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 realzwirch, 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—hisplanet—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 thatarmlounge admiralinsult 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, youczanworm!" 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 afarbishhowl 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, weknowabout 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 soswackablylewd 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 amarletafter 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 ofdéja 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. Thankfarbyou'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—thatmarlet! 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 theirfarbishinvisible necks."
She checked the thrill of panic that caused her, manageda Look up Ray Cornell when you hit Earth. And ruin Janet just for me.
Don't be too rough on Rolfwas 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 thanfarb?
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 whatisthe 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—likethat!" 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 theczanwormand 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—andRolf."
"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 abouther—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, "Iknewit! 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, youmarlet,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 creatureamI?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 hadnotsurvived—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. Lynneknewsomehow, 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 shehadto 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 blastedmarletsput 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. Thepurtof 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-shipsdopick 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 inpurt'sbeen 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, untilwegot 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 likefarbin 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 aspurt. 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 toofarblystrong 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. Thatdidit!
"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 gotthemlicked. 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?"
"Onezwirchyguess!" 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 tosayany of that. But watch what you think!"