Sentimentalists

On a distant world, young farmers Lon and Cathy face a brutal truth: they're prisoners of the very company that promised them a future. The corporation has designed their equipment to fail, their crops to be mortgaged before harvest, their dreams to be collateral on a debt that never decreases. They work land that feeds everyone but them, raising profitable Thanar leaves while slowly starving. But they're not alone in the galaxy. Passing through the solar system are Rhadampsicus and Nodalictha, ancient beings with sixteen eye stalks who study humanity as a curious specimen. They find human marriage genuinely puzzling: why would any species bind itself to one partner for life? Why call that devotion "love" rather than weakness? Murray Leinster's 1952 classic is a sharp, witty inversion of the first-contact formula. Instead of humans studying aliens, we become the subject of alien curiosity. The question at its heart is one science fiction has never stopped asking: what makes our attachments to each other irrational, and what makes them sacred?