by being of some practical use to somebody. It was, she thought miserably, beginning to look as if the only real happiness and fulfillment she was ever to achieve lay in her work alone. The growth of her telepathic talent had been responsible for the breakup not only of her engagement to a young man on Earth, but for the loss of her job as coordinating member of one of the highly specialized human brain-teams that, operating in conjunction with electronic computers, solved the more difficult and intricate material and mechanical problems of the mother planet. It had been her job, as coordinator, to obtain problem solutions that humanized and made realistic the sometimes over-abstruse answers that emanated from the machines, in response to the data fed into them by her human teammates. As her telepathic talent improved, her answers had become too perfect, which meant she had fallen into rapport with the computer rather than the human elements of the team--a psychological maladroitness which had led to her dismissal. It was a desperate need for telepaths on Mars that had brought her to the Red Planet. Climbing aboard one of the bi-hourly transports for Nampura Depot, Lynne faced the fact that her entire life, up to her transfer to Mars, had been planned and lived with the single aim of enabling her to adjust to the manners and mores of a densely populated, highly civilized, almost effete Earth. On Mars, with its vast open spaces and freewheeling pioneer anarchy and virility, she was a misfit.