"Do I look like your sister?"
He had to admit that she didn't.
"Anyway," Sonya went on, "their trailing us to different houses must have convinced them and the rest of their party that we are not. In the eyes of the Venusians, you see, our spaceships are just that. Houses. Odd one, perhaps, by their architectural standards, but houses just the same. How else could a simple bronze-age culture interpret them?"
Gordon ducked beneath a blossom-laden bough. "How did you know they're puritans?"
"I didn't—at first. I merely assumed, from their reactions to us, that they must be. And then I got to thinking about how neither the sun nor the moon can be seen through the cloud-cover, and it occurred to me that their concept of one god must have come much earlier in their civilization than would have been the case on earth, owing to the fact that there could have been no intermediate phase of sun- or moon-worship. Perhaps, somewhere along the line, they had a Christ whose teachings they misinterpreted, and no doubt they have a version of Genesis similar to the Judaeo-Christian one—except that in theirs, the problem of creating the sun and the moon and the stars never arose. Anyway, now that they have married us, they are no longer interested in us. All that concerned them was our moral welfare.... It seems to be growing dark."
"It can't be," Gordon said. "It's only a little past noon. Which reminds me—I skipped breakfast, and supper too." He pulled two concentrated food biscuits out of his fatigue-all pockets. "I suggest that we stop for lunch."
They sat down side by side beneath a tree with blue blossoms shaped like Dutchman's-breeches hanging from its boughs. They were halfway down the opposite slope of the ridge now, but Sonya's ship was still many hours away, and his was an hour farther yet. They ate silently for a while. Then, "There is one thing that puzzles me," Sonya said.
"Yes?"
"Why did they marry us so soon? Why was there such a need for haste?"