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Magnus Ryerson opened the door and waved them in. “I’d not expected you yet,” he said, which was as close as he would ever come to an apology. When he shut out the wind, there was a quietness which gaped.

This main room, brick-floored, whitewashed, irregular and solid, centered about a fireplace where peat burned low and blue. The chief concessions to the century were a radi-globe and a stunning close-up photograph of the Sirian binary. One did not count the pilot’s manuals or the stones and skins and gods brought from beyond the sky; after all, any old sea cap­tain would have kept his Bowditch and his souvenirs. The walls were lined with books as well as microspools. Most of the

full-size volumes were antique, for little was printed in En­glish these days.

Magnus Ryerson stood leaning on a cans of no Terrestrial wood. He was a huge man, two meters tall in his youth and not greatly stooped now, with breadth and thickness to match. His nose jutted craggily from a leather skin, shoulder-length white hair, breast-length white beard. Under tangled brows, the eyes were small and frost-blue. He wore the archaic local dress, a knitted sweater and canvas trousers. It came as a shock to realize after several minutes that his right hand was artificial.

“Well,” he rumbled at last, in fluent Interhuman, “so this is the bride. Tamara Sumito Ryerson, eh? Welcome, girl.” There was no great warmth in his tone.

She bent her face to folded hands. “I greet you most humbly, honorable father.” She was Australian, a typical high-class common of that province, fine-boned, bronze-hued, with blue-black hair and oblique brown eyes; but her beauty was typical nowhere. She had dressed with becoming modesty in a long white gown and a hooded cloak, no ornaments save a wedding band with the Ryerson monogram on it.

Magnus looked away from her, to his son. “Professor’s daughter, did you say?” he murmured in English.

“Professor of symbolics,” said David. He made his answer a defiance by casting it in the Interhuman which his wife under­stood. “We . . . Tamara and I . . . met at his home. I needed a background in symbolics to understand my own specialty and—”

“You explain too much,” said Magnus dryly. “Sit.”

He lowered himself into a chair. After a moment, David followed. The son was just turned twenty years old, a slender boy of average height with light complexion, thin sharp fea­tures, yellow hair, and his father’s blue eyes. He wore the tunic of a science graduate, with insignia of gravitics, self­consciously, but not so used to it that he would change for an ordinary civilian blouse.

T

AMARA made her way into the kitchen and began pre­paring tea. Magnus looked after her. “Well-trained, any­how,” he grunted in English. “So I suppose her family is at

least heathen, and not any of these latter-day atheists. That’s somewhat.”

David felt the island years, alone with his widower father, return to roost heavy upon him. He stifled an anger and said, also in English: “I couldn’t have made any better match. Even from some swinish practical standpoint. Not without mar­rying into a technic family, and—Would you want me to do that? I’ll gain technic rank on my own merits!”

“If you stay on Earth,” said Magnus. “Who notices a colo­nial?”

“Who notices an Earthling, among ten billion others?” snapped David. “On a new planet . . . on Rama . . . a man can be himself. These stupid hereditary distinctions won’t even matter.”

“There is room enough right here,” said Magnus. “As a boy you never used to complain Skula was crowded. On the con­trary!”

“And I would settle down with some illiterate beefy-faced good Christian fishwife you picked for me and breed more servants for the Protectorate, all my life!”

The words had come out before David thought. Now, in a kind of dismay, he waited for his father’s reaction. This man had ordered him out into a winter gale, or supperless to bed, for fifteen years out of twenty. In theory the grown son was free of him, free of everyone save contractual overlords and whatever general had most recently seized the title of Protec­tor. In practice it was not so easy. David knew with a chill that he would never have decided to emigrate without Tamara’s unarrogant and unbendable will to stiffen his. He would prob­ably never even have married her, without more than her father’s consent, against the wish of his own—David gripped the worn arms of his chair.