Unloading began immediately; the trucks gulped packages and scurried like beetles toward the warehouses. Mail, merchandise, tools and luxuries—it was like a friendly greeting from old Earth.

Another line of vehicles was chuffing toward an empty shuttle with boxed and baled Martian goods, mostly drybean extract with a scattering of jewels, hopper pelts and prehistoric relics.

The Fleet had to work fast, deliver its cargo and get loaded and start home again in a few days.

Magarac found a place in the post office line and resigned himself to waiting an hour. He was a somewhat dehydrated-looking man with a gaunt ugly face and dry black hair. The coverall which protected him from the late-afternoon chill was the standard Martian garment, but as a well-to-do planter, he bore an expensive cloak patterned like a rainbow.

“Ah… impatient, I see, my friend.”

Magarac turned around. Oliver Latourelle had joined the queue behind him. The physicist was a well-nourished man with a plump, sharp-nosed face, watery blue eyes and bushy white hair fringing an egg-shaped skull. “Is it that you await mail from a fair one back on Earth?”

“Not any more,” said Magarac gloomily. “Three Mars-years was too long to wait.”

Latourelle clicked his tongue in sympathy. “The old tale, no? You are going to Mars to raise drybeans and make a fortune. But it takes long to become rich, even in the Dominion, and meanwhile the radio beams are too public and first-class mail is ten dollars an ounce.”

“I’m doing okay,” said Magarac defensively. “On Mars, that is. The trouble is that passage home would eat up half my money.” He didn’t like to discuss his personal affairs, but when there are barely 10,000 people on an entire planet, privacy hardly exists.