Title: Nightmare tower
Author: Merwin, Sam
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Nightmare tower" ***


                            nightmare tower

                        By Jacques Jean Ferrat

                   Lynne disliked the man from Mars
                     on sight. Yet drawn by forces
                    beyond her control she let him
                   carry her off to the Red Planet.

    _A new magazine should bring a new name to science fiction--and
    in this very novel and moving story we believe we are launching a
    career that will help make 1953 memorable._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                  Fantastic Universe June-July 1953.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Lynne Fenlay had had a few headaches in the course of her twenty-four
years. But she had never had a headache like this.

There had been one as a result of her first field-hockey practice
at the seminar, when she was twelve and the hard rubber ball caught
her squarely above the left eye. There had been another, five years
later, when she had used a guided trip to Manhattan during the
Christmas holidays to experiment with a bottle of crême de menthe in
the unaccustomed solitude of a hotel room. There had been a third as
the result of overwork, while she was adjusting to her job with the
group-machine.

Each of them had been the result of an easily discovered cause. This
headache had come out of nowhere, for no perceptible reason. It showed
no signs of going away. Lynne had visited a health-check booth as soon
as she could find the time after the discomfort became noticeable.
The stamped response on the card had been as disconcerting as it was
vague--_Psychosomatic_.

Lynne looked across the neoplast tabletop at Ray Cornell and wondered
with mild malevolence if her fiancé could be responsible for her
discomfort. His spoonful of Helthplankton halfway to his mouth, Ray
was smiling at something Janet Downes had said. In her self-absorption
Lynne had not heard Janet's remark. Knowing Janet as she did, however,
she was certain it had undertones of sex.

With his fair height and breadth of shoulder, his tanned good-looking
features beneath short-cropped light hair, Ray wore all the outward
trademarks of a twelfth-century Viking chief or a twentieth-century
football hero. But inside, Lynne thought, he was a Mickey Mouse. His
very gentleness, his willingness to adjust, made him easily led.

Lynne forced herself to down another spoonful of Helthplankton and
thought it tasted exactly like what it was--an artificial compound
composed of sea-creatures, doctored up to taste like cereal.

Mother Weedon looked down at her from the head of the table and said,
"What's the matter, Lynne--don't you feel well?"

"I'm all right, Mother Weedon," she said. She felt a pang of fear that
stirred the discomfort between her temples. If she were really sick,
mentally or physically, Mother Weedon might recommend that she be
dropped from the team. After therapy she would be reassigned to some
other group--and the thought was insupportable.

"Don't worry about our Lynne." Janet's tone bore a basis of mockery.
"She has the stamina of a Messalina."

Damn Janet! Lynne regarded the other third of the team with
resentment. Trust her to bring a name like Messalina into it. Even Ray
caught the implied meaning and blushed beneath his tan. Mother Weedon
looked at Lynne suspiciously.

"Better take things a bit easier," Mother Weedon suggested tolerantly.
"After all, the team comes first."

"I know," Lynne said listlessly. She pushed her food away from her and
waited sullenly while the others finished theirs. Unable to face the
possibility of mental illness, she concentrated on Janet, wondered what
the girl was trying to do.

There was always danger of conflict, she supposed, when two young
women and a young man were set up as a team. Usually the members were
balanced the other way or were all of one sex. But mentally at any rate
Lynne and Janet meshed perfectly with Ray. So they had been assigned
to live and work together on the group-machine under Mother Weedon's
watchful eye. They had been together now for eleven months.

The trouble with Janet, Lynne thought, was that she wasn't the sort of
girl who registered on men at first sight. She was tall, her lack of
curves concealed by astute willowiness of movement, her half-homely
face given second-glance allure by a deliberately and suggestively
functional use of lips and eyes. Janet was competitively sexy.

Lynne, who was as casually aware of her own blond loveliness as any
well-conditioned and comely young woman, had not considered Janet
seriously as a rival when she had fallen in love with Ray Cornell. Now,
rubbed almost raw by the discomfort of her headache, Lynne decided she
had underrated Janet. She was either going to have to get Ray back in
line or turn him over to the other third of their team. Either way
promised complications for the future....

The three of them walked the thousand meters to the brain-station,
avoiding the moving sidewalk strips that would have sped them there in
three minutes instead of fifteen. Lynne, who usually enjoyed the stroll
through the carefully landscaped urban scenery, found herself resenting
its familiarity. Besides, her head still ached.

As they moved past the bazaar-block, halfway to their destination,
Lynne found herself wincing at the brightness of the window-displays.
Usually she found the fluorescent tri-di shows stimulating--but
not today. Nor was her mood helped when Janet, nodding toward the
plasti-fur coats in one of them said, "I wish I'd lived a century ago,
when a girl really had to work to win herself a mink coat."

And Ray replied with a smile she could only interpret as a leer, "You'd
have been a right busy little mink yourself, Jan."

Janet gurgled and hugged his other arm and Lynne barely repressed an
anti-social impulse to snap, "Shut _up_!" at both of them.

Lynne wondered what was wrong with her. Surely by this time she ought
to be used to Janet's continuous and generally good-humored use of the
sex challenge on any male in the vicinity. It hadn't bothered her much
until the headache began two days ago. Nor had Ray's good-nature seemed
such a weakness. Hitherto she had found it sweet.

On impulse she said, "You two go ahead. I'm going to have a colafizz.
Maybe it will knock some of the beast out of me."

"You could stand having a little more of it knocked into you, darling,"
said Janet. This time Ray said nothing.

Lynne entered a pharmabar and pressed the proper buttons, sipped the
stinging-sweet retort-shaped plastitumbler slowly. The mild stimulant
relaxed her a little, caused the ache in her head to subside to a dull
discomfort. She felt almost human as she took one of the moving strips
the rest of the way so as not to be late to work.

Their studioff was situated halfway up the massive four-hundred meter
tower of the brain-station. It was shaped like a cylinder cut in half
vertically and contained a semicircular table with banks of buttons in
front of each seat-niche. The walls were luminous in whatever color or
series of colors was keyed to the problem faced by the team. At the
moment it was blank, a sort of alabaster-ivory in tone.

Ray and Janet were already in their places. Their conversation ceased
abruptly as Lynne entered and slid into her lounger and slipped on the
collar that keyed her to the machine. She wondered what Janet had been
saying about her, what Ray had been replying.

_I'm turning into a paranoiac_, she thought, managed a smile of sorts
and said aloud, "What's today's problem?"

"Feel better, honey?" Ray asked her. Lynne nodded.

Janet, obviously uninterested, said, "Disposal of waste-foods so as
to be useful to highway construction in Assam--without disruption of
traffic-loads in Patagonia."

"Another of _those_!" said Lynne with a sigh. But she got to work
almost automatically, keying her impulses to fit those of Ray and
Janet. For the time being personal and emotional problems were laid
aside. They were a single unit--a machine that was part of the greater
machine--that was in turn part of the administration of Earth. For this
work they had been trained and conditioned all their lives.

       *       *       *       *       *

Early in the century--some fifty years back--when the cybernetic
machine had been regulated to their proper functions of recording and
assemblage only, of non-mathematical factors, the use of human teams,
working as supplements to the machines themselves, had been conceived
and formulated by the Earth Government.

No machine, however complex and accurate, could reflect truly the
human factors in a problem of social import. For such functions it
possessed the fatal weakness of being non-human. Hence the integration
of people _and_ atomo-electrical brains. Thanks to their collars the
human factors received the replies of the machine-brains through mental
impulses instead of on plasti-tape.

By means of the buttons before them they could key their questions
to the portion of the machine desired. For specific requests and
interkeying with one another they used, respectively, a small throat
microphone attached to their collars and direct oral communication.

Janet was the analyst of the team--it was a detail job, a memory job,
one which usually went to a woman. And she was good. She culled from
the messages given her by the machine those which bore most directly
upon the problem.

_Assam--vegetarian culture--grain husks unused for plastics because
of blight-weakness following second A-war--could serve as fifth-depth
foundation for second-run non-moving byways.... Patagonia first-line
producer of non-weakened grain husks--transportation limited by
seasonal deep-frost--atomic heat considered uneconomical for this
problem--transportation limited to third-class surface vehicles--_

Ray checked the stream of information selected by Janet. _Seek
possibility of using synthetic mesh on temporary laydown basis._... Ray
was team coordinator, who assembled the facts selected by Janet, put
them in shape toward solution of the problem.

Then it was Lynne's turn. In a way, save that all three of them were
vital to team-success, she was top-dog. It was up to her to listen to
Janet's stream of information, to follow Ray's assembly job, to say,
"This will work," or, "This will not work," or perhaps, "This will work
if we do such-and-such, rather than thus-and-so."

There weren't many who could fill this job of synthesizer without
too-wide variance from the judgments of the machine itself.
Consequently there weren't very many teams actually at work--perhaps
a score, give or take a few, at any one time. Such synthesization
demanded a quality almost akin to intuition--but intuition disciplined
and controlled to give results as often as needed.

She concentrated now, though her head was troubling her again, keying
her whole being to Janet, then to Ray. And to her horror she began
to get a picture--not of the problem of using waste matter to abet
highway construction in Assam without disrupting the climate-limited
transportation of Patagonia, but of the thoughts and feelings of Janet
Downes.

It was frightening to realize that she was reading everything Janet
kept carefully concealed behind the sardonic mask of her personality.
It was disturbing to discover how much she herself was resented and
hated and feared by Janet. It was horrifying to learn how hungry was
Janet, how she thirsted to smash Lynne's attachment to Ray, how she
planned to use the problem of the headache to discredit Lynne, not only
with Mother Weedon and the Mind-Authority but with Ray himself.

_I must be going crazy_, Lynne thought and became sickeningly aware
that she had missed a query from Ray. She turned her attention toward
him, found herself enmeshed in a confused jumble of thoughts in which
Janet figured with shocking carnality, while she herself was fully
clothed and placed on a pedestal resembling a huge and grotesquely ugly
frog. _Why_, she thought, _Ray fears me--almost hates me!_

Once again she had lost the thread. Desperately she strove to catch up,
found herself issuing an answer. _Suggest employment of sea-transport
to solve problem._

Where had that one come from? Lynne wondered. The ocean lanes had not
been used for two-thirds of a century, save for fishing and excursions.
But hundreds of the old double-hulled cataliners of the pre-atomic
air-age were still in their huge cocoon-capsules in various nautical
undertakers' parlors.

She watched the large indicator breathlessly, wondering what the
machine would answer. Almost certainly a 1.3 variation--which would
mean the problem would be shunted to another team. An 0.2 variation was
considered normal. Lynne's decisions, over the eleven months of her
assignment, had averaged 0.13. Her best mark had been an 0.08.

She caught a flash of Janet's thoughts ... _lucky SSG so-and-so! She
wasn't even paying attention!_ Rigorously Lynne forced herself to
concentrate on the large indicator. It flashed a warning blue, then
yellow, then red--and then showed a round single 0!

It was, Lynne thought, impossible. No team had ever, in the entire
history of human-cybernetic integration, produced an answer without a
single variance with the machine. The best on record was an 0.056 by
Yunakazi in East-Asia Center. And he had never come close to it again.

Lynne nodded to the rest of them and unfastened her collar. She felt
a little sick to her stomach. An 0-variant answer was supposed to be
impossible. But she had attained one, and at a time when her mind had
been wandering, thanks not only to her malaise but because of her
shocking telepathic experience. She wondered dully if the two factors
were integrated in her incredible result.

"... like the monkeys with fifty million typewriters composing a
Shakespearean sonnet, probability ultimately favors it," Ray was
saying. "Lynne, let's try another. What's the next problem, Jan?"

"Poor reaction of 11th age-group children in Honduras to gnomics during
the months of July and August," Janet said promptly. "Wanted--its
causes and cure."

Lynne listened in a sort of stupor. When she felt telepathic messages
impinging upon her mind she forced them out. She only half-heard
Janet's smooth assemblage of facts. Ray's coordination and selection of
those most relevant. And then she thought quickly, _Climate change to
42 per-cent lower humidity, expense contained by use in schools only
and segregation of children during crucial months._

Again the flashes from the indicator--again the zero.

Janet regarded Lynne with odd speculation in her hazel eyes, Ray looked
a little frightened. Lynne said, "I don't know what's going on but my
head is killing me. I'm going home and rest."

"What about our date tonight?" Ray asked quickly--too quickly.

She studied him a long moment. She _did_ love him, she _did_ want to
marry him, she _did_ want to bear his children--or did she? She was
going to have to face the problem squarely and do it soon. She said, "I
guess you'd better give me a rain-check, honey."

She walked out the door with a vivid picture of what Janet was
thinking. Janet was going to do her damnedest to take Ray away from
her that night by the oldest and still the most effective weapon a
woman could use. And if Lynne tried to make trouble about it she
intended to make trouble for Lynne.

As for Ray--he didn't seem to have any thoughts at all. He was a sort
of Thurber male, cowering in his corner while the dominant females
fought over him. The only hitch, Lynne decided, was that there wasn't
going to be any fight. Janet could have him ... in spades!

       *       *       *       *       *

She took the moving sidewalk back to Mother Weedon's. For almost a
year the trim white dome with its curved polarized picture windows
and pink Martian vines had represented home and shelter and a prized
individuality after the group-existence of school dormitories.

Now it looked like half an egg of some menacing unearthly bird, half
an egg into which she must crawl and hide, unsure of how long it would
afford her shelter. Even Mother Weedon, a shrewd and kindly widow of
sixty whose strength and good-humor made her the ideal team-matron,
looked alien and oddly menacing.

She caught the older woman's thoughts as she entered the house. _What's
happened to Lynne? Always thought that girl was too bottled up. She
should have married Ray six months ago. He's not the sort of male even
a girl as pretty as Lynne can keep on a string indefinitely--not with
a harpy like Janet in the picture...._

Mechanically Lynne ran her fingers down the magnezipper of her blue
plastifleece jacket, deposited it carefully against the magnetic hook
on the wall of the entry. She felt a renewed weakness, a sickness that
made her head throb more severely than ever. All the way back from the
brain-station she had been seeking reassurance in the probability that
her sudden telepathic ability was caused by some stimulation of the
machine, would vanish when she broke contact with it.

Now she knew better--and her panic increased. She almost ran to the
escalator so she wouldn't have to exchange chatter with Mother Weedon.
She literally had to be alone.



                                  II


Lynne stirred uneasily on her plastomat. She knew she was there, felt
sure she was not asleep. Yet the dream persisted, holding her in a grip
that was tighter than reality.

She was alone in a strange crystaline chamber, high, high up in a
strange crystaline tower. Thanks to the fact there was no metal in its
construction, nowhere was there rust. Yet her chamber, like the tower
itself, showed definite signs of age and ruin.

An irregular segment of one wall had been penetrated by a missile
of some sort and patched with plastic spray to keep out the thin,
chill, unending wind. On lower levels, she knew, were larger scars of
long-forgotten destruction. Just above the transparent arched ceiling
what had been an elaborate tracery of gleaming flying buttresses, their
functional purpose long since lost, stood precariously in a pattern of
ruin.

Here and there about her, other surviving towers of the city rose in
more serious stages of decay. And far below, on the windswept square,
huddled the gleaming egg-shaped shelters of the Earthfolk. Beyond the
city area the red desert and green oases stippled off to the dark
horizon or advanced to invade the steep scarp of the far bank of the
great canal.

Lynne was alone in a tower on Mars. Instruments, strange to her
eyes but stamped with the familiar patterns of Earthly design and
manufacture, lined three walls of the chamber. She knew she should take
the downlift and return to the tiny cluster of Earth-dwellings in the
court below, that her tour of duty was ended.

Yet she could not leave. Voices whispered within her head and tugged at
her emotions, voices whose owners she could not see, whose embodiment
lurked ever just beyond the range of her eyes, no matter how quickly
she rolled them. Voices that begged for her assistance, offering
unheard-of pleasures as a reward, unthought-of torments as punishment
for her refusal to cooperate.

They were strange voices, whose message bore the corrupt cynicism
of the very old, coupled with the naïve enjoyments of long deferred
second childhood--alien voices. Or were they alien? Wasn't it rather
that _she_ was the alien, like those other Earthfolk who lived in
the cluster of pathetic little huts below, who strove to reclaim the
too-lean atmosphere of a planet, most of which had long-since escaped
into the star-studded black-velvet backdrop of space.

Yes, it was _she_ who was alien. And with the thought came another, a
_human_ picture, so horrible, so gruesome, that her mind refused to
accept it. Yet she knew it was vitally important she see it clearly.
But the others, the invisibles, kept derailing her concentration with
their whispers of joys unknown before to mortal man or woman, their
soft threats of torments beyond those conceived by Dante himself.

"Let us in," they offered softly, with the mischief of the very old.
"Let us in and we shall romp and travel and find new uses for your
bodies. We shall live side by side within you and lead you to pleasures
no souls contained by bodies can ever know. We shall...."

There was something Lynne should ask them, an answer to their
Saturnalian bribery--but like their visibility it refused to rise to
the upper level of her consciousness. She felt sudden shame at not
being able to speak, fear at her inability to marshal needed thoughts,
fear that grew quickly into terror while the all-important question
struggled vainly to make itself uttered.

Laughing like rollicking imps, the whisperers closed in a hemisphere
about and above her, dancing in weird joyous malicious rhythm and
bottling up reason as effectively as a plastivial. All at once she
found herself holding her head and screaming at them to go away....

Lynne woke up. She discovered herself already sitting erect on the
plastomat, supported by hands that dug into its pneumatic surface.
She looked wildly around her, noted the familiar tri-di picture of
Victoria Falls on the wall, the blank vidarscreen on its stand beside
the magnicloset entry, the picwindow with its familiar vista of morning
sunlight and greenery outside Mother Weedon's.

Only then did she become aware that her headache was worse. It seemed
to grow with each successive morning. During the day it lapsed at times
to mere vague discomfort, and with the aid of a couple of syntholaud
pills she was able to sleep. But when she awoke each following morning
it seemed a trifle worse.

She stepped into the bathostall, which performed all functions of
cleansing and elimination simultaneously, felt briefly better and got
into sandals, clout and bolero, polarizing them to a gaudy scarlet,
which clashed with her fair coloring but expressed her mood of
defiance, not only at her own ailments but the personal treachery of
Janet and the waverability of Ray Cornell.

Mother Weedon smiled approval of this gay gesture when Lynne took her
place at the breakfast table. "I'm glad you're feeling better, Lynne,"
she said. "I've been worried about you lately."

"Really putting it on, aren't you, honey?" Janet asked with a trace of
resentment. She had polarized her own costume to a soft pink, which was
washed out by Lynne's bold color-scheme. Nor could she change it during
the day without revealing her defeat.

"Delicious!" exclaimed Ray, ogling her with delight and pouring
paprisal instead of sucral on his Helthplankton.

Lynne laughed as she hadn't laughed in days. She wondered why she
felt so suddenly light-hearted and happy, especially after her waking
nightmare. Then, suddenly, she realised she was utterly unaware of what
the others were thinking. She was no longer telepathic. She was normal
once more!

However, it required no telepathic powers to sense that Ray was in a
sadly shattered state over whatever had happened between Janet and
himself on their date the night before. Lynne surmised that her rival
had enticed Ray into full courtship, that he was now suffering from
remorse, revulsion and a resurgence of desire for herself.

She wondered why she didn't care, then realised that Janet was no
longer her rival. Ray was a nice boy, a highly trained and talented
boy--but she wasn't in love with him any more. There were, she thought,
probably half a billion unattached males in the world at any given
moment, many of them far more interesting and attractive than Ray
Cornell. All she had to do was look for them....

Headache and nightmare receded further with each mouthful of breakfast
she ate. Her appetite was back and she kidded brightly with a miserable
Ray and a rather sullen and suspicious Janet all the way to the
brain-station. And then things began to happen that shattered her
new-found adjustment.

She was barred from entry to the studioff. The electroscreen admitted
Ray and Janet as usual but remained an invisible wall that refused her
admittance. She was no longer keyed to the group-machine. Before she
could try again a magnovox said, "Please report to Integration Chief on
Floor Eighty. Please report to Integration Chief on...."

Ray looked scared. Disruption of a team during working hours was an
emotional shock. Even Janet showed traces of fright. But she managed a
grin and said, "Give him the old treatment, Lynne, and you can't lose."
She accompanied the remark with a thoroughly carnal bump.

Lynne said nothing, being incapable of speech. She turned and made her
way to the mobilramp, had a sudden vivid recollection of the older but
far more efficient lift on the Martian tower in her dream. She felt
sick to her stomach and her headache was thumping again.

She had never been on the eightieth floor before--it was reserved for
guiding geniuses, who had no time for mere group-machine members except
in case of trouble. Lynne wondered what she had done as she entered a
room with walls of soft rolling colors.

The man on the couch, a tall lean saturnine man with dark eyes that
seemed to read right through her from out of a long lined white face,
didn't leave her long in doubt. He said, "Miss Fenlay, I'm afraid
I have bad news for you. As a result of your amazing performance
yesterday your usefulness as a group-machine worker is ended."

"But I was right," she protested. "I had the first zero-variation in
integration history."

"You needn't be so frightened," he said more gently. "I know this must
be a severe emotional shock. You were right--by the machine. We need
human factors in cybernetics to show us where the machines are wrong,
not where they are right. To come up with two successive zero-variant
answers implies some sort of rapport with the machine itself. We can't
afford to take further chances."

Lynne sat down abruptly on an empty couch. She felt empty inside, said,
"What am I to do?"

The tall dark man's smile was a trifle frosty. He said, "We've been
watching you, of course. About all I can tell you, Miss Fenlay, is that
your--er--aberration is not exactly a surprise."

"You mean you've been spying on me?" Even though Lynne was thoroughly
conditioned to accept her life as part of a complex mechano-social
integration, she found the idea of being spied upon unpleasant.

"Not really," he told her. "And don't worry. We have no intention of
letting your remarkable gifts go to waste." He paused, added, "I hope
your headache is better soon."

"Thank you," she said. She was outside before the full implications
of his parting shot sank home. How had he or anyone known she was
suffering from headache? She had reported it to no one--and the
helth-check booth machine was not geared to give confidential evidence
or to retain personality keys for checking.

It was a puzzle. She worked on it until she was almost back at Mother
Weedon's, then realised the Integration Chief had given her no hint of
a new assignment--had only suggested she was to be used. She began to
wonder if laboratory test-animals suffered from headaches like the one
which seemed to have led to her undoing.

There was no escaping Mother Weedon, who was enjoying a tri-di
vidarcast in full view of the front door as Lynne came in. Well, the
girl thought, she was going to have to be told anyway--if she hadn't
already got the news from the brain-station.

Evidently Mother Weedon had heard. She motioned the girl to sit beside
her on her couch and said, "Don't worry, Lynne. You're going to be
fine. The trouble with you is you've outgrown your job--yes, and Janet
and Ray and me too. You can't help it. You're too good for us and
that's that. They'll be moving you on."

"But I _like_ it here," cried Lynne. "I like you and Jan and Ray and
our work with the group-machine. I don't want it to change."

"But it will--everything changes," said Mother Weedon gently. "I'm
glad you've been happy here. But your happiness has meant Janet's
unhappiness and, more lately, Ray's."

"I--see," Lynne said slowly. She hadn't thought of things in that
light before. But of course it was true. The first real home she had
ever known was about to be taken from her and the experience was too
personal to allow much detached thinking.

Like most genetically-controlled children whose double-birth had
been successful, she had been brought up with functional rather than
sentimental care. Not having known her parents, not having known her
twin brother on Mars, she had never missed them. The teachers and
matrons at the seminary had been carefully selected for their warmth
and competence. There had always been plenty of playmates, plenty of
interesting things to learn.

Living at Mother Weedon's had been a new and emotionally opening
experience, as had the blossoming of her romance with Ray Cornell, her
now-fractured friendship with Janet Downes. It was not going to be easy
to leave, to tear up only recently established roots, to set down new
ones which might in time be as ruthlessly sundered.

She felt frightened and very much alone, as if she were again in the
Martian tower of her nightmare with only alien and disembodied voices
speaking to her. Mars--she wondered a little about it. Somewhere on
Mars was her twin, Revere Fenlay, the brother she could not remember.
She wondered if he too were having troubles. There were stories
floating about of twins whose rapport spanned lifetimes separated by
the distance between the planets. But she knew nothing of Mars.

She watched a vidarcast with Mother Weedon, an unreal historical
romance of love and adventure in one of the vast sprawling
industrial empires of the mid-twentieth century. There was,
for twenty-second-century folk, a vast emotional appeal in the
job-competition, the hard compulsory physical toil, the dangers of that
exciting era. But Lynne was too wrapped up in her own problem to react
as usual.

While she and Mother Weedon were lunching on pineapple soup and
Bermudasteak with shadbacon and lacticola, Ray and Janet came in. They
pretended concern at what had happened to Lynne and the team but were
obviously excited with one another and the prospect of integrating a
new member of the team in Lynne's place.

After the meal Janet and Lynne were briefly alone in the vidaroom.
Janet eyed Lynne covertly and Lynne said, "It's all right, Jan. I'm
not going to put up a fight for Ray. Under the circumstances it's only
fair. I don't know what's going to happen to me and you and him--"

"Damn you, Lynne Fenlay!" Janet's sudden flare of hot emotion was
almost frightening. "You _would_ be like this. Don't you realise that
by being noble you'll leave both of us with a guilt complex we'll never
be able to shake?"

"Sorry," said Lynne sincerely. "I can't help it."

Janet regarded her narrowly, shook her head. "Hasn't anything ever
touched you, Lynne?" she asked. "Haven't you ever wanted Ray or anyone
as I want him? Haven't you ever hated anyone as I'm beginning to hate
you? Haven't you ever been human?"

"_Jan!_" Lynne was shocked, then vaguely frightened. "I don't know--I
guess maybe not," she said. "But Jan, I can't help it. That's the way I
am."

Janet sighed and said, "In that case I'm sorry for you." She changed
the subject quickly as Ray came wandering in, gave Lynne an unhappy
look, then crossed the room and turned on the vidarscreen. Peace of an
uneasy sort reigned for the next hour.

"When are they assigning your new member?" Lynne asked as the picture,
a documentary about solar heat, came to an end.

"Not for a day or so," said Ray. He looked at her piteously. "We--we're
going to miss you, Lynne. I wish I understood...."

"You're going to be too busy," Lynne told him. "And don't worry about
me, Ray. I've already talked to Jan."

"You mean you're not angry about _us_?"

Lynne shook her head, glanced at Janet, was again startled by the
blazing hatred that was beamed her way. She wondered what it must feel
like to hate in such thorough fashion. She was relieved when she heard
Mother Weedon talking to someone at the door.

A moment later the widow entered and said, "This is Rolf Marcein, kids.
He's going to be staying with us a little while." She introduced the
three of them to the newcomer.

Lynne barely acknowledged the greeting. She was too startled. The most
recent addition to Mother Weedon's charmed circle appeared, in the
semi-dark room, to be the man who had given her her walking papers that
morning on the eightieth floor of the brain-station tower.

He was tall, dark, lanky, saturnine. His name was Marcein. At least
that was something Lynne hadn't known before. And then she noticed
that this Marcein's face was not so pale, that his eyes were brighter,
his manner and movements more athletically poised than the man on the
eightieth floor. Mother Weedon pressed the polarizer to let more light
into the room, since the vidarbox was not on. The stranger's tan, seen
in the light, was startling, especially to Lynne, who had seen his pale
double so recently.

       *       *       *       *       *

His double--that meant his twin, she thought. And if his twin worked in
the brain-station, then _this_ man must be a Martian. Certainly that
would account for his tan, caused by living under the thin atmosphere
of the red planet--as it would account for an athletic poise acquired
during the hardships of Martian existence.

_You're right, of course. I am Dolf's twin and I am from Mars._

It took her almost a full second to realise the thoughts had not been
spoken. She was telepathic again, aware not only of the newcomer's
thoughts but of those of the others in the room--though not as much
aware of theirs as of Rolf Marcein's.

She looked at him with something like panic, saw his brilliant dark
eyes upon her, noted that he wore his clothes well, that there was
something almost lupine in his grace, something almost overpowering....

_You must know you're beautiful yourself, Lynne Fenlay--if soft and
unawakened. I have an idea I could turn the trick...._

It was like a blow. Not only could she read _his_ thoughts, Lynne
realised--but he could read _hers_. She felt her face flame and a
sudden surge of resentment toward his arrogance that forced her to
leave the room lest she reveal the weakness it caused. And as she left
his soft laughter rang like hailstones in her ears.



                                  III


The days that followed Rolf Marcein's arrival at Mother Weedon's
became, to Lynne, a period of waiting. It was a period of waiting games
as well. No summons came from the eightieth floor of the brain-station
to give her a clue as to the nature of her next assignment. For the
first time in her life she found herself hung in a vacuum with nothing
definite to do or to look forward to.

Naturally she wondered whether Rolf Marcein might not be the answer
to this facet of her problem. But not even her growing telepathic
abilities could pry a response out of his mind. He seemed to be
visiting the home planet on the vaguest sort of business--something to
do with development and transport of specially-bred plant and animal
stock for the red planet.

It seemed absurd on the face of it that such an obviously able adjustee
should be returned to Earth on such a mission, especially with every
gram of interplanetary ship-space at a premium. Yet either it was
truth or Rolf had developed some method of screening his thoughts
against telepathic probing--a frightening idea in itself.

He hung around Mother Weedon's most of the time. As a result Lynne
saw a lot of him throughout the days and evenings, a fact which both
pleased and alarmed her unreasonably. It was during the third night of
his stay that he invaded, or tried to invade, her nights as well.

Before drifting off to sleep she found herself dwelling on him with
relaxed reverie. Ray and Janet had had some sort of quarrel and the
atmosphere that evening had been far from pleasant. It was a relief to
lie alone, to let her thoughts roam and quest as they would.

Rolf had talked of Mars during a stroll to the bazaar-mart during the
afternoon. He had described a boar-hunt on Earth's sister-planet during
a night when both Deimos and Phobos were describing their rapid orbits
across the cloudless sky.

The pig, as man's most adaptable food-animal, had been the first
livestock imported to Mars less than three decades earlier. Now,
according to Rolf, the animals had in large measure reverted to their
feral state and constituted a menace to man and his works alike.

"We used flashlights and small-arms paralyzers on that hunt," Rolf
said. "We flushed a whole herd of them in an erosion-gully along the
border of the Great Southern Canal--didn't get so much as a smell of
the brutes until we were right on top of them.

"At that we managed to nab a baker's dozen for de-tusking and
redomestication. _Ferkab_, it was touch and go for a bit! One big
brute slipped under my ray and if I hadn't been lucky enough to jam my
flashlight tube into his mouth he'd have taken my leg off."

"What does _ferkab_ mean?" Lynne asked, a little annoyed at feeling an
atavistic thrill from the account of the primitive hunt.

To her delight Rolf actually blushed beneath his tan. He began with, "I
don't think you'd appreciate its meaning," then recalled her telepathic
powers and shut up and blushed more deeply.

At which it had been Lynne's turn to feel her face grow hot. The
meaning of _ferkab_, an approximate translation of certain graphically
illustrated ancient Martian runes, was explicit to the point of
bawdiness. Yet on Mars, apparently, it was used in mixed company.

So, lying half asleep, Lynne not surprisingly visualised the boar hunt
as Rolf had described it. She could see his weatherproof aluminum
clothing gleaming in the pale light of the swift tiny moons, shining
in the occasional ray of a flashlight as he and his shadowy companions
worked their way along the eroded bank of the canal.

Then the sudden rustle and thump and grunting of the beasts as they
came charging out of their threatened shelter, their vast menacing
shapes with huge tusks and little red eyes glittering in the confused
crisscross of flashlight rays. She saw the paralyzers' brief glow,
heard the thud of falling animal bodies, saw the sudden rush of one
furious beast inside the protective sweep of Rolf's hand-weapon, saw
his quick graceful evasive movement, heard the champ of savage tusks
crushing the hard alloy of the metal tube.

       *       *       *       *       *

Once, on the vidarscreen, she had watched a toreador do his dance of
death with a furious bull, in an historical show. Rolf, she thought,
was slim as a toreador, slim and graceful and equally accustomed to
facing danger and death as an accepted part of life.

Then, she told herself scornfully, she was reverting to the primitive
as if she were a Martian sow herself. She thought of the word _ferkab_
and what it meant and felt her face grow hot in the darkness. For she
could visualise Rolf and--herself--in a way she had never been able to
think of herself with Ray Cornell.

_It's not confined to Mars, darling_, came the sudden probe of Rolf's
thought over hers. _But it takes a Martian to be the best._

Reverie was obliterated by rage. She sent back a string of thoughts
that should have blistered Rolf's brains--if he had any decency. He
withdrew before her counterattack and she wondered if he really did
have any decency--or if her rage were all she had pretended.

She was cool to him the next day--and the arrival of the new member of
the group-machine gave her opportunity to avoid him. Her replacement
was a dark stocky quiet young man named Alan Waters and he seemed quite
smitten with her--a fact which made Janet visibly jealous. Lynne found
herself quite enjoying her triumph.

But the day after, when the other three reported for work at the
brain-station and Mother Weedon visited the bazaar-mart for some needed
household supplies, Lynne found herself looking at a mischievously
contrite Rolf across the breakfast table.

He said, "I'm sorry if I've offended you, Lynne. Apparently I made the
mistake of thinking you had blood in your veins."

Lynne acted without volition for the first time since early babyhood.
She picked up the plastisaucer in front of her and flung it across the
neoplast tabletop at him. He ducked and for a moment his dark eyes
blazed with laughter and then he sensed her distress and helped her
with the atocleaner.

She tried to apologize but the words refused to come. And he never
mentioned the incident afterward. Instead he took her for a walk
through the park and talked to her of the more feral beauties of his
own planet. "It's far wilder than this," he told her, gesturing at the
neat clusters of trees and flowers, the perfectly clipped hedges about
them. "Wilder and deadlier and far more beautiful."

"This is perfection," she told him.

"And perfection is death," was his reply.

"I thought Mars pretty much a dead planet," she said.

"It's a vast mausoleum," he said, his eyes lighting. "A mausoleum
visited by new life, a mausoleum in which the very souls of the dead
themselves seem beginning to stir. It's raw new life burgeoning on the
old."

He talked on and she felt the beginnings of small responses stir within
her and frighten her. For she had been conditioned to Earth and to wish
for Mars was wrong. Finally he stopped and faced her and captured both
her hands in his incredibly strong ones.

"Lynne," he said. "I haven't much longer here. I want to take you back
home with me. Will you come?"

"Home--on _Mars_?" she countered. The idea was impossible. Yet,
somewhere within herself, she wanted to go. Then the reasons, the
millions of reasons why she couldn't say yes, came flooding up within
her. Surely Rolf knew them--or did he?

"You know the system and the reasons behind it," she reminded him. "You
have a twin right here in the city. I've talked to him--it was he who
gave me my walking papers from the group-machine."

"He told me," said Rolf quietly. "He told me a lot about you. Enough so
I wanted to see you and get to know you. Now that I do know you I want
you to go back with me. Can't you see, darling? There's little use for
telepaths on Earth. On Mars we need them desperately. I think I can
arrange a transfer."

"But my brother is already there," she told him a little desperately.
"I--we--they can't leave two of us on one planet. And what right have I
to ask him to come to Earth? He's not conditioned."

"But maybe he'd like to come back," Rolf suggested. "Maybe he's not
happy on Mars."

"It's not just that," she said miserably. Nor was it. For the first
time the entire system by which the Mars project was functioning seemed
to her vastly unfair. Until that moment she had accepted it, considered
it as immutable as the need for the sun itself.

The Earth Government, which was what the U.N. had evolved into after
its first tortured half-century of birth, was determined not to repeat
upon alien planets the mistakes of imperialism and colonization that
had caused the home planet all but to tear itself to pieces during the
twentieth century.

No convicts, no misfits, no refugee cultists were to be sent out to
settle the newly-opened red planet--instead, the cream of Earth's best
trained, most gifted and strongest young men and women were to do the
preliminary settling. For it would still be many years before the arid
world would be able to support much humanity.

There had been protests--chief among them a group of eugenicists who
felt that loss of such a large group of qualified young folk would cost
the home planet more genetically and socially than it could afford.
The answer had been genetically-induced twins on the part of parents
qualified to pass a wide variety of mental, physical and psychiatric
tests, open to all who wished to join the project.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of each set of such induced identical twins was early selected to
go to Mars, the other to remain on Earth. Thus Earth lost nothing, yet
had its potential Martians, ready for conditioning and training in
special seminaries for lifetime work on the red planet. When one of a
pair of twins was a girl, the other a boy, the boy was the one sent
out--since life on Mars was still a rugged affair. Thus it was that
Lynne had been reared for an Earth-career while her brother, Revere,
had been educated and coached for a Mars-life.

Lynne's entire twenty-four years had been passed for the purpose of
integration into and work for the improvement of humanity on her native
planet. The very idea of Mars was terrifying, as was the idea of
traveling there through space. She simply _couldn't_ endure the wrench
of the trip, the separation from all that mattered.

Rolf stood there quietly, letting her thoughts flow without
interruption. Then he said, "I see--but it's not as bad as all that,
darling. After all, _I_ made the trip in reverse."

"But that's different--you're a man!" she protested.

"Nor is being a man as bad as you seem to think," he said and she
sensed that he was teasing her and was grateful for the change in
mood. Before she realized what she was doing she called him mentally a
thoroughly bawdy Martian word.

"Where did you learn that?" he asked, startled.

"Where do you think?" she countered--and enjoyed seeing him blush
again. They had a pleasantly innocuous time together the remainder of
that day and evening.

The following morning Lynne awoke from another horrible nightmare of
alien worlds to find her headache back in full force. So bad was it, in
fact, that after making a half-hearted effort to get up she fell back
on her plastomat, actually moaning a little. She felt as if she were
undergoing some long-forgotten sort of Inquisition torture.

Rolf walked into her room within the hour and so sick was Lynne that
she didn't even protest his presence. He said, "Lynne, darling, you've
got to get over this. Believe it or not you're killing me."

"Then stay in your own mind." She managed a whisper of a smile.

"You're like a bad tooth," he said inelegantly. "You know it's going to
hurt if you touch it but you can't stop running your tongue over it."

"Oh, shut up," she said rudely. "So now I'm an ulcerated tooth. I've
never had one so I wouldn't know."

"Nor have I," he replied promptly. "But I've read about them. Come on.
I'm going to take you to Centromed and get you fixed up."

"I'm too ill to move," she quavered, alarmed at the prospect.

But he simply moved in and took over, virtually forcing Lynne firmly
but gently into her clothes, getting her downstairs and onto a moving
strip, escorting her through the prophylactic entrance of the huge
vertical cross of the Centromed, giving her in charge of a stern-faced
but kindly physician in white, who put her in turn in the hands of a
giant red-headed nurse in steropants and white cap.

Lynne never did find out what they did with her. She recalled lying
down and looking up at a hypnotic ceiling, drifting quickly into
merciful unconsciousness. When she recovered her headache was gone and
she had a sense of having undergone an important experience.

"Miss Fenlay," the doctor said, "you're undergoing a period of mental
growth and change that in your case seems to make such suffering
periodic."

"What can I do about it?" she asked in panic.

"I believe your trouble is one of environment," he replied.
"During this period of readjustment you find familiar surroundings
unsufferable. In plain English, you need a change."

"But how am I to get it?" she asked.

"That is hardly our department," he told her. "You'll have to take it
up with your Integration Chief, I'm afraid. Naturally we'll be glad to
make a recommendation for transfer on medical grounds."

"Thanks--thanks a lot," she said uncertainly. She walked out of the
building and discovered it was already late afternoon. Unsureness
chewed at her for the first time in her well-ordered life. The headache
was gone but it might return if she didn't make a change--and she
didn't want to leave the only home she'd ever known.

Rolf rose from an alloybanc on which he had been sitting and said,
"Headache gone, Lynne? You look upset."

"Headache's gone," she replied. "But it may come back."

"Not if I can help it," he told her and she took his arm in hers and
squeezed it to show her appreciation. Rolf might be a barbarian, she
thought, but he _had_ been kind and helpful.

"Thanks for the crumb anyway," he told her and her confusion grew
almost to tears. They rode back to Mother Weedon's in silence.

Because of her fear at finding herself becoming so dependent on Rolf
she flirted outrageously with Alan Waters, the team replacement, after
dinner. When he followed her out into the garden and told her he was
madly in love with her she didn't exactly discourage him. Just then her
soul and body alike craved appreciation.

A furious Ray Cornell interrupted their third kiss. He strode through
a gap in the hedge-wall and pulled Waters from her roughly and said,
"They _told_ me I'd find you two out here."

"What right have you to interfere?" countered Waters.

"_This!_" snapped Ray, throwing a clumsy punch at his rival, who threw
one back in return.

Lynne let out a gasp of alarm and tried to move between them but was
brushed rudely to the ground. So hard did she land that for a moment
the world seemed to swim.

She shook her head to clear it, felt the alarm gongs she had come to
know preceded a return of her headache. Then she saw a third taller
male figure take Ray in one hand, Alan in the other and pull them apart
by the collars of their bolo packets as if they were a couple of dogs
squabbling over a bone.

"You men are supposed to work together," he said quietly. Then, his
voice rising a half-tone and increasing in force, "Why in _farb_ don't
you?" With which he cracked their heads together with stunning force,
tossed them to the turf like a pair of sacks and came over to help
Lynne gently to her feet. She collapsed into his arms, for the first
time let his lips seek hers, responded to them.

Later--how much later she didn't know, for during that day and evening
she seemed destined to lose large chunks of time--she looked up at him,
reveling in his controlled strength and leanness.

"Rolf," she said, "I'm sorry--that was my fault."

"You'd have been less than a woman if you hadn't done something like it
to put me in my place," he whispered.

"But it seems so cheap now," she said. "And my head...."

"It wasn't cheap because you didn't know," he told her. "As for your
head, you need a change. You're going to get one. You're leaving with
me for Mars tonight."

"But, Rolf--" she began.

"Come on, honey," he told her. "It's all arranged. We've only got a
couple of hours to make the ship."

She walked back to Mother Weedon's with his arm around her, stumbling a
little from time to time like a blind woman. She was going to Mars and
the mere idea scared her almost to death.



                                  IV


Lynne, who had been largely brought up on stories of pioneer
space-flights in which the passengers had to endure tremendous initial
acceleration, was pleasantly surprised by the takeoff. She probably
would have known better had her conditioning and training not geared
her to such complete uninterest in anything beyond the atmosphere that
she seldom thought of the stars except as pretty lights in the sky.

She did have to strap herself to her bunk before the immense silver
teardrop rose slowly upward toward space--but as the stewardess
explained in routine tones the strap was a mere precaution against a
possible lurch caused by brief failure of one of the launching jets.
And within five minutes after takeoff a tiny sign lit up over the cabin
door that read UNFASTEN BELTS--SMOKING PERMITTED.

She sat up and loosened the strap and swung her feet to the deck,
noted her roommate was doing likewise. In the turmoil of catching the
Mars-ship Lynne had had little time to notice her. She managed to
recall that her name was Joanna-something and that she was an expert in
animal husbandry. She was a handsome immense South African girl whose
dark complexion wore traces of both Caucasian and Oriental, as well as
Hamitic ancestry. She offered Lynne one of the new skinless cigarettes.

"You on Integration business?" she asked.

Lynne, who knew nothing of affairs on Mars, probed quickly and
discovered what the girl had in mind was a coordination trip by an
Earth Government executive. She shook her head, said, "No, I'm going
for good. I understand there's a job there for me."

The African girl regarded her curiously, then said, "I don't want to
sound rude but aren't you a bit old to be going home?"

"I guess maybe I am." Looking more closely at her cellmate Lynne
saw that for all her evident maturity she was still a girl in her
late-middle teens. "They came after me."

As the girl nodded uncomprehendingly Lynne wondered if what she had
uttered as a polite brush-off lie might not be the truth. There was a
definite pattern of continuity to events following her first headache
and her non-variant answers at the brain-station.

"Let's go to the saloon and see the stars," Joanna suggested.

It seemed like a good idea--besides, Lynne wanted to talk to Rolf,
to discover if there actually _was_ considered motive behind her
apparently aimless emigration to the red planet.

She said, "How long does this trip take anyway?"

Joanna's jaw dropped and her black-satin hair gleamed with liquid
highlights as she shook her head. "_Crehut_, you are green!" she
exclaimed. Then, assuming sociability with an effort, "You're mighty
pretty though. The trip takes a little more than one Earth-day."

"Thanks--I see," replied Lynne. She felt she was beginning to see a
lot of things. Along with her archaic ideas about the rigors of a
space-ship takeoff, she had apparently retained some mighty obsolete
theories about the speed of space-travel, at least on the Earth-Mars
run. In her mind it was a matter of weeks if not months, depending upon
the relative positions of the two planets.

A little over one Earth-day--if her growing feeling that she was the
victim or core of some vast unseen conspiracy were correct, then there
would have been plenty of time for Rolf to be summoned from Mars after
her non-variant answers had given the brain-station bosses the clue to
her newly-developed telepathic powers.

But why all the secrecy? It didn't take her long to find an answer.
Had she been asked immediately to come to Mars she would have refused
point-blank to make the trip. Her conditioning, her whole life would
have forced her to reply in the negative.

So Rolf Marcein had been sent for with orders to make her want to leave
Earth with him, by fair means or foul. And he had not hesitated to
employ the foul. She felt her whole body blush as she recalled some of
the brazen suggestions he had made, some of her responses, especially
to his embraces earlier that evening.

It was going to be a very interesting session, she decided, as she
followed the girl into the single small but beautifully compact central
lounge or saloon that space requirements permitted on the Mars-ship.
She looked around but failed to see his tall figure and saturnine
face--treacherous face, she thought--among the half-dozen passengers
already reclining in plastolounges, watching the amazing panorama
projected on the ceiling from the viewplate recorders in the prow and
stern of the huge space-vessel.

She followed Joanna to a chair, tried to share the girl's tremulous
excitement. After all, she thought, she had felt much the same
on emerging from the seminary to take her first position as a
data-recording supplement for the biggest of all cybernetics machines,
the "brain" that occupied six thousand acres of the Sahara Desert.

"Look!" the girl whispered enthusiastically. "There's X-Three, the last
of the derelict space-stations."

Lynne watched the oddly complex structure, that resembled a pair of
unrooted pyramids fastened point to point, as it revolved slowly across
and out of the plane of vision.

"What do they use it for now, Joanna?" she murmured.

"Nothing," the girl said with a trace of scorn.

Lynne knew she should have known about that. She recalled now a vidar
newscast in which the abandonment of the last of the space-stations had
been mentioned. In the years before A-engines were finally perfected
space-stations were vitally necessary as change-over stops for
interplanetary rocket flights. But once fuel ceased to be a problem
they had been used merely as meteor-warning points and weather stations.

In the first function they had proved useless--in fact one of them had
been destroyed by a large space-missile--and weather forecasting and
control were practised far more efficiently by electronic mastery of
the Heaviside Layer. Lynne shouldn't have forgotten--but when she heard
it the matter of space-stations had been utterly unimportant in her
life.

A steward in space-black bolo and clout offered them vari-flavored
colafizzes from a rack strapped about his waist. Lynne wondered at this
mode of serving the drinks while she sipped hers but decided not to ask
Joanna. She didn't want to appear a total numbskull to a girl whose
whole life had consisted of conditioning for Mars.

She found out soon enough when Rolf Marcein walked into the saloon
before she had finished sipping her drink. She rose to greet him, to
haul him off somewhere so they could talk alone--and as she did so she
automatically dropped her colafizz in the receptacle ready to receive
it in one arm of her plastolounge.

Joanna made a grab for it as it bounced off and rose lazily in the air
and turned slowly over. The African girl caught it before it released
any of the liquid remaining in it, pushed it firmly down into the
hollow space reserved for it, where it was magnetically held.

But Lynne was not paying much attention. She was having enough trouble
holding herself upright as her feet displayed an astonishing reluctance
to keep on the floor while the rest of her wanted to describe a lazy
parabola across the saloon. She did an off-to-Buffalo and wound up
against Rolf's chest with his arms about her.

Embarrassed she whispered fiercely, "Put me down, you _marlet_!"

He grinned at her infuriatingly, replied, "I'm no _marlet_--that's a
very nasty word on Mars and most of these people understand it. Don't
you know you're in space?"

He set her gently back on her feet, holding her steady with one hand
gripping an upper arm. She knew she looked like an idiot, felt certain
everyone in the saloon was laughing at her. "I thought they had
artificial gravity on these ships," she said.

"They do," he told her. "But it's nothing like Earth-gravity. It
would use up all power if it were. You'll learn to navigate. Come on,
I'll show you how." He led her unprotesting into one of the corridors
outside the saloon.

She pulled herself free, promptly smacked her head none too gently
against the corridor wall. "I don't want a lesson now," she told him
angrily. "Besides, why aren't I sick?"

"You would be," he informed her with what she interpreted as a smug
expression, "if you hadn't been given your full quota of shots in the
Centromed this afternoon. You don't think they'd have allowed you
aboard otherwise, do you?"

"You had it all figured out, didn't you?" she snapped at him angrily.
"I'll give odds you even said something to Alan and Ray tonight that
got them involved in that horrible brawl!"

"It was nothing," he said with false modesty, flicking a non-existent
speck of dust from a bare forearm. "Just a bit of premeditated
Machiavelli. Anyone could have managed it."

"What are you trying to do to me?" she asked him desperately. "I'll
even bet my headaches were induced. Why pick on _me_? I don't want to
go to Mars--I never wanted to go there."

"Maybe because I'm in love with you," he said simply.

She ignored the intensity of his dark eyes, said, "You're not in love
with me. You didn't come to Earth until that twin of yours at the
brain-station sent you a message I was telepathic. You've only made
love to me to get me to Mars--for some selfish purpose of your own. Try
and deny it."

"In view of your current mood," he replied quietly, "I'd be seven kinds
of a sand-_lurtonk_ to try. You seem to have things all figured out
yourself. Very well, it's your privilege to look at my actions any way
you choose. But my purpose is not selfish!"

Something in the ring of his voice, in the determined set of his lower
face, told her he was speaking the truth. She said, "All right, what
purpose gives you the right to come to Earth, to violate everything I
cherish, to make me a voluntary kidnapee, to wreck my life and drag me
off to a planet I haven't even been trained for? What's to prevent me
from reporting it and having you arrested?"

"Nothing," he replied, "except that I'd probably be released as soon as
we reached Mars. If you still feel like this when we get there tomorrow
I shan't stand in the way of your returning." There was a new sag in
his shoulders, a weariness to the lines about his mouth.

"Oh, great!" she retorted. "Smash my job, my personal life, then say
you won't try to stop me from going back to it. How _can_ you go around
with so few ethics? What sort of person are you anyway?"

"A very serious one--a very worried one," he told her quietly and her
quick probe of his thoughts revealed him again to be speaking the
truth. He captured both her arms again, held her gently against the
wall, and so great was the hypnotic force of his personality that
despite her anger toward him she made no move to break away.

"You have a right to know--_now_," he told her. "I'm a Martian, a
third generation one, even though I was born and trained on Earth.
Conditions out there are only just beginning to be fit for human
infants. We're building the biggest thing Man has ever accomplished on
Mars--making a barren ruined planet live again, making it fit for men
and women and babies to inhabit.

"Right now we're up against the greatest danger we've faced since the
first few desperate years--maybe an even greater threat. We can't see
it, we don't even know what it is. But men and women on Mars are going
mad. Only a few of us can reach them--and thanks to a condition of the
planet we're all too overloaded to do the psychiatric work we should
do. We need telepaths."

A flash of something she had heard or read somewhere about the red
planet occurred to her. She said, "But doesn't the atmosphere or
something of Mars encourage telepaths? _You're_ one. Why come to Earth
for them? Why pick on me?"

"Because," he told her with the patience of exasperation, "we need
at least to maintain those telepaths we have--which aren't nearly
enough. You don't seem to realise that a genuine two-way telepath, even
among fourth generation Martians, occurs only about once in eleven
thousand six hundred births. And we need more than the few we have for
communications alone."

"Communications!" Lynne was honestly shocked. "Do you mean to tell me
that Mars has no--"

"No form of lateral electronic communications functions reliably on
Mars," he told her bluntly as if admitting a fact he hated to mention
about the planet he loved. "Don't ask me why--it's just so, that's
all. _Crehut_, do you think our best scientific brains haven't tried?
They believe the thinness of the atmosphere and the resulting weakness
of the Martian Heaviside Layer has something to do with it. We get
messages from Earth and the other planet-stations clearly and, with the
ato-reduced time lag, in a matter of seconds."

"And you have to use telepaths to transmit and receive?" She was almost
incredulous but her mind informed her he was telling the truth without
reserve.

"Whatever we can't heliograph or send over wire cables," he said
unhappily. "And the climate of Mars is rough on cables. Above the
ground the winds snap 'em. Underground they rot or the _czanworms_ eat
through them. Now do you begin to understand?"

"A--little," she replied hesitantly, unable to maintain her entirely
justified anger against his sincere appeal. "But what about this
threat--this madness? What is it?"

"We don't know." His face was shadowed. "There may still be life-forms
on Mars of which we know nothing--or perhaps manifestations of those we
thought safe that are dangerous. But something apart from atmosphere
or weather or diet or drink is creating insanity. And it seems to
be affecting our telepaths rather than others. Maybe our telepathic
minds are more open to whatever the influence is. I don't know." His
expression turned grim. "I've never allowed them--it--to affect _me_."

All at once she remembered the nightmare, the being alone in the
crystal tower, the crowding in upon her of unseen things that whispered
dreadful alluring suggestions, the sense of panic. She began to
understand it with growing certainty.

Lynne said, "My brother--Revere--he's one of those who's been affected,
isn't he?"

He hesitated, evidently felt the probe of her questing brain, nodded
reluctantly. He said, "Your brother is one of them. The _purt_ of it is
we don't dare send him back to Earth."

"I understand." She shuddered, felt a reassuring hand on her shoulder,
added, "He's mad, isn't he." It was statement, not query.

"I'm afraid so--at least part of the time," he replied. "But don't
worry. We have marvelous clinics on Mars. Once we get him to one of
them there's a good chance of a cure."

"You mean he isn't getting care now?" she asked, shocked.

Rolf shook his head, replied, his voice low, "Not yet--not until you
replace him. That's how short-handed we are. We've lost too many the
last few months. And there simply aren't any replacements. That's
why I rushed to Earth when I heard about you, why perhaps I used
unscrupulous methods to get you to come. There are less than a million
people on all of Mars."

She understood his unspoken analogy. Less than a million people--less
than a hundred telepaths, to maintain communications over the
entire planet. Then she thought of something else, said, "My
headaches--they're telepathic, aren't they? Caused when my brother has
one of his attacks?"

"That's right as nearly as we can judge," he told her. "You seem
to have an intense sympathetic affinity. It's not unusual between
identical telepaths."

"And there aren't many of those," she said idly. She looked at him.
"How about your brother, Rolf. Isn't he...?"

"Unfortunately not," he replied. "He has some tendency toward E.S.P.
but insufficiently strong to be reliable."

Lynne sensed his thoughts shifting to his brother, then to hers--and
was astounded by the depth of dislike he suddenly projected. It came
as another shock and she said, "You hate my brother, don't you, Rolf?
If you didn't you'd have managed to get him the care he must have to
survive."

"I don't hate your brother," he said wearily and she realised he spoke
the truth. What he felt for Revere Fenlay was the rather arrogant
dislike and distrust toward a weaker man that is so frequent among the
strong. Lynne resented it, resented him, bitterly.

She said, "Then why haven't _you_ replaced him? You're a telepath--why
haven't _you_ given him relief?"

Again he looked defeated and, with feminine illogic, her heart went out
to him. He said, "I wish I could--unfortunately I'm not permitted to go
out in the field alone."

Annoyed by her heart's betrayal she let herself think, _Ah, an
armlounge admiral, a user of men who saves his own skin!_ She watched
anger wash defeat from his face, for a moment felt fear at its
intensity. Then, without a word, he turned and left her alone in the
corridor.

She felt a cheap victor as with difficulty she made her way back to her
cabin. Nor was her self-esteem lifted when Joanna, sitting up in her
bunk, said, "You must be real _zwirch_, Fenlay, if Marcein came for
you. He's Communications Integrator for the whole ruddy planet--a real
big bomb. How about introducing me before we land?"



                                   V


To her considerable surprise in view of her emotionally upset
condition, Lynne slept like the proverbial top. It took the combined
efforts of Joanna and the stewardess to get her awake and up and
dressed in time for the landing outside of New Samarkand. After a
momentary breathless hovering pause the big ship set itself down so
gently there was a hardly perceptible jar as it touched ground.

Feeling cumbrous in cold-resistant parkaed coverall and curiously alone
despite the cluster of passengers that waited with her in the airlock
foyer, Lynne looked about her for Rolf Marcein. She felt a certain
residue of guilt for her treatment of him during their last session,
despite the justification of her anger. Here, on the threshold of an
alien planet--_his_ planet--she needed him.

He might have betrayed her and her brother, kidnapped her, all but
seduced her--yet he was the sole human being she knew here. Her eyes
sought him desperately, finally saw him working his way through the
waiting passengers toward her.

He thrust an oddly-shaped little packet toward her, said, "Here--fasten
it on. It's an oxyrespirator--you'll need it. Use it whenever you feel
faint."

His manner was gravely polite and his thoughts were carefully masked.
He hadn't, she decided, forgiven her for that _armlounge admiral_
insult of the night before. She sent her apologies mentally, received
only a curt acknowledgement. She began to feel miserable.

Then, abruptly, the port was opened. With his arm steadying her Lynne
stepped out onto the escaramp platform, a couple of hundred meters
above the flat blast-scarred surface of the field. A thin chill wind
cut her face, a wind from out of a sky darker than that of Earth.

Her first reaction was of gauntness, of barrenness beyond anything
she had known on her home planet. The grounds around the Sahara
brain-center in which she had served her apprenticeship had been
lush with tropical growths--and even the desert around them had been
warm. But the vast reddish expanse of the spaceport looked cold and
uninviting--even the row of oddly-shaped metal buildings at its edge
had a shabby eroded untended appearance.

Her second reaction, as she rode the ramp down was of breathlessness.
The icy air stung the insides of her nostrils, as it did her face, but
failed to fill her lungs. Panic swept over her and she clutched at her
breast. Then Rolf's arms were around her from behind, his long strong
fingers were adjusting the oxyrespirator.

Lynne breathed deeply and felt a sudden surge of exhilaration. No
wonder, she thought irrelevantly, the Martians were more volatile than
Earthfolk. They must be constantly high on oxygen. She suppressed an
impulse to giggle as she reached the bottom of the moving ramp.

Her third reaction, as she took her first step on Mars, was of
weightlessness. Not the unhealthy weightlessness of the space-ship but
a buoyancy comparable to that of swimming in the Great Salt Lake or the
Dead Sea. Lynne sat rigidly on an urge to discover how high and far she
could jump, even encumbered by the aluminum coverall. She realised her
hair was blowing in the wind, pulled the parka over it.

"You'll do." Rolf looked her over disinterestedly, added, "Unless you
still want to go back to Earth."

It must have been the oxygen that made her reply, "What for? Now that
I'm here I might as well give it a run." Irresponsible or not, it was
worth it to see the softness that came into his dark eyes.

He took her arm and said gruffly, "Come on. We've got things to do. I'm
turning you over to Tony Willis. He'll brief you. He promised to be
here.... There he is, by the Administration Building."

There was no doubt about the warmth of Tony Willis' greeting--outwardly
or telepathically. He gave Rolf a bearhug, then turned quickly to
Lynne, pumped her right hand, said, "_Crehut_, I'm glad you got here!
But Rolf didn't warn us he was bringing a tearing beauty."

"Tearing mad most of the way," she said, unable to remain unresponsive
to Willis' warmth. He was a tubby bespectacled young man with an
irresistible grin. From him she felt no probe of her thoughts, knew
sudden overwhelming relief. Despite Rolf's assurance that there were
fewer than a hundred telepaths on Mars, subconsciously she had been
expecting to land on a planet where her innermost thoughts were open to
everyone. She was almost pathetically grateful that it was not so.

"Old Rolf must be losing his touch," said Willis, grinning. "He's our
ace-in-the-hole when it comes to--personal management. Has a thousand
lovely ladies eating right out of his hand."

"Shut up, you _czanworm_!" Rolf's thoughts revealed acute distress and
Lynne felt a little glow of triumph.

She said, "Well, one way or another he got me here."

"And do we need you!" Willis led the way toward a pharmabar.

"Thank you, sir." Lynne turned on the charm, enjoying the inner growls
of resentment from Rolf. Well, he'd played a game with her, she
thought. He had no right to resent her playing a few herself.

_But I wasn't playing for fun!_ The message was sharp and resentful. _I
was playing for the safety of my planet._

_You mean one little girl like me can save a great big world like
this?_ It must be the oxygen, she decided, that was making her behave
so giddily. Or perhaps she couldn't help tormenting him a little--a
very little.

"Hey, cut it out!" Tony Willis looked aggrieved. "It's bad enough
having one of you telepaths around--but with two of you together anyone
else is out in the cold. What do you want for breakfast?"

They apologized and kept their special talents under wraps. Lynne
felt a certain disappointment at the prosaic familiarity of the food
and drink they were served. She didn't know exactly what she had been
expecting but there was no trace of the exotic.

Nor was the aircar in which Willis drove them from the spaceport to
New Samarkand any different from similar vehicles on Earth--save that
it seemed somewhat battered and in need of a refinish. She and Rolf
rode in silence, letting Tony do the talking.

They traveled at about five hundred meters altitude toward a low range
of reddish hills, sprinkled here and there with green. The sky was
cloudless, the ground beneath them innocent of roads, of cultivation,
of homes. For the first time Lynne began to appreciate the immensity of
the task these emigrées from Earth had undertaken, the rehabilitation
of a near-dead planet.

And then, when they crested the hill, there were rectangular patches
of vegetation on its lee side. But she gave this man-made miracle only
the briefest of glances--for beyond lay the vast bank of the canal,
stretching as far as the eye could see, in a straight line from horizon
to horizon. And beyond the canal lay the city.

Here, on the far bank of the incredible dry ditch, men had built well.
Plastic half-domes and metallic towers, spare and functional, rose from
the newly-buttressed escarpment for a good two kilometres. Beneath the
buildings, on the bank itself, were broad terraces upon which passenger
and freight-craft and landing engines made a busy and familiar pattern,
kaleidoscopic with movement.

And behind the man-made city, its incredible soaring half-ruined
spires and obelisks cutting a jagged rampart across half the sky,
lay the once-vast Martian metropolis. Crystaline minarets, revealing
materials and a beauty of design unknown as yet to Earthmen, reflected
the rays of the distant sun in prismatic showers of color, coruscating,
almost blinding, yet so weird and beautiful that they brought tears to
Lynne's eyes.

_I'm glad you can capture their beauty._ Rolf's thought shared the
excitement of her own. _So many of us see nothing but ruin._

"Quite a sight, isn't it?" said Tony Willis complacently. "We get a
_farbish_ howl from the archeological boys whenever we have to clear
any of it away."

"It seems a shame," said Lynne with feeling.

Willis shrugged. "Can't be helped. We haven't the time or resources to
build from scratch in the sand. Besides, there's oceans of ruins left
for them to poke around in."

He brought them in with practised skill to a landing on one of the
terraces, where Rolf was quickly gobbled up by a waiting group of men
and women. Before they led him off he said to Lynne, "I'm sorry if
I've seemed unfair, Lynne. But I think you'll understand in time. This
is a frontier world and we can't always take time out to observe the
niceties."

Some inner emotion she refused to recognize caused her to ask, "When
will I see you again, Rolf? You aren't leaving me...."

"Tony can take care of you as well as I," he informed her. "I'd like to
get you started myself but I'm way behind in my work. I'll be paying
you a visit at the post--perhaps sooner than you expect."

"I see." She felt frozen. Now that he had her here he was discarding
her like an old clout. She recalled what Tony Willis had said at the
spaceport about his having a thousand women eating out of his hand, how
eagerly Joanna had expressed a desire to meet him the night before. She
was glad there had been no opportunity to perform that introduction.
Why make it a thousand-and-two?

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?"

"Right." He nodded. "We can short-cut your training because you are his
twin. Ordinarily we take a couple of weeks fitting each communications
worker to his or her post--finding in just which their telepathic
sensitivity will work the best. But since, in a way, we _know_ about
you through Revere, we can save time."

"Revere," she said, "what about him? Is he very sick?"

Tony Willis shrugged. "It's periodic," he told her. "This whole
business is so new and so sudden it hit most of them without warning.
Since you know the score you ought to be able to fight it."

"But mightn't I have my brother's weaknesses?" Lynne asked.

"We're hoping not," was the reply. "In most cases women resist better
than men. The suggestions these creatures make are so _swackably_ lewd
they clash with the feminine propriety-barrier."

"While men, being Casanovas, give in," she said, thinking again of Rolf
and his thousand-and-two women.

"Something like that," he replied, went on to tell her how telepathic
messages were keyed and directed and addressed to reach the proper
destinations. "You'll be here"--tapping a spot on the globe, a third of
a world away from New Samarkand--"at Barkutburg, within mentarange of
Zuleika, New Walla Walla and Cathayville. So here will be the code-keys
for you to remember...."

The final briefing took sixteen hours. If Lynne, through her years of
coaching for and year of work on the integration-team, had not been
trained to complete concentration over long periods, she would never
have been able to absorb all the new knowledge Tony Willis and other
communications experts pumped into her.

At the end of that time he looked at her with red-rimmed but admiring
eyes, shook his head and said, "My hat is off to you, Lynne. You're the
quickest study I've ever met."

"Thanks--most of it's a matter of training," she replied modestly. She
was glad he was not telepathic or he would have read the bright glow of
far-from-modest pride that ran through her. _Wait till Rolf hears about
it_, she thought. _Maybe he won't think I'm such a_ marlet _after all._
With this went added pride in that she was obviously less exhausted
than her mentor.

When it was over she was fed real meat for the fourth or fifth time in
her life--ham from lean Martian-bred hog, basted in some curious alien
sauce. With it went real potatoes and non-processed vegetables, raised
on the red planet. Rugged or not, Lynne decided as she was bundled into
a planetcar, life on Mars had its compensations.

When the ship landed at Barkutburg a tearose-pale Martian dawn was
lighting the dark eastern sky. Lynne felt a tingle of anticipation,
mixed with dread, a stir of _déja vu_--the I've-been-here-before
feeling--as she alighted with her strangely light bag in hand and
paused to sip sparingly of her oxyrespirator.

For here was her nightmare city, though seen from the ground. Here
were the widely-spaced transparent towers, similar to yet oddly unlike
those of New Samarkand. Here were the scant human dwellings, clustered
like alien mushroom growths amid the towering demi-ruins.

Two aluminum-coveralled figures were awaiting her at the rim of the
airport. One was tiny, feminine, despite the bulk of her costume, her
exotically delicate Eurasian features roughened by wind and sunburn.
She was Lao Mei-O'Connell, qualified and elected leader of the pioneer
settlement. The other was--Revere Fenlay.

It was add to see oneself mirrored in the features of another human
for the first time in one's life, Lynne decided. She noted her brother
looked unexpectedly healthy, that his handclasp was firm, his eyes
probably clearer than her own sleep-puffed ones.

His thought was warningly clear. _Don't be fooled by externals, Lynne.
These creatures can move in on me every time I open up my mind to
receive a message. They're murder!_ Aloud he said, "Lord, I had no idea
my counterpart was a beauty."

Quite naturally she linked arms with Revere as they walked toward
the cluster of Earth-dwellings. It was, she thought, a rare event
for twins, separated by the gulf between planets, ever to meet after
incubation--except of course on such rarified levels as those trod by
Rolf Marcein and his brother. She sensed a discomfort, a reserve,
behind the routine welcome of Lao Mei-O'Connell, decided swiftly there
was some sort of guilt feeling there.

As swiftly her twin replied telepathically, _Of course she has feelings
of guilt. Thanks to her I was given the coldwrap treatments--even when
I was not under Their control. There was no need for them and they made
me feel my head would burst. Thank_ farb _you're here!_

_When did you receive these treatments?_ she thought sharply. And the
answering thought confirmed her sudden suspicion. Revere had been
placed in coldwrap restraint each time a headache had assailed her on
Earth. He had been deliberately tortured as part of the campaign to get
her to come to Mars and replace him.

_That Rolf--that_ marlet! Fury assailed her, fury and frustration. But
Revere's grip tightened on her forearm.

_I don't mind--now_, he informed her. _We need you here._

It was pathetic but she managed to still the thought aborning. With
Revere, as never before in her life, she felt as if she belonged to
someone, as if someone belonged to her. But she had not been with him
an hour when he said good-bye. He was returning to New Samarkand on the
planet-ship for treatment, perhaps ultimately to Earth to replace her.

"Don't worry," he told her. "You'll do great, Lynne. Wring their
_farbish_ invisible necks."

She checked the thrill of panic that caused her, managed _a Look up Ray
Cornell when you hit Earth. And ruin Janet just for me._

_Don't be too rough on Rolf_ was his farewell thought. _You'll
understand him better--later on._

She watched the takeoff, walked back with Lao Mei-O'Connell in silence.
And, twenty minutes later, she stepped off the uplift platform and
found herself alone in the patched tower-room of her nightmare.



                                  VI


Sitting there alone, waiting for something to happen, Lynne for the
first time since becoming aware of her telepathic powers began to
get a sense of direction along with the thoughts that came to her
from outside. Heretofore she had only been conscious of the thoughts
themselves, varying in power according to the strength of the thinker.

Perhaps because of the altitude of the tower-room, perhaps because her
own power was increasing with practise, perhaps because telepathy was
easier in the thinner Martian atmosphere than on Earth--perhaps through
a combination of all these factors, Lynne was aware of tremendous
mental strength.

Her on-duty periods consisted of two daily shifts, each of about two
Earth-hours. In case of an emergency message reaching her during any
other time, she was to report at once to her tower-post and remain on
duty for the duration. And this was her first shift.

She wondered how long it would take the Martians that had possessed
Revere to seek her out and test her defenses. Apparently these
invisible creatures operated upon a time-scale of their own, making
themselves felt without semblance of rhythm or regular schedule.

Shutting out the meaningless scramble of thoughts that reached her from
the Earth-village below, Lynne considered Revere and the odd constraint
that had prevailed between them during their brief single meeting.
Somewhere beyond the gaunt reddish Martian hills to the southeast, the
planet-ship was carrying him swiftly toward New Samarkand--and, she
hoped, toward rehabilitation.

Revere had had a rough deal on this outpost world. Although he seemed
not to resent it Lynne found herself trembling with indignation at
thought of the needless torture he had undergone--merely to give Lynne
the induced headaches that had undermined her Earth-conditioning. She
thought of Rolf and his thousand-and-two women.

And from somewhere, half a planet away, came a quick mocking thought
from the Svengali who had led her to a planet she had never had the
slightest desire to visit. It said, _Don't bother me now, Lynne--can't
you see I'm busier than_ farb?

So thrilling was the experience, so magnificent the surge of power
which swept through her, that Lynne actually forgot to be angry at
receiving such a quick brush-off. Even a half-world away, she thought,
she could key in on Rolf, learn what he was doing.

A thousand-and-one other women? She sipped sparingly at her
oxyrespirator, felt reinforced exhilaration. With her new-found
ability she was going to be able to check up on his alleged love-life.
She actually gloated as she sat there alone amid the spare Martian
landscape.

Then, feeling somewhat ashamed, she thought of her twin again.
Evidently he was keeping his mind closed for she could not reach him.
She wondered what he was really like, what--say--Lao Mei-O'Connell felt
about him. And all at once she knew, for the Eurasian woman's mind was
an open book.

The Barkutburg leader was almost physically sick at Revere's departure.
Her thoughts of love, of desolation, were so strong that Lynne found
herself sharing them, even though she had seen her twin but a scant few
minutes since attaining an age of reason.

Yet there were strength and determination and a strong sense of duty
holding Lao Mei-O'Connell to her important tasks of seeing that her
share of reclaiming a planet continued. The frail-looking Martian woman
was, Lynne realised, a person of vast character.

She thought of her having deliberately to torture the man she loved,
through drugs that opened his already sick mind to the invaders, and
wondered if she herself would be capable of such behavior no matter how
urgent the circumstance, to--say--Rolf Marcein.

It was then that her first message came through--so unused was she
to receiving telepathically impersonal thoughts that she all but
missed her code signal. The Zuleika operator had to repeat it three
times before Lynne came to with a start and keyed her own thoughts
properly--_Ess-two, Barkutburg. Ess-two, Barkutburg. Come in._

The message itself concerned a supply of chemilamps, which had arrived
at Zuleika from Cathayville and was ready for transhipment, if they
were needed at Barkutburg. Lynne repeated the message, pressed
the hand-buzzer for ground-communication, relayed the news to Lao
Mei-O'Connell in her office below. She was told to notify Zuleika to
send the chemilamps on at once, as they were sorely needed.

Lynne got the message through, after which the Zuleika telepath
flashed, _You're new on the job. How is Fenlay?_

_This is Fenlay here_, she replied. _Revere's twin, Lynne. He's been
sent to New Samarkand for treatment._

_Welcome, Lynne Fenlay--and good luck_, came the answer. _Met any of
our unseen friends yet?_

_Not yet_, thought Lynne, _when are they apt to hit me?_

_There's no telling._ Lynne received a definite impression of a
shrug. The Zuleika operator gave his name, which was Zachary Ramirez,
then signed off for the time being. Thanks to this brief personal
conversation Lynne no longer felt so alone. At least, when the invaders
attacked her, she'd have someone to reach for--or would she?

There was a message from New Walla Walla direct, about an hour later,
concerning some point of bookkeeping. Lynne handled it, then sat out
the rest of her first tour of duty alone. The Martian sun was high in
the sky when at last she took the downlift to the ground.

She found herself ravenously hungry. Either through some effect of the
alien atmosphere and climate or the knowledge the food she would get
was real rather than fabricated, Lynne found herself thinking about
dining in an almost animal fashion.

Nor was the mess disappointing. All residents of Barkutburg shared a
single dining hall, since such a method represented great economy of
time, labor and food supplies. It was, to Lynne, rather like a greatly
enlarged and much more volatile Mother Weedon's. The other residents of
the settlement wore the uniform ruddiness of unmistakable good health.
To Lynne, accustomed to the more pallid countenances of Earth, they
seemed almost vulgar.

Yet the good humor, the camaraderie, were unmistakable--as were the
animal spirits. Lynne, as a pretty girl and new arrival, got more
masculine attention than ever before in her life. She was plied with
offers to see the Martian ruins, to visit the nearby mountaintops, to
take long excursions through the vast dry canal-beds.

To her relief the other girls and women, unless their thoughts lied,
showed very little resentment at her presence. In fact most of them
were as eager as the men to question her about the home planet--though
their questions were cast in more feminine mould. Yet Lynne played her
welcome cautiously, accepting no dates for the present on the plea that
mastery of her new job demanded all her time and strength.

A few days later Lao Mei-O'Connell suggested the two of them go for
a walk. When they were well out of earshot of the others she said,
"You're handling yourself very well, Lynne. So far so good."

Lynne eyed her, carefully avoiding a probe of her mind--she had no wish
to make an enemy of this woman and the basic situation was emotionally
delicate to begin with. She said, "Then you anticipate trouble, Miss
O'Connell?"

"Lao, please," she said. "There's scant room for social formality in a
settlement like Barkutburg. You'll have some trouble, of course--you're
bound to on an alien planet. I hate to think of what I'd have to go
through to adjust to Earth."

"Fair enough," Lynne said gratefully. She wanted to ask Lao about
Revere, what sort of man he was, some of his little habits. She also
began to understand better why Earth-Mars twins were kept so rigorously
apart as a rule. The relationship was a complex and deep one and she
found herself almost as homesick for her twin as was Lao.

"Life is hard here," Lao said, "but not unhappy. It isn't even
particularly earnest, save for necessary jobs. Work hard, play hard,
rest hard--that's the rule of Mars."

"It sounds good," said Lynne sincerely. "Tell me, Lao, just what _is_
the status of electricity on Mars? I was a little worried when you
wanted the chemilamps so urgently. But we have the communicator phones
and electric cooking...."

"It's a strange problem," said the other woman. "Everything works as
long as we can use a closed circuit on this planet. But the minute we
open one up--for lateral broadcasting, say--it is dissipated--like
_that_!" She snapped thin fingers sharply.

Then she added, "But nature seemed to have compensated in our favor
when we were able to develop telepaths." She eyed Lynne speculatively,
added, "You must have tremendous powers. No other Earth-person has ever
been able to make the grade. From what Rolf Marcein told me you were
outstanding the moment Revere reached you."

"I don't pretend to understand it," said Lynne. "As far as my first
few sessions on duty, it seemed to be all right."

"You weren't bothered?" The question was softly urgent.

"No." Lynne shook her head. "But I'm expecting to be."

"You will be, I'm afraid. Every telepath on Mars has been at least
once. Revere had the bad luck to be the first--before the presence
of these beings was even suspected. Hence he was surprised and his
resistance was unprepared. Once they've gained possession it becomes
progressively more difficult to keep them out."

"I suppose," said Lynne, "they pick on telepaths because they can only
enter minds opened for message-reception."

"Probably," Lao informed her. "We can't be certain of anything until
we know more about them and their motives. But you can see what a
threat it has become. Thanks to the paralysis of lateral electronic
communication, the survival of humanity on Mars depends almost entirely
on telepaths. When these zombies or whatever they are take possession
no telepath is worth a damn. Nor can any of them receive messages while
the aliens are threatening them. If they do...."

Lao's silence was eloquent. Lynne took a sip of oxygen as her breathing
became difficult. They were approaching one of the semi-ruined
structures, a vast edifice, squatter and broader than the slim pinnacle
which contained the broadcasting room, whose lower facade was a mass
of friezes in high-relief.

Lynne, as part of her cultural training on Earth, had been taken on
tours of the vast temples of India, Pakistan and Malaya--including
Ankhor Vat. Yet not even the incredible and bizarre reliefs of those
fabulous temples, with all of their grotesqueries and solemnly
religious obscenities, prepared her for what she now saw.

The pantheocratic creatures of ancient Mars were far more diverse than
their counterparts on Earth--and of course utterly exotic. Here were
creatures with two, three and four heads, with innumerable appendages,
with reproductive organs so weird as to defy comment or moral reaction.

       *       *       *       *       *

One feature Lynne noted at once. Like their Asiatic counterparts on
Earth, they seemed to belong to a theocratic rather than a scientific
culture--yet the buildings themselves were utterly beyond the creative
techniques of even an interplanetary human culture.

She said, "Are the other towers of Mars like this?"

"In general," replied the Eurasian girl. "The aborigines seem to have
been mostly a philosophic sort. Perhaps they became so when their
planet began to die. All that have survived are such low life-orders
as the _czanworm_ and sand-_lurtonk_. Unless, of course, the invisible
ones are natives. I for one am inclined to believe they are."

"So does Rolf Marcein," said Lynne.

"You love him, don't you?" Lao asked matter-of-factly.

"I'm beginning to be afraid so," said Lynne as frankly.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of," replied the other. "I love Revere, you
know--and I don't expect to see him ever again."

"I know," said Lynne, feeling her companion's unhappiness like a knife.
She pulled the parka over her head although it was not the cool Martian
afternoon breeze that was making her cold. She said, "It must have been
very difficult for you--what you had to do to help get me here. I don't
wonder if you hate me."

"I don't hate you, Lynne," said Lao. "But if you fail on this job I
shall. I should not enjoy sacrificing Revere for nothing."

"I won't fail," Lynne told her with more assurance than she felt.
"After all, I have Revere to think of--and you--_and_ Rolf."

"I encourage myself with similar thoughts," said Lao. "Come--let us go
on inside."

It was like entering a pagan cathedral. The tower in which Lynne's post
was bore heavy over-marks of human habitation. Probably, she thought,
it had long since been stripped by the archeologists of any objects of
historical or cultural value. Save for its crystaline flying buttresses
it might almost have been an Earth skyscraper.

But, outside of a few pieces of scaffolding, where restoration work or
study was evidently in progress, this immense building had been left
untouched by the new inhabitants of the red planet. Thanks probably
to the thinness and dryness of the atmosphere, brilliant murals had
retained their coloring intact. Yet in numerous patches the colors
seemed to fade into neutral tints at variance with the brightness of
the rest.

"Here." Lao took from a table, on which tools and other instruments
had been laid, an odd-looking stereoptical device, handed it to Lynne,
adding, "Adjust it and you'll get the full effect. A lot of their work
was done below the human color-scale, in the infra-red."

Lynne gasped when she studied the hitherto drab patches in the murals
through the double-eye-piece of the viewer. She saw strange beings,
hauntingly near-human, engaged in fantastic gambols. Multi-faceted
eyes leered out at her from the Capuchin heads of twin-bodied smaller
creatures of a boldness that almost made her flinch. And there were
endlessly varied poses of both sorts of beings....

"Rather disturbing, isn't it?" said Lao. "I didn't bring you out here
just to see the sights, Lynne. From what little your brother was able
to tell me, the odd little games those creatures are playing are very
like those his invaders hinted at."

"You mean," said Lynne with a shudder, "that the zombies or whatever
they are looked like that before they lost their bodies?"

"Or before they became invisible," said Lao quietly. "The near-humans
seem to have been the dominant species. These others--the twin-bodied
monkeylike things--seem to have been their pets."

"What disgusting games they played!" said Lynne. "They sound a lot
like...." She hesitated, realising she was about to repeat Lao's remark.

"Exactly," said Lao.

They walked back to the settlement in silence. Both girls had a great
deal to ponder over. When they got there Lynne settled down to listen
to some musicrolls in the recreation building and Lao left to tend to
her various executive functions.

Lynne's new life on Mars passed without notable incident for another
week, Earth-time. She was beginning to adjust to days and nights almost
twice as long as those of her home planet, to the small cool sun, to
the use of her oxyrespirator whenever her lungs felt empty.

She was even beginning to enjoy the give-and-take of the neo-pioneer
society of Barkutburg. Yet loneliness continued to gnaw at her,
loneliness for the twin she had known such a short time, loneliness for
Rolf, at whose activities she could only guess. And some of her guesses
were in lurid vidarcolor.

Late one afternoon, in the recreation building, the musicroll was
playing a fine concerto for theraharp by Liston-Lutz, the most
important human composer yet to emerge on Mars. Back on Earth his
music had seemed to Lynne to be both glaringly dissonant and a trifle
decadent. Here on Mars she understood it. He was writing of the red
planet itself, of a world that had all but died and was now having its
life renewed through lusty Earth-pioneers.

"Like it?" one of the engineers enjoying an off-shift rest asked Lynne
over a colafizz globe.

"Very much. It--fits," said Lynne. She was still smiling at him when
the headache came back--with a sharpness and depth of discomfort she
had never felt on Earth. For a full minute or two she thought she was
going to be physically sick from the pain.

She managed to get up and move toward her quarters before anyone
noticed she was feeling badly. It would never do to have them worried
about _her_--after all, they had enough to worry about. Besides, she
knew what was the matter. Revere was in New Samarkand and they were
doing something to him, something that might easily either kill him or
drive him permanently insane.



                                  VII


Lynne lay down on her simple cot and tried to flash a personal message
through to Revere. But all she got was an increase of agony that almost
blacked her out.

Then she tried to reach Rolf Marcein. Although she lacked the advantage
of being high in her tower-post, the emotional urgency of the moment
more than compensated for this adverse factor. She got through to him
quickly, discovered his mind was open. So intense was his concentration
that he seemed momentarily unaware of her probing.

He was sitting in a hospital room, an operating room, and Revere lay
in front of him, stretched out on a surgical table. Sight of him made
Lynne feel another wave of nausea. An anestherator had been attached to
his nose and mouth and an alert nurse stood by the regulator. Revere's
temples had been slit by twin incisions, from which tubes were attached
to an odd and complex piece of machinery that seemed to support a
visual-grid.

Rolf Marcein was digging at her twin mentally, at the same time seeking
to receive whatever messages came from his tortured brain. Lynne could
read Rolf's thoughts clearly as he waved to her twin, _Their shape--you
of all of us must have received some vision of their appearance_.
Crehut, _Fenlay, we've got to know how they think of themselves!_

       *       *       *       *       *

Then came a chaotic jumble of answering thoughts from Revere's damaged
brain. And even as she suffered sympathetic anguish Lynne understood
that with full anesthesia the mind itself would be dulled so that no
messages would be possible. It was a hideous moment.

_I'm trying, Rolf--I'm trying...._ In spite of the agony he was
undergoing Lynne's brother was beginning to formulate his thoughts.
Little by little a picture was building itself on the screen. It
was a wispy fragmentary picture, like a vidarscreen suffering from
old-fashioned television "ghosts." The figures he projected looked
wispy, blurred, repeated side by side in overlapping focus.

Lynne noted that Rolf and the alert attendants present were using
stereoscopic devices, forced herself to see through the mind of one
of them, to learn the impressions they were getting of the infra-red
portions of the picture.

It was like some of the images Lynne had seen earlier on the Martian
mural--but all balled up. It looked like one of the near-human dominant
species, yet had the multiple body of one of their disgusting pets. Its
antics were even more suggestive than the mural.

Lynne quickly re-transferred herself. She remembered all at once what
Tony Willis had told her about women being better able to resist the
aliens than men. They were incredible, impossible, she thought, yet
there was a hint of intense pleasure in their....

All at once she lost the entire image in a flash of worry, confusion
and finally frustration. Yet her headache persisted, grew worse, and
she got a definite impression that Revere was dying, that Rolf was
mercilessly goading him on to destruction. Outraged, she tried to key
furious thoughts in Rolf's direction--but so greatly was she herself
suffering that she was unable to focus her powers.

Then, abruptly, the agony was over. Whatever had happened was finished,
done with. Lynne sat up on her bed, feeling limp and sore all over,
as if she had taken a physical beating. She ran an acti-comb through
her blond hair, freshened up her looks generally, though she felt like
the proverbial wrath of Satan, went out to the recreation room. At the
moment she needed human company.

Through a window she saw that the sun was low in the west, looked
in awe at the brilliant colors of the Martian sunset. Thanks to the
thinner atmosphere and its high impregnation of dust, the brilliance
far exceeded anything on Earth, even though the sun looked far-away and
cold.

Someone offered her a colafizz, which she accepted gratefully. She
tried to reach Revere but got only a wall of blankness. He was either
unconscious--or dead, she decided. She didn't know whether to be
relieved or grief-stricken at the prospect. True, Revere was her
identical twin--yet she barely knew him, had no real close ties.

Then Lao appeared and under the artificial lighting of the chemilamps,
Lynne was surprised to note how tired the Eurasio-Martian girl
looked. She appeared thin enough to be blown away by the first breeze
and there were deep purple circles under her slightly tilted black
almond-eyes--yet the fingers that gripped her skinless cigarette were
rock-steady.

She said, "They've done something to Revere, haven't they?"

"I think so," Lynne replied. "How did you know?"

"I felt it--until just lately," said Lao. "Most of us are somewhat
telepathic on Mars. In moments of emotional stress especially."

"I'm not sure what's happened," Lynne told her. "They were trying to
get him to record the shape of the invaders on a grid."

Lao's already pale face turned ashy-white. She whispered, "I _knew_ it!
They've used the necro-recorder on him."

"What is it?" Lynne inquired.

"It's a Martian device--supposed to get impressions from the minds of
dying men. It was used in the early days when we had more crime." There
was sudden listlessness in her manner.

Lynne read her thoughts all too plainly. Lao Mei-O'Connell was stunned
with grief. No one, it seemed, had ever survived treatment with this
machine--survived to sanity at any rate. So Revere was dead--or as good
as dead.

Lynne looked blankly at the Eurasian woman, utterly unable to think
under the sudden shock of her words. And then, out of nowhere, came the
fragment of a thought. _Don't give up the space-ship, Lynne--tell Lao
I'm not completely batty yet._

It was Revere--unquestionably. Lynne tried to get him again but the
blank wall was back. Only now, for some reason, it didn't seem so
terrifying. She looked at Lao, who said, "You got something just now,
Lynne. Was it...?"

Lynne nodded. "It was Revere. He--he asked me to tell you he's
okay--not completely batty yet was the way he put it."

For a moment doubt blanked Lao's face. Then she smiled and looked on
the verge of passing out herself. She said, "I might not have believed
you, Lynne. But that phrase--it's--well, it's the way he would have
said it."

"It was Revere," Lynne repeated. She looked at the chronometer above
the door of the room, realized it was getting late. "I've barely got
time to eat dinner," she said. "I don't want to miss my shift."

"No, you don't," the other told her. "There might be a message."

"Why not share it with me?" Lynne offered. "I could use some company."

Lao shook her head regretfully. "I've got a million things to do here,"
she said. Then, with the ghost of a smile lighting her exotic features,
"Besides, I'd be afraid it might be bad news."

"I'll send you a message via the ground-communicator the second I learn
anything," Lynne told her. Then the two women went in to dine at the
head table. They were two islands of preoccupation amid the rough
good-humored gaiety of the room. It was Saturday night at Barkutburg
and there was going to be a dance.

Lynne found herself wondering at the morals of her new companions. They
certainly didn't seem backward about sex--and the planet-wide dislike
of privacy seemed to extend into even their most intimate personal
relationships. Yet when Lynne thought about Janet Downes and certain
other young men and women of the supposedly more civilized home planet,
she decided the Martians were probably the nicer. At any rate they
lived their emotional lives right out in the open.

For the first time since her first few days on the red planet she
felt alone as she stepped off the uplift and entered her listening
and message-post, high in the crystal tower. There was something
frightening about sitting alone in this ruined building with the wind
making its night sounds through the flying buttresses about her and
what appeared like the whole of Mars stretched out in panorama before
her.

It had looked desolate enough in the daylight. Now, with the stars
blazing an enigmatic backdrop, it looked dark--and twice as desolate.
Lynne found herself wondering what strange and fearsome caravans,
what hideous battles and frightful plagues, had passed within view
of her post. She seemed to see again the strange capering figures of
the murals and bas-reliefs, and of the vision-grid she had viewed
telepathically that afternoon in the distant hospital room at New
Samarkand.

She told herself she was getting the jams, sent a tune-up message
through to Cathayville. Though the telepathic operator should have
been on duty there was no response. She reached out further to locate
Revere, could not get to him, found Rolf. He told her, _Lay off, you_
marlet, _Lynne. You nearly jammed the works this afternoon._

_How is Revere?_ She was insistent.

_In coma--and hereafter use the proper channels, Lynne. You're supposed
to key all messages for New Samarkand through Cathayville._

_Cathayville fails to answer_, she informed him.

_Cease sending at once! Cease sending at once, Lynne. If Cathayville is
out it means.... Cease sending at once!_

_What does if mean?_ Lynne was unused to Martian directness, unused to
taking peremptory orders, especially from a man. She had no intention
of obeying before she was good and ready and....

Suddenly they were there, all around her. Thanks to having viewed the
murals and the scene on the visual-grid that afternoon she was able to
get some idea of their nature--or what had been their nature before
a dying globe had driven them to seek the refuge of pure thought and
feeling-forms.

First one of them came fluttering into the room, like some giant
invisible moth, then came another and another and another until she
lost count. They were gay for some reason and nibbled at her mind like
moths nibbling at wool in a closet.

Worse, now that she had allowed them into her brain she was unable to
drive them out. They darted away, amused, just beyond the reach of
her questing probe. Then they came back, doing their strange dances
and whispering outrageous suggestions. Alien or not they had definite
erotic appeal, that awakened in Lynne responses she had never before
suspected she possessed.

_What kind of creature_ am _I?_ she thought hysterically after
a particularly ingenious lascivious mental embrace. And then,
from some hidden source, she drew the strength to fight. She
concentrated as never before in her life--even while working with the
group-machine--and little by little began to win the battle with the
aliens.

_You'll regret it--just let us have the loan of your body and we'll
show you joys you have never dreamt of._ The thoughts pounded at her
head with frail persistent powdery punches, that promised to win
through sheer weight of numbers what they lacked in power.

But Lynne forced herself to think of kindly prosaic Mother Weedon.
At once, seizing upon her thought, the invaders suggested all sorts
of indecent sports for that mature lady. And the very idea of Mother
Weedon indulging in such pursuits was so absurd that Lynne was unable
to resist laughing out loud.

At once the creatures were gone. They were unable to stand the brain
waves of ridicule. Lynne wondered about it. For the moment she felt
carried aloft on a wave of high excitement at her victory. She tried to
code through a message to Rolf Marcein through the proper Cathayville
channel.

Cathayville had been attacked earlier in the evening and for awhile the
telepath on duty had been forced to keep his mind resolutely shut, lest
he fall prey to the enemy. Repulsed, they had moved on to Barkutburg
and Lynne. She gave the message for relay, received information to the
effect that Rolf Marcein's current whereabouts were unknown and that he
was maintaining a closed mind to all messages and was therefore not to
be reached.

Lynne felt terribly alone at this message and the invaders chose that
moment, while her mind was still open, to return in greater force.
This time Lynne found herself in actual pain. Their promise was no
longer mere physical pleasure--although their abandonment of bodies had
unquestionably led them to overstress the joys of the flesh. Now they
promised pain unless Lynne were to give way to them, the sort of pain,
a thousand times magnified, that she had felt sympathetically while
Revere was enduring similar attack.

She tried to concentrate on Mother Weedon but the creatures were not to
be fooled twice by the same ruse. This time it was their laughter that
hurt. Lynne cast about wildly for help from any telepath within mental
reach, lest she actually surrender body and mind to their control. She
even tried to reach Lao Mei-O'Connell but the Eurasian woman was not
telepathic enough to respond to the appeal.

Then, as she was about to give up, support reached her. Revere was
sending to her, helping her to steady herself. She could sense his
complete exhaustion, felt concern for him even while she accepted
gratefully his mental powers of assistance. Only such a relationship
as theirs, she realised, could cope with the blanketing torment of the
invaders.

He was telling her something, that Rolf and the others had compiled
some sort of error that afternoon from the vision-grid. The thought
ran, _They think they know what the creatures are now but they
don't. Even I don't. My images were mixed. They are not the dominant
near-human species we thought but something else...._

Slowly his thoughts faded once more, unable to hold out against the
fatigue that was plaguing him. But his hopeless message of defeat had
sprung a fresh thought-train in Lynne's mind, one that so occupied
her attention she was able to hold the invaders at bay almost without
effort.

She recalled the murals--the near-human looking dominants and
their pets with the disgusting dual bodies and vile games and
many-faceted eyes. She thought back to what Revere had just said via
thought-waves--_They are not the dominant near-human species we thought
but something else...._

She saw once more, in clear memory-vision, the telepathic picture that
had come to her of Rolf and Revere and the visual-grid. No wonder the
pictures had looked foggy and full of "ghosts." In his mind's eye,
limited by the fixed belief of Mars that only the dominant species
could have survived in invisible form, Revere had tried to project
these near-humans onto the screen.

Inwardly, subconsciously, he had known better. The dominant species had
_not_ survived--on Mars at any rate. It was the horrid little creatures
with the multi-faceted eyes and the capuchin-like heads and the dual
bodies that had managed to shed their corporate existence and still
maintain life of a sort. The masters had gone--the beasts remained....

Lynne felt a wave of delight at her discovery, realised it was more a
result of her not having been inhibited by the traditions of Martian
conditioning than through any genius of her own. For an instant she let
down the bars of her mind--and the invaders, hovering unseen about
her in the tower-room, came swarming in for their third and fiercest
attack. They knew she had guessed their nature, were determined to
prevent Lynne from making the discovery clear to other humans. For they
too were telepathic.



                                 VIII


This time they actually knocked Lynne to the floor of the tower-room.
It was greater torment than she had ever endured in her life. Somehow
she could sense the pattern behind its intensity, even while she was in
the grip of a mental confusion that seemed to be burning out the very
fibers of her brain.

This was the showdown, the decisive battle. Her being imported to
Mars had been a step in the duel between the invisible aliens and the
Communications Integration of the red planet, headed by Rolf Marcein
and his telepaths and other department workers.

Unless the aliens were stopped and stopped now there would be no
holding them. Earthfolk on Mars were becoming increasingly telepathic
and telepaths were the prey of the invisible foes. Lynne _knew_
somehow, from the thoughts of the aliens, that they had been growing
steadily in strength since the arrival of the Earthmen on their planet,
that after a creepingly slow revival for decades they had finally
snow-balled to sufficient power to make open attacks upon human brains
laid bare for telepathic communication. They longed to renew the lost
pleasures of the flesh through possession of human bodies.

Rolf and the scientists had learned something that afternoon from
Lynne's twin, something about the nature and life-form of the attackers
that had hitherto been concealed from them. They were moving to the
attack themselves--and it was of vital import to them that Lynne should
now get through with the message that would reveal this true nature.

She tried desperately to reach Rolf--and when this effort failed to
think of Mother Weedon or even plump Tony Willis engaged in amorous
sports--but the keynote of the alien attack had been altered from
suggestion of sensation to outright mental attack. Instead of bribery
or blackmail through pain, she was being given sledgehammer treatment.

But she _had_ to get her message through. Without her knowledge of the
nature of the aliens Rolf would use faulty weapons against them, would
lose precious time, time that might prove decisive for the survival of
Earthmen on Mars.

Despairing, knowing she could not hold out much longer against the
attack with her mind open, Lynne summoned reserve powers she did not
know she possessed and swept the planet's surface with her thoughts,
seeking Rolf. Her love for him, her fear for Revere's ultimate fate,
her affection for her new comrades--all combined to help her make a
final superhuman effort.

Yet for awhile it seemed that even this despairing try was destined
to defeat. The floor was beginning to swim before her eyes when at
last she reached Rolf, got him, lost him, got him again. With darkness
closing about her she poured out her information, her theory, her
surmises.

Faintly at last she felt Rolf's Crehut! _The multiple bodies on the
visual screen we thought were ghosts--of course they're the survivors,
rather than the near-humans! Thanks million, honey, we'll know what to
do now. Hold on out there--help is on its way._

But Lynne could hold out no longer. She felt the invisible attackers
come pouring through her weakened mental barriers--her last remembered
vision was of the floor rising rapidly to strike her. She turned her
face away just before it hit.

Lynne became aware of a lifting from her brain, of a cessation of pain
that she had never actually felt. She opened her eyes, discovered she
was still lying on the floor of the tower-room. But she was no longer
surrounded by terror.

The patched portion of the wall had been smashed through and beyond it
hovered the well-lighted outlines of a small aircraft. With her in the
room was Rolf Marcein--and he was sweeping the apparently empty air
about him with an odd-looking weapon. No flash or beam came from its
squat muzzle but briefly, all around her, Lynne was aware of alien
anguish, alien drainage, alien flight.

"That should do it for awhile, honey," he told her, helping her to her
unsteady feet. "_Crehut!_ What a show those blasted _marlets_ put on
this time. They tried to knock out the whole system simultaneously.
Check the other stations, will you, honey?"

Automatically she did it. Cathayville came in clearly, as did New Walla
Walla and Zuleika. Save for a few stations on the other side of the
planet the communications network was clear once again. Lynne informed
Rolf of the fact.

"Good," he said, pulling a skinless cigarette from his pocket and
letting it ignite itself. "I guess we're solid now. The _purt_ of it
is they almost got us, before you could find out enough about them to
knock them out for awhile."

"What sort of gun is that?" Lynne asked him. He had called her honey,
he had saved her life, but so casually had he done it that she still
felt definite constraint between them.

"We had to put it together in a hurry, once we got your message," he
told her, patting it fondly. He held it up so that she could examine
it better, added, "It isn't really a gun at all. We've been using the
damned things for space and planet-ship external repairs for years
now--you know how their outer skins pile up positive electricity...."

"I don't," she said. "Tell me." He shook his head, put an arm around
her, scowled at her fiercely. "How come I managed to acquire such an
ignoramus?" he asked rhetorically. "I'm not going to explain it all now
but space-ships _do_ pick up positive charges on their outer hulls and
this thing is an anion gun that attracts and discharges negative juice.

"Our unseen visitors with the gone bodies are mostly positive
electricity in their present form, honey," he went on. "This blaster of
ours gives them a negative charge that wipes them right out." Rolf put
an arm about her, led her unprotesting to the hovering vehicle outside.
"I imagine they're beginning to wonder what in _purt's_ been going on,
down below."

But before he pressed the buttons that lowered the hovering pinnace to
the planet's surface he drew her into the circle of his arms, kissed
her, then said, "If you hadn't given us the clue to what these horrors
were we'd never have had sense enough to know what to do. We couldn't
conceive of the dominant species turning into this kind of force. But
their pets, with the multiple bodies...."

Lynne and Lao Mei-O'Connell and most of the rest of the citizens of
Barkutburg listened attentively while Rolf told them the full story.
The trouble, it seemed, was caused by the fact that the Earthmen had
brought electricity back to Mars.

"These creatures were forced to discard their corporeal bodies to
survive on a planet as dead as this one," he went on. "Their food is
electricity and they'd been existing on a starvation diet for thousands
of years, until _we_ got here."

"It's strange they never tried space-travel," said Lynne.

"I don't believe their philosophy admitted to such a materialistic
solution," Rolf replied. "They must have progressed like _farb_ in the
spiritual direction to be able to discard their bodies at all. Probably
couldn't manage it both ways."

"That makes sense, Rolf." Lao nodded, looked at Rolf with an appeal she
could not put into words.

He understood, told her, "Your Revere is going to be right as _purt_. I
know what you must have thought when Lynne gave you the message she got
about what we were doing to him. I tried to conceal it for that reason
but this young lady is too _farbly_ strong telepathically to shut her
out. I'm sorry I had to make him suffer but he understood. And I wasn't
going to damage him permanently.

"We--that is, some of Tony Willis' bright young men, have managed to
improve the necro-recorder so that it is no longer destructive of the
mind of the usee. They'd been working on it against time--and against
just such a situation as arose recently, when we were finally able to
get Revere off duty for a bit."

"Thanks." Lao Mei-O'Connell said the word gratefully.

"It's been rough on you," Rolf told her, "but nothing like as rough as
if our little friends got control of all the telepaths."

"What did they feed on that made them strong?" Lynne asked.

"Electricity," said Rolf. "Just because we couldn't make it work in
open circuits doesn't mean we haven't tried. They got enough from our
efforts partly to restore themselves--from such efforts and the leakage
of our closed circuits. They were always sopping it up.

"But we didn't even know what they looked like, though we had our
suspicions. They figured to be survivors of the dominant species on the
planet before it dried up--but Revere's test this afternoon gave us
our first doubts. We were still up a tree when Lynne got her message
through. That _did_ it!

"But it was touch and go. I grabbed a space-ship to get to Lynne,
then took a pinnace. If we hadn't managed to get the anion guns ready
tonight I think we'd have been licked for all our knowledge. Now we've
got _them_ licked. They can still raid our electricity once in awhile,
but it's going to cost them."

That was about it. Lynne got up and went outside in the chill Martian
night to smoke a skinless cigarette. A little while later Rolf came out
and joined her. He slipped an arm around her again, hugged her, said,
"_Purt_, isn't it?"

"I guess so." The constraint she felt in his presence was strong upon
her. And she had been through a little too much too quickly. She said,
"What about Revere?"

"He'll be back on the job in a little while," he said. "From what he
told me before he went under this afternoon he wants to mate up with
Lao Mei-O'Connell."

"That'll be fine," said Lynne, feeling suddenly very lonely. "But what
happens to me?"

"One _zwirchy_ guess!" he said, bringing his other arm into play.

"But if you drive off the aliens, why are you going to need telepaths?"
She felt robbed of a fascinating new career before it was even begun.

"Don't you believe it," he told her. "Telepathy is going to be the
keystone of the entire Martian culture. Now that we shan't have to
confine people like you and Revere and me to communications we can
use them a thousand other ways. Think of what telepathy will mean in
education, in therapy, in sheer honesty and understanding!

"Besides...." He looked thoughtfully at the star-studded sky. "Man
isn't always going to be limited to two puny planets. We've still to
get a settlement working on Venus. And out there somewhere are the
moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Think of how easy it will make the task if
we have telepaths ready-made!"

He paused, forced her to look at him, said, "How about it, honey?"

She said, "You must be in love with your own voice--you didn't really
have to _say_ any of that. But watch what you think!"




*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Nightmare tower" ***

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