“I think,” Barney said gently, “you should let these people alone.” And me, too, he thought. I’ve got enough troubles as it is; don’t add your religious fanaticism and make it worse. But she did not look like his idea of a religious fanatic, nor did she talk like one. He was puzzled. Where had she gotten such strong, steady convictions? He could imagine it existing in the colonies, where the need was so great, but she had acquired it on Earth.

Therefore the existence of Can-D, the experience of group translation, did not fully explain it. Maybe, he thought, it’s been the transition by gradual stages of Earth to the hell-like blasted wasteland which all of them could foresee—hell, experience!–that had done it; the hope of another life, on different terms, had been reawakened.

Myself, he thought, the individual I’ve been, Barney Mayerson of Earth, who worked for P. P. Layouts and lived in the renown conapt building with the unlikely low number 33, is dead. That person is finished, wiped out as if by a sponge.

Whether I like it or not I’ve been born again.

“Being a colonist on Mars,” he said, “isn’t going to be like living on Terra. Maybe when I get there—” He ceased; he had intended to say, Maybe I’ll be more interested in your dogmatic church. But as yet he could not honestly say that, even as a conjecture; he rebelled from an idea that was still foreign to his makeup. And yet—

“Go ahead,” Anne Hawthorne said. “Finish your sentence.”

“Talk to me again,” Barney said, “when I’ve lived down in the bottom of a hovel on an alien world for a while. When I’ve begun my new life, if you can call it a life, as a colonist.” His tone was bitter; it surprised him, the ferocity… it bordered on being anguish, he realized with shame.

Anne said placidly, “All right. I’ll be glad to.”

After that the two of them sat in silence; Barney read a homeopape and, beside him, Anne Hawthorne, the fanatic girl missionary to Mars, read a book. He peered at the title, and saw that it was Eric Lederman’s great text on colonial living, Pilgrim without Progress. God knew where she had gotten a copy; the UN had condemned it, made it incredibly difficult to obtain. And to read a copy of it here on a UN ship—it was a singular act of courage; he was impressed.

Glancing at her he realized that she was really overwhelmingly attractive to him, except that she was just a little too thin, wore no makeup, and had as much of her heavy dark hair as possible covered with a round, white, veil-like cap; she looked, he decided, as if she were dressed for a long journey which would end in church. Anyhow he liked her manner of speaking, her compassionate, modulated voice. Would he run into her again on Mars?

It came to him that he hoped so. In fact—was this improper?–he hoped even to find himself participating with her in the corporate act of taking Can-D.

Yes, he thought, it’s improper because I know what I intend, what the experience of translation with her would signify to me.

He hoped it anyhow.

Extending his hand, Norm Schein said heartily, “Hi there, Mayerson; I’m the official greeter from our hovel. Welcome—ugh—to Mars.”

“I’m Fran Schein,” his wife said, also shaking hands with Barney Mayerson. “We have a very orderly, stable hovel here; I don’t think you’ll find it too dreadful.” She added, half to herself, “Just dreadful enough.” She smiled, but Mayerson did not smile back; he looked grim, tired, and depressed, as most new colonists did on arrival to a life which they knew was difficult and essentially meaningless. “Don’t expect us to sell you on the virtues of this,” she said. “That’s the UN’s job. We’re nothing more than victims like yourself. Except that we’ve been here a while.”

“Don’t make it sound so bad,” Norm said in warning.

“But it is,” Fran said. “Mr. Mayerson is facing it; he isn’t going to accept any pretty story. Right, Mr. Mayerson?”

“I could do with a little illusion at this point,” Barney said as he seated himself on a metal bench within the hovel entrance. The sand-plow which had brought him, meanwhile, unloaded his gear; he watched dully.

“Sorry,” Fran said.

“Okay to smoke?” Barney got out a package of Terran cigarettes; the Scheins stared at them fixedly and he then offered them each a chance at the pack, guiltily.

“You arrived at a difficult time,” Norm Schein explained. “We’re right in the middle of a debate.” He glanced around at the others. “Since you’re now a member of our hovel I don’t see why you shouldn’t be brought into it; after all it concerns you, too.”

Tod Morris said, “Maybe he’ll—you know. Tell.”

“We can swear him to secrecy,” Sam Regan said, and his wife Mary nodded. “Our discussion, Mr. Geyerson—”

“Mayerson,” Barney corrected.

“—Has to do with the drug Can-D, which is the old reliable translating agent we’ve depended on, versus the newer, untried drug Chew-Z; we’re debating whether to drop Can-D once and for all and—”

“Wait until we’re below,” Norm Schein said, and scowled.

Seating himself on the bench beside Barney Mayerson, Tod Morris said, “Can-D is kaput; it’s too hard to get, costs too many skins, and personally I’m tired of Perky Pat—it’s too artificial, too superficial, and matterialistality in—pardon; that’s our word here for—” He groped in difficult explanation. “Well, it’s apartments, cars, sunbathing on the beach, ritzy clothes… we enjoyed it for a while, but it’s not enough in some sort of unmatterialistality way. You see at all, Mayerson?”

Norm Schein said, “Okay, but Mayerson here hasn’t had that; he isn’t jaded. Maybe he’d appreciate going through all that.”

“Like we did,” Fran agreed. “Anyhow, we haven’t voted; we haven’t decided which we’re going to buy and use from now on. I think we ought to let Mr. Mayerson try both. Or have you already tried Can-D, Mr. Mayerson?”

“I did,” Barney said. “But a long time ago. Too long for me to remember clearly.” Leo had given it to him, and offered him more, big amounts, all he wanted. But he had declined; it hadn’t appealed to him.

Norm Schein said, “This is rather an unfortunate welcome to our hovel, I’m afraid, getting you embroiled in our controversy like this. But we’ve run out of Can-D; we either have to restock or switch: this is the critical moment. Of course the Can-D pusher, Impy White, is after us to reorder through her… by the end of tonight we’ll have decided one way or another. And it will affect all of us… for the rest of our lives.”

“So be glad you didn’t arrive tomorrow,” Fran said. “After the vote is taken.” She smiled at him encouragingly, trying to make him feel welcome; they had little to offer him except their mutual bond, the fact of their relatedness one to another, and this was extended now to him.

What a place, Barney Mayerson was thinking to himself. The rest of my life… it seemed impossible, but what they said was true. There was no provision in the UN selective service law for mustering out. And the fact was not an easy one to face; these people were the bodycorporate for him now, and yet—how much worse it could be. Two of their women seemed physically attractive and he could tell—or believed he could—that they were, so to speak, interested; he sensed the subtle interaction of the manifold complexities of the interpersonal relationships which built up in the cramped confines of a single hovel. But—

“The way out,” Mary Regan said quietly to him, seating herself on the side of the bench opposite Tod Morris, “is through one or the other of the translating drugs, Mr. Mayerson. Otherwise, as you can see—” She put her hand on his shoulder; the physical touch was there already. “It would be impossible. We’d simply wind up killing one another in our pain.”