"But my brother is already there," she told him a little desperately. "I—we—they can't leave two of us on one planet. And what right have I to ask him to come to Earth? He's not conditioned."
"But maybe he'd like to come back," Rolf suggested. "Maybe he's not happy on Mars."
"It's not just that," she said miserably. Nor was it. For the first time the entire system by which the Mars project was functioning seemed to her vastly unfair. Until that moment she had accepted it, considered it as immutable as the need for the sun itself.
The Earth Government, which was what the U.N. had evolved into after its first tortured half-century of birth, was determined not to repeat upon alien planets the mistakes of imperialism and colonization that had caused the home planet all but to tear itself to pieces during the twentieth century.
No convicts, no misfits, no refugee cultists were to be sent out to settle the newly-opened red planet—instead, the cream of Earth's best trained, most gifted and strongest young men and women were to do the preliminary settling. For it would still be many years before the arid world would be able to support much humanity.
There had been protests—chief among them a group of eugenicists who felt that loss of such a large group of qualified young folk would cost the home planet more genetically and socially than it could afford. The answer had been genetically-induced twins on the part of parents qualified to pass a wide variety of mental, physical and psychiatric tests, open to all who wished to join the project.
One of each set of such induced identical twins was early selected to go to Mars, the other to remain on Earth. Thus Earth lost nothing, yet had its potential Martians, ready for conditioning and training in special seminaries for lifetime work on the red planet. When one of a pair of twins was a girl, the other a boy, the boy was the one sent out—since life on Mars was still a rugged affair. Thus it was that Lynne had been reared for an Earth-career while her brother, Revere, had been educated and coached for a Mars-life.
Lynne's entire twenty-four years had been passed for the purpose of integration into and work for the improvement of humanity on her native planet. The very idea of Mars was terrifying, as was the idea of traveling there through space. She simply couldn't endure the wrench of the trip, the separation from all that mattered.
Rolf stood there quietly, letting her thoughts flow without interruption. Then he said, "I see—but it's not as bad as all that, darling. After all, I made the trip in reverse."