Moving uneasily in her seat as she smoked a cigarette of excellent canalside leaf, Lynne felt her homesickness vanish. This was the real world, the real job--restoring to life a long-dead world. Compared to it the constricted existence of overcrowded, static Earth seemed artificial, even a trifle inhuman. She was glad Rolf had let himself go at the weddings. At least he had had more to drink and had concealed it better than anyone else at the ceremony. If you lived as hard as Rolf and the other Martians lived--as they had to live to make headway against the cruel remorseless environment--you had a right to get drunk on occasion, she told herself vehemently. Colafizzes were for children, or the puling neurotics of Earth. Lynne slipped a coin into the dispenser-slot by her seat, and drank the cup of lichenwasser she received in return. This time, she felt no discomfort--the Martian distillation sang its happy song through her veins. _Mars_, she thought, silently toasting the Red Planet, _you may have destroyed your own species, but you won’t destroy us!_ Sobering a little, Lynne considered the fact that Mars had not totally destroyed all native forms of existence. Outside of the lichens and other flora, there were still the ugly czanworms that burrowed ceaselessly beneath the planet’s arid surface and were the despair of cable layers. And there had been the disembodied descendants of the aboriginal subject species which, revivified by the Earthmen’s use of the electricity upon which they thrived, had for decades made open-circuit electronic communication impossible, and had then sought possession of the telepaths with which the colonists had supplanted mechanical means of talking over long distances around the Red Planet’s surface. Might there not be still other life-forms, unseeable, unapproachable by Earthmen, surviving on Mars? That was one of the problems Nampura Depot T-teams were trying to solve. Had Spinelli-Olsen found something to their sorrow? Had they left records? Probably not. Lynne cursed the competitive instinct that flourished on Mars and, at times, made the cooperative sharing of knowledge so difficult. Yes, there were problems. She recalled, somberly, what Joanna had told her about the necessity of improving irrigation methods if domestic animal life was to be maintained and developed. There were the black, short-tusked boars, of course--fiftieth-generation descendants of pigs imported by Earthmen, who had, as always, adapted themselves to their environment and run wild. But you couldn’t live on pork alone. Lynne looked into the sunset and, by its soft light, at the endless aridity around her. Until the atmosphere was re-thickened--it would take many decades and a miracle of human accomplishment through slow mechanical processes--there could be no rain on Mars. And until there was rain there could be no regular plant-growth cycle with its symbiotic animal relationships.