As he walked slowly away, with the reception committee dancing attendance about him, she received a faintly mocking thought projection from him, became aware that he was enjoying her jealousy. She felt her face flame again, said, "Ferkab!"—all but stamped her foot.
"What was that?" Tony Willis asked politely.
"Nothing—my clout slipped," she replied, embarrassed.
Lynne was taken to a gaunt office whose chief piece of furniture was an immense Martian globe, upon which all the chief Martian cities, all the human settlements, all the communications posts were marked. She began to understand, from looking at it, how very different conditions upon the red planet were from the Earth norm.
The home planet, heavily over-populated, was skilfully disguised to appear roomy. Virtually every inch of its land surface was devoted to giving crowded humanity the illusion of privacy. Aloneness was one of its most prized cultural assets.
On Mars, with its scant million humans and solitude ever-present, all cultural efforts were bent the other way—to create the illusion of a large number of people that did not exist. Instead of seeking privacy the inhabitants gratefully crowded close together in their small communities, seeking strength through numbers.
"We're making progress—tremendous progress," Tony told her seriously, tapping a point on the globe. "The more ground we get under cultivation the more atmosphere we reclaim through the plant-breathing process. What we actually need is a few hundred million more people—but the planet will barely support those we have. It's a slow and laborious process."
"Operation bootstrap," said Lynne, wondering how she could even briefly have found this dedicated young man ridiculous.
"Exactly," he told her. "I take it Rolf has briefed you a little about your job here."
"A little," she said. "I'm to relieve my brother—right?"