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Title: Snowstorm on Mars

Author: Jr. Sam Merwin

Illustrator: Ed Emshwiller


        
Release date: March 14, 2026 [eBook #78212]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1956

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78212

Credits: Tom Trussel (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SNOWSTORM ON MARS ***




                           Snowstorm on Mars

                         by Jacques Jean Ferrat
                     [Pseudonym of Sam Merwin, Jr.]




  _We might have known it would be dangerous to publish a
  science fantasy novel as well-liked as Jacques Jean Ferrat’s_
  NIGHTMARE TOWER, _followed by a sequel in much the
  same exciting vein. Unhappily for us the popularity of_ THE
  WHITE RAIN CAME _spread in widening circles all the way to
  Mars and brought dire threats of telepathic reprisal for our delay
  in enlivening our pages once again with Lynne and Rolf Marcein
  in Martian splendor arrayed. Here then is a second sequel, made
  mandatory by our desire to keep all such threats at bay._

  =So bright and fateful was Lynne Marcein’s destiny that it set her
  apart from all other women. She was soon to have a baby--on Mars!=




Lynne Fenlay Marcein was the most conspicuous landmark at Nampura
Depot--or, for that matter, on all of Mars. Although the Red Planet
was sparsely populated, with only a little over a million men and
women to cultivate its vast, waterless land-area, she could go nowhere
outside of the Depot itself without finding a crowd of the curious, the
awestruck, and the morbidly pessimistic about her.

She had long since given up her weekly visits to New Samarkand, the
Martian metropolis and capital city. She could not enter a store,
a theater, or an office without finding herself a focus of a mass
interest that brought all normal traffic to a standstill. Women eyed
her with sympathy and disbelief, men with downright incredulity. For
Lynne was the only visibly pregnant woman on the entire planet.

“Not only visible, but apparently downright shocking,” she told her
husband, Rolf Marcein, over the Earth-Mars radarphone during their
weekly conversation. “Hold on tight, _vinral_,” Rolf told her,
using the Martian term of supreme endearment. She longed to see his
face, but so far there was no vidar communication between Mars and the
mother planet. With obvious concern, he asked, “How soon?”

“Dr. Smetana says another two weeks, at least,” she replied. “Don’t
worry, darling. If that little snip Rana Willis could have her baby
here on Mars, I can be lucky too.”

Rolf said, “I could kill these _ferkab_ VIP’s in Paulo City for
their _czanworm_ sluggishness. We’ve had their E-source taped
for a solid Martian month. It’s right smack under the Eastern Siberian
topsoil. I’ve laid down a reserve power-program, but they won’t let me
go until they’ve adapted it officially. Right now the date seems as far
away as ever.”

“I know,” said Lynne soothingly. “You stick there until the job is
done. I’m doing wonderfully well, according to Dr. Smetana. It’s just
that I’m getting a little tired of being a freak.”

“And I’m getting fed up with being an engineering genius fifty million
miles away while a lot of politicians check endless brain-team
coordinates to make sure E-power on Earth won’t upset their wretched
little _ferkab_ arrangements. Also, _vinral_, I miss you
_farbly_.”

“Doubled in diamonds,” said Lynne warmly. Before she could add further
words of affection her transmission time expired and she was cut off
from her husband for another Earth-week.

The fact that Lynne Marcein was pregnant was no small thing on the Red
Planet. From the very first, when pioneering space ranging humanity
sought to colonize Mars, the combination of rarefied atmosphere and
light gravity had rendered child-bearing impossible. Since the rigors
of settling a planet alien to humanity demanded the highest-level young
minds and bodies, the genetic solution had originally been through
induced identical twins and a better solution had not been found.

From birth one twin was conditioned and trained for life on the Red
Planet, while the other was trained for life on Earth. Thus, Earth was
not stripped of its most gifted and adventurous young men and women,
and Mars was equally favored. Both Rolf and Lynne were the products of
such training.

But Lynne was especially remarkable. She had not only been one of a
pair of identical twins of opposite sexes--she had been trained for
life on Earth, while her brother, Revere, had been the Mars-bred one.
And yet, here she was, a Martian in the fullest sense.

“Once a freak, always a freak,” she told herself wryly, as she left
the Earth-Mars communications chamber and walked slowly across the
courtyard of Nampura Depot Center. Her objective was the residence wing
where both she, and Rolf--and the Willises--had their apartments.

Rough lichen-shrubs, a triumph of creative botany, bordered a smooth
pathway that had a short while previously been as bare of foliage as
the aluminum, cold-resistant coverall that housed both Lynne and the
unborn life within her. She halted for a moment to look upward at the
incredible blaze of the night heavens in the black-velvet sky, noting
the brilliant passage of Deimos, one of Mars’ two small moons, as it
slowly blacked out of the three-starred belt of Orion.

Since she had become partially inured to the rarefied atmosphere that
had made breathing difficult on her first landing, and since she hadn’t
far to go, she did not bother to use her oxyrespirator. The cold air
stung her nostrils like fine sand and caused her to inhale deeply.

She was grateful for the air’s lack of density, since its very
sparseness enabled the heavens to blaze without atmospheric hindrance.
She would never, being Earth-conditioned, cease wondering at the
incredible splendor of the Martian skies.

And yet it seemed to her that the spectacle was infinitesimally less
brilliant than it had been during her early months on the Red Planet.
She could remember vividly how, abetted by her husband-to-be, she
had helped save the telepaths, on whom all Mars depended for lateral
planetwide communications. By themselves they would have succumbed
to the maddening onslaught of the bodiless, electricity-devouring
aborigines who had so nearly driven her twin insane with their
insidious mind-destroying suggestions.

She had been virtually shanghaied to Mars by Rolf Marcein and, later,
had helped him to discover and harness the E-power sources--those
mysterious mineral brains that seemed to exist either on or within
every stable planet and atmosphere-bearing satellite. It was E-power
that had brought atmospheric moisture to Mars, where virtually no
atmosphere existed, and had thereby speeded up the process of making
the planet increasingly fertile and habitable.

Yet it was E-power that was holding her husband on faraway Earth, when
she longed more than ever before to have him by her side. Not, she
thought, that Rolf or any man could help her with the ordeal of giving
birth to the second baby born on Mars. And it was the result of E-power
that would someday blanket the spectacle of the night skies by giving
the Red Planet a new atmosphere.




                                   II


Lynne Marcein rapped on the green plastic door of the three-room suite
where Tony and Rana Willis, and their infant daughter made their home,
and entered in response to a cheery, “Come in!”

The first baby ever to be born on Mars was in the process of having
a bath. Its parents--plump, amiable Tony Willis and tiny, vivacious
Rana Spinelli--were cooing over the small portable tub like any two of
the hundreds of millions of doting new parents on Earth. The bedroom,
where the bath had been set up, smelled of talcum and soap and, of
course--baby.

Rana looked up quickly at Lynne and said, “Well! How goes it with you,
little mother?”

“_Little_ mother!” exclaimed Tony, who was standing by with the
towel. “Aren’t you being medically inexact?”

“Don’t be conceited,” Lynne snapped at him. “You had little enough to
do with her,” she nodded toward the infant, who was cooing contentedly
in her tiny plastic tub.

“Well, I did what I could,” he replied with false male modesty. “Watch
out, _vinral_--or you’ll get soap in its eye.”

“I’ll thank you not to refer to our daughter as ‘it,’” said Rana
loftily, lifting the baby out and allowing her husband to wrap the
towel around her glowing, plump little pink limbs.

Operation bath completed, and the infant safely deposited in its crib
with a bottle, the Willises joined Lynne in a cola-fizz and cigarettes.
“When is Rolf coming back?” Tony asked.

“He doesn’t know,” said Lynne. “At least, he didn’t say. As usual, the
transmission time ran out before he could really discuss his plans.”

“Those _ferkab_ stuffed-shirts at the Earth-end!” Rana exclaimed,
inhaling and blowing twin plumes of blue smoke through her nostrils.
“How are you--holding out? You look simply _zwirchy. Farbish
zwirchy_.”

“I feel like a three-headed monster,” said Lynne. “Everybody stares at
me. I envy you, Rana--getting through it on outpost assignment beyond
New Walla Walla.”

“And I envy you,” said Rana, her eyes sparkling. “Here I have the first
baby on Mars, and you get virtually all the attention. It got pretty
lonely out there during the final weeks.”

“I can imagine,” said Lynne, with open admiration. What the tiny
Italo-Indian girl had done seemed to her akin to the greatest epics
of human heroism. Once Mars had ceased to be a raw frontier the
induced-twin method had been dropped in favor of natural reproduction
on the Red Planet. But since Martian environmental conditions prevented
normal births, it was necessary--once a woman was known to be carrying
a child--to ship her to Earth for pregnancy care and the actual birth
of her baby.

It was an expensive process, not only in the strain it put on
domestic relations, but because it used up cargo space sadly needed
for supplies. Already Mars had built up a thriving export trade in
lichenwassers, lean Martian boarmeat, archeological products and rare
minerals.

A brilliant telepath--which her husband was not in spite of his not
inconsiderable virtues as an executive and organizer--Rana had been
assigned to the lonely Thule station beyond New Walla Walla in the
far Southern Polar district. Her task was to install and supervise
a new trans-polar tele-communications unit that had cut and greatly
simplified complex relays around the Red Planet’s top. Not even Tony
had known his wife was pregnant.

“I decided, since I was a Martian, that my baby was going to be Martian
too,” was what the tiny slip of a woman had told an almost raging Rolf
and Tony. Incredible had seemed her courage when her condition had been
finally discovered--much too late for the usual transport to Earth.
When the male protests continued, Rana said quietly, “No woman on Mars
has ever carried a child more than four months. I’m already in my
seventh. Now will you stop worrying?”

At this stage, Lynne had intervened, firm in her conviction that Rana
had accomplished a miracle. “How?” she asked.

Rana’s reply had been as original as it had been unexpected. “A trained
telepath must be able to attain total concentration at will. To achieve
such concentration we need complete mental control. That in itself is
inseparably tied up with complete control of our bodies. And a baby is
closer than breathing to its own mother.”

“But I still don’t see how--”

“_Crehut!_” had been Rana’s reply. “You remind me of the
Indian chief who said to the mermaid in the old Earth-joke: ‘_I
did exercises_.’” Then, growing serious, she had explained the
process--a well conceived combination of TP and yoga, practiced at
regular intervals, that had thus far assured the child’s safety.

Later, noting the detached look in Lynne’s eye, Rolf had protested,
“If you think for a moment, _vinral_, that you’re going to put me
through what poor Tony’s enduring, you’re out of your mind.”

“We’ll have plenty of time to talk about that,” Lynne had affirmed,
“_after_ Rana’s baby is born.”

“_If_ Rana’s baby is born,” had been Rolf’s tormented comment.

But the baby had been born, and was thriving. Now Lynne was carrying
the second Mars-child, with only two weeks to go unless Dr. Smetana was
grievously mistaken. She had found the “exercises” which enabled her to
protect the child curiously restful--once she had mastered the task of
attaining close rapport between her body’s precious new burden and the
universe around her.

Despite the awkwardness of advanced pregnancy, she felt strangely at
peace with herself and the infinite. Even Rolf’s enforced absence
didn’t matter too much--though she longed to have him with her. She
moved through her daily work at the Depot--the task of seeking new
telepathic relays which would detect the existence of other, alien
intellects in the cosmos--almost as if it were being done by a complete
stranger.

She finished her second cola-fizz, glanced at her wristwatch and rose,
a trifle clumsily, even though the light gravity of Mars made the
weight within her comparatively light. “Well, chilluns,” she said,
“it’s time for this little mother-to-be to go home and commune with
nature.”

Tony was about to ask her a question, when a choking wail from the
bedroom sent him flying. “Honestly--_men!_” exclaimed Rana.
“They’re such idiots about babies!”




                                  III


Late the following morning, in accordance with her pre-maternity
schedule, Lynne paid her daily visit to Dr. Smetana’s office. It
adjoined the gray-walled infirmary in the southeast corner of the
low, sprawling complex of semi-cylindrical buildings that was Nampura
Depot--literally the brain-center of Mars. The doctor was a stocky,
square-jawed man with unexpectedly light-blue eyes and a deceptive
appearance of ill-health, thanks to the refusal of his skin to acquire
the usual Martian sunburn. He put her through the usual run of tests
and shook his head.

“I’ll be _zwirched_,” he said, “if I can figure out how you manage
it, Lynne. According to everything we’ve learned about women on this
ghastly, wonderful planet you should have lost your child four months
ago. Yet everything still looks one hundred percent.”

“If I’m such a freak, what about Rana Willis?” said Lynne, who was
beginning to tire of the “miracle” aspects of her pregnancy.

“We expect miracles to happen once in a long while,” Dr. Smetana told
her, “but not two in a row.”

“Or maybe it’s not such a miracle after all,” Lynne suggested. “I’m
merely following Rana’s technique--with a wrinkle or two of my own
thrown in. If it works for two of us--”

“Remember, you’re both Class-C telepaths,” said the physician. “I’d
hate to recommend this yoga-and-TP technique to anyone less gifted.
And, right now, there are only fifty-three Class-C telepaths, female
gender, on Mars. So....” He lifted one thick, dark eyebrow.

Leaving the doctor, on her way to the dining hall for lunch, Lynne
ran into an old acquaintance--dark-skinned Joanna Wheatley, who had
shared a space-ship cabin with her on her trip out from Earth. The
young animal husbandry expert had, quite by accident, put Lynne on the
track of the E-power source that was already doing so much to increase
the density of the Martian atmosphere, and make successful cultivation
possible on the bleak desert wastes.

Joanna, a buoyantly healthy, good-natured girl who usually wore her
exuberant emotions close to the ebony surface of her skin, seemed to
Lynne strangely subdued. Looking at her in disbelief, Lynne said,
“_Crehut_, Joanna, you can’t be ill. Not you.”

“I’m not,” was the reply. “At least, I don’t think I am. But my chief
at Woomera Station thought your Dr. Smetana had better look me over.”
Then, eying Lynne’s figure, “You look wonderful. Lynne, I’d give
anything to trade places with you. Every woman on Mars would.”

That, Lynne decided, was probably untrue. She interrupted with,
“Woomera Station? I thought you were running the beef garden at
Patagonia since old E gave us enough moisture for pampas.”

“I am,” said the girl with a flash of pride. “But Patagonia is still
under Woomera control. Lynne, what you did to harness E-power was the
most marvelous thing. And now, this!”

“_This_ is one prolonged headache,” said Lynne, looking down at
herself ruefully. “One of these days, when it’s over, I’m coming down
to pay you and your prize shorthorns a visit.”

“That would be wonderful,” Joanna said, her eyes glowing. Then her gaze
fell away, her manner became diffident. “But not too soon,” she said in
an abnormally small voice. “Things are a bit messed up right now. I’d
say they were downright _swackish_.” Another pause, then, “I’ll
let you know when we have everything _purt_. I do want you down
there.”

“I’ll be there--whenever you’re ready,” said Lynne. “Don’t let old
Smetana intimidate you, Joanna. He has a heart of lichen-jelly.”

She gave Joanna’s smooth-fleshed, muscular forearm a friendly squeeze.
Then she went on out and crossed the main patio to the dining hall,
where she joined her twin brother, Revere and his wife, Lao Mei, at one
of the smaller tables. As always, when confronted with Revere, Lynne
wondered why she hadn’t been born a man. To her, the Fenlay face looked
far better in masculine gender. Fortunately, she thought, her husband
did not agree.

Lao Mei, small, exquisitely feminine and endowed not only with quiet
charm but with that combination of fine human ingredients customarily
lumped under the general heading of “character,” was recently back from
Earth, where she had born Revere induced twins. She said, “How is it,
Lynne. Is everything still _purt?_”

Lynne nodded and turned her attention to her soup. “Couldn’t be
_purter_,” she replied, thinking that Lao Mei, with her hard core
of integrity had been a wonderful mate for Revere, who was brilliant,
telepathically gifted, but given to occasional lapses of weakness.

_You can say that again._ Revere’s thought came through to her
clearly across the table. _Everything really_ zwirchy?

_Everything’s fine._ It was not really good manners at Nampura
Depot for two Class-C telepaths, capable of receiving, selecting and
projecting thoughts to indulge in silent dialogue in the presence of a
mere Class-A like Lao Mei. But since it was all in the family....

Lynne went on silently to Revere, who, with non-TP Tony Willis
virtually ran Martian communications while Rolf was away on Earth,
_I’ve got to take an exercise spell after lunch or I’d tend to it
myself. But I wish you’d check Doc Smetana on Joanna Wheatley of
Patagonia Station this pip emma and give me the gen on her._

_Why, something up?_ Revere inquired with a thought-probe.
Lynne told him of her meeting in the doctor’s office, and the girl’s
strange behavior. Then, aloud, she said, “If something _is_ wrong
down there, it might be a good idea to find it out now. You know how
touchy Husbandry has been about our mucking into their _ferkab_
affairs--ever since we had them shut off their atomic transmuter
while we were getting Old E in a harness. It’s probably nothing. But
it didn’t _feel_ like nothing. Joanna was keeping her thoughts
rigidly masked while I talked to her.”

“If you two _marlets_ do any more silent talking while I’m at
this table,” said Lao Mei sternly, “I’m going to dump your food right
over your heads. It’s like being stranded in the middle of a deaf-mute
convention and not knowing sign language.”

“Sorry,” said Lynne.

Revere took his wife’s hand and squeezed it. Then, telepathically, to
Lynne he said: _Will do, female. Go do your exercises and let Brother
Revere ride again._

Lao Mei, looking at them closely, made a move toward a particularly
drippy canalberry salad with leeks, and thereafter the table talk was
just that. When Lynne left them to go to her room, her sister-in-law
said with a sigh, “I’m going to turn my old brain in for a new model-a
TP Class-D one.”

“If you do,” said Revere Fenlay, “you’ll be the only one in all the
worlds. So who will you have to talk to?”

“It’s not _whom_ I’ll have to talk to,” said Lao Mei demurely.
“It’s the _whoms_ I’ll be able to shut out.”




                                   IV


Lynne lay on her plastomat for the next two hours, one hour on her
stomach, the other on her back. Under the conditions of light Martian
gravity, these positions had been discovered to be better for yoga
breathing and trance than the cross-legged, sitting positions of
yoga on Earth. More important, they maintained a more normal flow of
circulation through the brain, a flow essential to full TP keying and
control.

At first, as she lay prone on the mat, it seemed to her that every
stray thought in the Depot came tripping, unwanted, into her
head--every stray thought in Mars. She could, had she wished, have
identified the senders, but to do so would have destroyed her purpose.
A vital factor in Rana’s success with the first Mars-born baby, had
been the isolation of her post, and her ability to shut out extraneous
thoughts, and concentrate entirely upon the union of her own existence
and the new life blossoming in her womb.

Lynne breathed deeply and closed her eyes. She relaxed the muscles
at the corners of her eyes and little by little awareness of outside
thoughts faded. At the end of the first hour, after rolling over on
her back, she was able to lose all outside interference in a matter of
mere minutes. Then her real concentration began. She grew conscious
of the unborn child she was carrying, even to sensing the faint and
fitful radiations of its thoughts. From time to time she felt the stir
of its body, the kick of its feet. She conveyed a message of union, of
_oneness_, of warmth and security to the embryo brain within her.
Then, after a while, she slept dreamlessly.

She awoke at the exact end of the second hour, feeling serene and
refreshed. A thought reached her mind, probing, a thought unmistakably
that of her twin, Revere. He was telling her, if she was awake, to go
immediately to the doctor’s office. Something about Joanna Wheatley and
a cattle plague and the DT’s....

Revere and the doctor were waiting for Lynne in the physician’s inner
laboratory. It was the room of a medical jack-of-all-trades, for Mars,
being thinly populated and in need of a variety of medical services,
was unable to afford the specialists of Earth. Dr. Smetana was not
only a fine general practitioner. He was also the only competent
psychiatrist in this entire sector of the Red Planet. It was therefore
not surprising that he had been assigned to Nampura Depot, since
the telepathic headquarters of Mars was a place where, presumably a
head-shrinker might be needed.

However, as Dr. Smetana was fond of saying, “In that department, I’m
merely an observer, since TP’s are mentally just about the healthiest
folk there are. Telepathy and repression don’t exactly walk hand in
hand.”

Revere spoke to Lynn aloud for the benefit of the doctor, who was
barely a Class-A telepath. “I’ve been doing some checking on conditions
at Patagonia Station,” he said. “Those _marlets_ have been
having a bucketful of _swackish_ troubles lately. It seems the
cattle have been showing every symptom of going off their collective
rails--stampedes, off-season breeding fits, berserk tempers, even
dancing.”

“That I’ll have to see,” said Lynne, lighting a cigarette.

“You will--in a moment,” said Dr. Smetana. “I’ve got Joanna Wheatley’s
tapes right here.” He turned on a switch.

At once a wall screen flashed on, revealing a set of file numbers.
Thanks to Rolf Marcein’s development of the formerly dangerous
necro-recorder, which reproduced on a screen the thoughts of a person
under certain hypnotic drugs, psychiatry on Mars had taken a long leap
ahead of parallel progress on the mother planet. There, because its use
hastened death or insanity through the strain it put on the patient’s
mind and body, the recorder was still used only in cases of extreme
urgency. On Mars, thanks to Rolf’s improvements its use had become mere
examination routine.

The screen flashed its polychromatic “adjustment” patterns, some of
which were highly revealing of Joanna’s normal young woman desires.
Then, in response to channeled suggestion, got to the matter under
examination. The miraculous green grasses of the newly-created
Patagonia Station veldt appeared in brilliant color with the dark blue
sky of Mars over them. Small herds of plump, carefully selected beef
cattle grazed peacefully on the grass which the wonder of E-power had
made possible. There was even a glimpse of Joanna, riding herd on a
tractoscooter, and smoking a cigarette.

Then the vehicle was halted close to a herd which the dark-skinned girl
was inspecting. A plump steer turned to watch her. It seemed to be
regarding her with speculation. There was a close-up of the creature’s
face, its eyes revealing a startling intelligence.

All at once, the steer went into a dance. It was a rhythmic swaying, at
first, but it quickly became a series of small steps in harmony with
some unheard rhythm or meter. The other steers looked, nodded or shook
their heads and finally joined in, following the leader. They performed
almost like a vidar chorus-line back on Earth, kicking in unison and
swaying as if to music.

Then they broke up into groups and entered into a series of
unbelievable revels that could only be described as immoral, even for
animals. There was a flash of Joanna, taking off on her tractoscooter,
followed by a picture of her back on the scene, with the neighboring
Woomera Depot superintendent, while the creatures placidly grazed.

“What do you make of it?” Dr. Smetana asked the instant the film ended.
He was frowning as he switched off the recorder. “Is she crazy?”

Lynne knew what Revere was thinking, and for a moment, there was
shared horror between them. They _knew_ what had happened to the
prize cattle of the Red Planet’s only ranch. Lynne said aloud, for the
doctor’s benefit, “Joanna Wheatley isn’t crazy, Doctor.”

“But what about those cattle?” the physician asked.

“Revere will tell you,” Lynne replied. “I’ve got to put an emergency
call through to my husband. He’s needed here--at once.”

Absently, she cursed the fact of her advanced pregnancy, and the
demands it made on her. If she hadn’t been so nearly incapacitated, she
would have been able to handle the matter herself. How and where, she
wondered, had the grotesque, bodiless aborigines of Mars--life forms
that fed on electricity--managed to get enough of it to obtain strength
for possession even of bovine brains? Rolf would have to come back at
once, to deal with this new outbreak of a problem long considered under
control.

Lynne put through her call, and obtained Mars Central on New Samarkand.
Fortunately, she was able to cut through red tape and obtain the chief
supervisor without delay.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Marcein,” he said, in reply to her request for
an immediate Earth-call to her husband. “Solar disturbances have
temporarily blocked interplanetary communications.”

Lynne hung up, feeling almost physically ill. All the terrors of
Nightmare Tower, where she had battled the vicious aborigines alone in
the darkness, returned to plague her. Then she rallied and remembered
that a deadly threat that had been conquered before could be conquered
again. She was going to have to go it alone.

Inside her, the baby kicked feebly.




                                   V


Martin Juarez, Director of Woomera Station and Patagonia Station,
and the most influential single individual in the entire Martian
Agricultural Experiment Program, was a wiry, swarthy man whose face and
bare forearms had been burned almost black by the fierce Martian sun.
Looking at Lynne, across his office desk, he said, “Mrs. Marcein, I’m
almost beginning to wish Joanna was as crazy as a _czanworm_.”

“So am I,” said Lynne quietly. She turned and looked directly at the
dark-skinned young animal husbandry expert she had seen only the day
before in Dr. Smetana’s office at Nampura Depot. “Nothing personal,
Joanna,” she said.

“_Crehut!_” exploded the girl. “I wish I was crazy instead of
those steers. Mars can always ship out a replacement for me. But they
can’t breed cattle on Earth capable of surviving on this planet.”

Lynne thought Joanna had put the problem very eloquently. Somehow, the
zombies, as she termed the electrophagic aborigines that had supposedly
been routed forever shortly after her arrival, had discovered a new
source of dietary strength. This time, with appalling ingenuity, they
had evidently decided not to seek possession of human bodies--or, to be
more exact, human minds laid bare to them by telepathic exposure.

Instead, they had elected to take over the minds of the Patagonia
Station steers. Lynne would have given several years of her life to
know why and how the selection had been made. According to Martin
Juarez and Joanna, there had been no abnormal behavior on the part of
other species of food-on-the-hoof bred and raised at the two stations.
Sheep, fowl and pigs had been left entirely alone, either through
choice, or because they were invulnerable to zombie possession.

The zombies, whose visible record had been left for human study
on hundreds of magnificent murals in the ruins that had survived
for untold ages, owing to the airless and moistureless Martian
climate, had been one of the two dominant species on the Red Planet.
Somehow--probably through their ability to survive in electronic rather
than physical form--they had survived the long desolation of their
home world, where all animate life with the exception of the mindless
czanworms and the imbecilic sand-lurtonks had succumbed.

They were weird and utterly repulsive creatures--with complex multiple
bodies, undefined appendages and much-too-well-defined reproductive
organs. Their concept of proper mating behavior was utterly beyond the
pale from a human point of view. They were revolting--and Lynne well
knew that much of the horror they inspired in human minds was caused by
the fact that they managed to make their ghastly idea of fun and games
even momentarily alluring.

Lynne shuddered, remembering her previous combats with them, before
their positively-charged entities had succumbed to the telepathically
directed bursts of negative anion-gun barrages. Then she said, “The
first thing I’d like to do is examine every record you have of abnormal
behavior among the cattle.”

“Joanna will give you the tapes, Mrs. Marcein,” said Martin Juarez. He
paused, then added, “I’m sorry to be causing you such trouble at this
time.”

“Forget it,” said Lynne, lighting a cigarette. “I’ll manage. Even if
the worst should happen, I can always try again. You may not have the
chance if we don’t lick this thing right now.”

She knew that Juarez knew he should have reported the trouble
sooner--at least to Mars Agriculture Chief Radchev. But Mars was still
a pioneer planet, and a responsible project boss like Juarez was very
much on his own. Naturally, he had not wished to report a failure until
he could be sure it was real and that there was no possibility of
mastering it with the means at his command. Lynne liked him, sensed his
very real abilities, and had no wish to chide him.

While studying the record-tapes in Joanna’s neat office, with its
bright pots of flowering lichenheather, Lynne considered just how
serious the problem was. Until E-power had been harnessed to give
impetus to the restoration of Martian atmosphere, the planet’s human
population had had to subsist largely on synthetic foods, plus the
occasional lean, leather-tough meat from wild pigs which had somehow
survived exportation from Earth and reverted to savagery.

The small bits of grass and grain and vegetables that were painfully
nurtured in the bone-dry Red Planet soil were far too precious and
costly to be used for animal fodder. Not until the atomic transmuter
had been installed at Woomera Station could any cattle be grazed at
all. And here, the cost was way out of line with even experimental
results. Until E-power, through controlled moisture production, enabled
an ever-growing patch of Martian soil to become fertile, the effort to
grow cattle on Mars was doomed.

“Here’s the first case on record,” said Joanna, halting the tape
unwinding its record of pictures, written matter and her own clear,
precise accents on a vidarscreen. “It happened last May twenty-third,
Earth-calendar. Old Bill, one of our prize musk-Brahmas, went on a
rampage and tried to catwalk the drinking pool border and fell in. It
was pretty unusual, but not alarming. No harm was done.”

“Stay with it, Joanna,” said Lynne.

       *       *       *       *       *

She was thinking of what failure of the husbandry program could mean
at this stage. Since the Red Planet had no water surface--above all
no salt water--the plankton which had become the staple diet of an
overpopulated Earth was simply not available. Mars needed beef, and
lamb, and good rich pork. No heat or energy tablets could make up for
the real things--especially on a sub-Arctic pioneer planet.

Other incidents of cattle aberration showed on the record with
increasing frequency and severity. It was a senseless duel that had
left two prime musk-oxen dripping their own insides. It was an utterly
out-of-season misbreeding in which the bull seemed to have been helped
to achieve his purpose in a sort of team operation--a senseless
miniature stampede that had run off tons of good meat from the bones of
its owners.

“You know about the dance I saw yesterday,” said Joanna, her bright
eyes falling away. “When I reported it, Martin went back with me
to witness it. The cattle were all as mild as turtles. He ordered
_me_ to report to Dr. Smetana.”

“_Crehut_, I was there yesterday--remember?” Lynne said.

She glanced at the biplanetary chronometer on her wrist--a trim and
amazing simplification of complexities which Rolf had given her on her
last birthday. She wondered if her brother or Tony Willis, back at
Nampura Depot, had got through to Rolf yet.

Then she became aware of the time, and realized that she had missed her
period of yoga-TP concentration on the precious burden she was carrying
inside her. As if in protest, the baby kicked vigorously, twice. Lynne
closed her eyes and sent a message to the unborn tot--_Easy, infant,
mummy’s right here_. There was no time for rest now. She had to try
to make some sense out of Joanna’s records.

She began to make sense out of the problem after a while. But it was an
understanding that deepened, rather than relieved her growing concern
and mounting fear. Fear of the zombies had never fully left her since
her first ghastly encounter with them in Nightmare Tower, when it
had seemed to her that her mind must forever stand alone against the
ghastly phantoms of an alien world.

Until the previous February Patagonia Station had been little more than
a blueprint addition to the rapidly spreading green acres of Woomera
Station. In the fenced-in, relatively small grazing areas of the parent
station there had been plenty of negative electricity protection
against zombie inroads. And similar fences had been erected around
every important official installation on Mars.

But the zombie threat was ancient history, and the broad new pastures
of Patagonia Station had been planned to enable the specially bred Red
Planet cattle to roam free--as they had done in the early days of the
American Southwest, the Argentina pampas and the tse fly-freed plateau
of Central Africa. The results of this mistake could be ticked off
almost by the calendar.

The zombies had moved in and were feeding on the vast electrical
discharges of the mysterious E-entity that provided the power--through
human-inspired irritation--to create the storms and moisture that made
the expanded station possible. Taking possession of the empty bovine
minds, they were beginning to play their monstrous games as their
new-fed strength waxed.

“_Crehut!_ Look at those _ferkab_ devils now!” Joanna had
risen and was staring in horror at a vidarscreen on which was projected
a fairly wide expanse of New Patagonia Station. “Come _on_!” she
cried.

Lynne paused for an incredulous moment to study the screen. It showed
level acres, bright with tough, waving grass, each green stretch dotted
with gray, long-haired cattle. The normally stupid and independent
beasts were clustering together in a strange way, forming distinct
group shapes, almost as if in response to some alien military command.

Even as she watched she saw the leader--a large long-horned
steer--deliberately lower his head and savagely attack an animal that
had managed to get in his way. She caught a glimpse of blood dripping
from its torn flanks and spreading like a sun-reddened shadow over the
emerald-green grass.

“I’m _coming!_” she said grimly in response to another plea from
Joanna.




                                   VI


They rode a two-place tractoscooter together, with Joanna driving the
rugged, almost-springless vehicle recklessly out over the expanse of
the growing station toward the scene of incipient disaster. Lynne hung
onto her perch with both hands, her lips white as they rocketed over
grassland that had looked level on the vidarscreen, but proved in
reality to be savagely bumpy and uneven.

Joanna, dominated as she was by a desperate concern for the safety of
her cattle, did not realize her recklessness until she had braked the
vehicle, almost in the midst of the zombie-driven beasts. She plucked a
long bullwhip from a boot at her side, and a stunner from the dashboard
pocket in front of her. She marched boldly toward the herd, which had
ceased all movement and was regarding her with massed, owlish eyes.

Then, suddenly, she stopped and turned to Lynne, a look of utter
consternation on her face. “Lynne!” she exclaimed. “What a _ferkab
marlet_ I am. I completely forgot about the baby! Are you all right?”

“So far everything’s _purt_,” said Lynne, reassured by her own
lack of distress. She was all right, she decided, and felt relief flood
through her. “Get on with it, Joanna,” she urged. “I needn’t tell you
how important it is.”

Alarm rang like an old-fashioned radar _ping_ in her brain, and
she swung about just in time to see a long-haired musk-ox rising from
the tall grass in which he had been lying concealed, and advancing on
the tractoscooter they had just abandoned.

She experienced a chilling sense of triumphant malice as the shaggy
beast reared and brought its forefeet viciously down on the dashboard
and steering apparatus of the vehicle. Instantly the scooter was
wrecked beyond immediate hope of repair.

Fear became so much a part of Lynne she could feel its copper taste at
the base of her tongue.

“Joanna!” she cried, her voice strangely weak. “Look behind you.”

The girl turned, her eyes narrowed in desperate rage. Raising the
stunner she felled the zombie-ridden creature with a perfect shot
between the eyes, and watched it collapse beside the vehicle it had
wrecked.

“That should put you to sleep for a while, you _czanworm_,” she
said, furiously.

Lynne had turned again. The massed herd was advancing remorselessly
now, spear-headed by an even larger creature. She recognized it as the
leader she had seen in the vidar screen in Joanna’s office. There was
still blood on its horns, and tumultuously heaving flanks. Lynne could
feel the triumphant malice pouring from the zombie in control, and an
even greater horror came upon her.

“Joanne,” she called desperately, wondering in an extremity of panic,
what had possessed her to expose herself to so great a danger at such a
time. She had no doubt at all concerning the deadliness of the danger.
And it was increased immeasurably seconds later when the dark girl
swung about and fired pointblank at the menacing ovebos. As the echoes
of the blast died she hurled her weapon away with a Martian curse.

“Forgot to recharge it,” Joanna said bitterly. Swinging about and
whirling the bullwhip about her head, she advanced straight toward the
herd, cracking the whip at them, the flicks sounding like a series of
rifle-shots.

Some of the cattle shifted uneasily and refused to come forward. Here
and there a steer even turned and broke away. But the leader, and those
close behind him continued their inexorable advance.

Lynne got a flash of a too-familiar alien thought, and cried aloud,
“Careful, Joanna, they’re going to stampede.”

The leader executed an odd, an un-oxlike little shuffle. Then he
lowered his bloody horns for the charge.

Lynne Marcein, at that moment of great peril, became telepathically
hyper-acute. She received, sifted, analyzed, and identified a series of
terrifying mental impressions which came in such quick succession that
they seemed dreamlike and unreal. There was Joanna, whatever fear she
felt sublimated to outrage at the grotesque derelictions of the animals
whose breeding and care was her job. Joanna was going to use her whip
until the stupid, insane creatures turned and fled in blind panic.

But the creatures were neither stupid nor insane. At least, the
brains and beings that controlled them were not craven. They were as
determined as Joanna to destroy her, an obstacle in the path of their
appalling urge for such degenerate pleasure as their bovine embodiment
would permit. She caught the mass urge to destroy, and instantly
thereafter the driving mental force of the leader with his gore-soaked
horns.

By concentrating telepathically on the leader, Lynne automatically
shut out all other minds from her consciousness. This was a weapon
that would have stood all telepaths in good stead when the zombies
threatened their sanity with mass possession. For the Martian
aborigines, standing alone, lacked the strength to overpower and
possess a human TP brain. Their power lay in numbers, not in the
individual mind.




                                  VII


All this Lynne learned in an eyelid’s flicker, while the leader lowered
his horns to charge, and the lazy snake of Joanna’s long whip made
a black silhouette against the Martian sky. She sensed the revelry
and sense of power that came from possession of a strong animal body
after uncounted ages of disembodiment. But that feeling of power
was accompanied by the unsureness of not knowing exactly the stolen
body’s limitations or what animal instincts the possessor might have
to control at a moment’s notice. She sensed concern at the defection
of some of the herd, evidently against the wishes of their zombie
controllers.

Deliberately, Lynne lowered the level of her probe, shutting out the
aboriginal brain completely. Somewhere, underneath, lay the stupid,
foolish, instinct-ridden cattle brain. Never before had Lynne--or
anyone else to her knowledge--sought telepathic contact with an animal
mind. Yet alien brains of all levels had been contacted during the
long-range experiments at Nampura Depot.

It could be done. It had to be done. She was dealing with the leader.
If she could force his bovine body to revolt, to stampede wildly, other
bovine bodies would follow--for such unreasoning obedience was deeply
instinctive in all cattle.

Suddenly she caught it--faint, inchoate as the mind of the unborn child
within her--a fear buried deep beneath the alien mentality. But she
caught it, and held it, probing it relentlessly. She felt it catch
explosively. She saw the great beast halt and tremble, helpless in the
grip of three minds, just as Joanna cracked the whip with aggressive
violence.

There was a frantic shaking of a shaggy head, a momentary
quivering. Then the leader turned and began to trot in front of his
followers--began to trot, to lope, to canter, finally to cut around the
body of them at a full, heavy gallop.

There was a confused chorus of other cattle sounds. Then, punctuated
by the lashings of the bullwhip, the entire herd was galloping away in
helpless stampede toward the distant rim of the ever-widening Patagonia
pasturage.

Joanna coiled her whip, and stared after the galloping herd. “Spooky
_marlets_,” she muttered. “I hardly cracked the whip at them, and
they take off like a bunch of locos.”

Lynne, who was still trembling violently, looked at the girl in
amazement. “You don’t sound very happy about they’re not trampling us
into the ground,” she said.

“That’s not the point,” Joanna replied. “I just don’t like having them
stampede. They’ll run off fifty pounds a head before they’re through.
It means fattening them up all over again, and a serious delay in our
schedule.”

There, thought Lynne, spoke the dedicated animal husbandry woman. She
followed slowly while Joanna walked to the base of a vidar-tower,
plucked a communicator from a plastobox, and called Woomera to send out
a pickup for them. Both girls waited by the tower, smoking cigarettes,
until the low-built airsled arrived.

Less than two hours later, Marstime, Lynne and Joanna were in
conference with Martin Juarez and Nicholas Radchev, Planetary
Agricultural Director, who had hopped a rocket from New Samarkand to
confer on the emergency. A huge, swarthy man with tousled white hair,
he shook his head slowly at the conclusion of Lynne’s report.

“An unfortunate mess, Mrs. Marcein,” he said. “What do you suggest we
do about it?” He spoke with respect, for he had not forgotten that
it was Lynne and her husband who had made Patagonia Station possible
through their harnessing of the hitherto deadly and uncontrollable
E-power.

“I’d like to know a bit more about it before I suggest anything,” said
Lynne quietly.

Joanna said: “I thought that big fellow spooked _ferkab_ easily
when I cracked the whip at him. Lynne, why didn’t you _tell_ me
you were using TP on him?”

“I didn’t want to bore you with long explanations just then,” said
Lynne, her eyes bright with amusement. Then, becoming serious once
more, she asked, “Any results on the anion-gun tests?”

Juarez, who had been busying himself with a vidar screen in a corner of
his office turned and replied, “The report just came in. The results,
I’m sorry to say, are negative. The zombie steer used for the testing
is dead.”

“I was afraid of that,” said Radchev, running thick, muscular fingers
through his shock of white hair. “The poor beast was well electrocuted.
They’re a lot more sensitive than sheep in some ways. They have more
delicate nervous systems.”

“What about the zombie?” Lynne asked.

“Burned out, too,” said Juarez. “The _marlet_ couldn’t shake
itself out in time and took a full negative charge.”

There was a moment of silence. Lynne didn’t have to probe the other
minds in the room to know what they were thinking. Her own mind was
following the same channel. If mechanical means--via the anion-guns
which had routed the disembodied zombies--failed conspicuously now, the
problem remained grave. For uninhibited possession would destroy the
all-important Patagonia Station development and, with it, all hope of
future beef for Mars. Left in possession the aborigines would run the
cattle ragged, foul up the breeding lines, and destroy one another in
spurts of sheer malice.

Furthermore, it was conceivable that they might batten on their bovine
hosts until they grew sufficiently strong to leave them and assume some
form still more dangerous to humanity on Mars.

Director Radchev spoke in his deep rumble of a voice. “You say, Lynne,
it’s positive emanations from the E-for-Entity that has made them
strong enough to take over the beeves?”

“I’m sure of it,” Lynne told him. “Whenever we irritate E to create
a storm, he releases plenty of positive electricity over the entire
area--and that’s what the zombies feed on.”

“How long can Woomera and Patagonia endure without rain or snow?”
Radchev asked Martin Juarez.

“Not long enough,” said the station boss quickly. “One Marsweek without
moisture would dry us up. Two would cripple us.”

The director nodded, his full lips tightly compressed. Then he turned
deliberately to Lynne and said, “Any suggestions?”

She returned his level stare while she turned over in her mind the
idea that had been burgeoning there. “Just one,” she said. “While
I was probing the leader out there I received a number of definite
impressions. Most of them were straight zombie--the usual ghastly
_swackish_ stuff.”

After a brief, organizational pause, she added, “But there was also an
impression of discomfort, almost of fear. The only comparison I can
make is to the uneasiness a green rider feels mounted on a new and
too-spirited horse. He knows he has control, but he isn’t quite sure
what the beast may try on him, and he isn’t quite sure just how he’s
going to come down--of his own volition, or his mount’s.”

“Then you think--”

“I think they’re still struggling for control,” Lynne said. “They can’t
control the human mind because it’s too tough, too alien, and complex.
They failed to take permanent possession even of a wide open TP brain.
Now they’ve hit the other extreme--a bovine brain that is beneath their
comprehension. They can move in on it, they can blanket it--but they
can’t be sure it won’t kick off the covers.

“Not one of those beasts wanted to stampede the way they did. But once
I triggered the beast-brain in the leader, and Joanna cracked her whip,
he had to obey steer-instinct and flee. And the others had to follow
him, zombie control or not.”

“What’s this leading up to?” Radchev asked. He had pulled out a
plastopipe, and was packing it with coarse Martian shag. Lynne caught
a wry longing for good Earth-tobacco, inhibited by a stern resolve to
fulfill his obligations as Agricultural Director of Mars by using only
the home-grown product.

She checked her amusement out of courtesy, and said, “There’s another
factor that may prove vital--_farbishly_ so. In their disembodied
form the zombies went streaking off at the first threat of danger.
That’s why we haven’t been able to put them out of business for keeps.
But this time, they may be in trouble. I’m not at all sure they can get
out of these bovine bodies they’ve taken over.”

“So what do you propose?” Martin Juarez asked.

“We’re going to try to put the zombies to sleep,” said Lynne quietly.
“I’ve already sent out a call for help to my TP pals from Nampura
Depot. We’re going to set up a TP brain-team on Patagonia Station and
use mass-hypnosis on the whole _farbish_ herd.”

“You’re going to hypnotize the zombies?” Joanna was appalled.

Lynne shook her head and smiled. “Hardly!” she said. “We don’t even
know that they’ll react to our suggestions. We’re going to give the
cattle immunity to possession.”

Radchev and Juarez exchanged glances. Then the director rose and took
her small hand in his. “Young lady,” he said, “you seem to have done it
again.”

“Better save your congratulations until the job is completed,” she told
him. “We may not even get out of the batter’s box.”

Lynne and her colleagues were waiting at the trim Woomera Station
landing field when the newcomers’ Nampura Depot runabout landed, and
her twin brother and Rana Willis got out. Rana, looking irrepressible
as usual, went into a bowlegged stance and said, “Well, pardner, how’s
the roundup?”

Lynne sensed that the girl was glad to get briefly away from her
first-born Mars-child as she made the introductions. At their
conclusion, Revere Fenlay said, “Well, we brought the tri-di projector
along.”

“Okay,” said Lynne. “Don’t unpack it yet. We’ve got a bit further to
go. Back in with you, _czanworms_.” She waved farewell to the
others and climbed into the runabout after them, to make the short hop
to Mars’ still small cattle country.

They landed at the far side of Patagonia Station’s fenced-in acres,
and Lynne stood by while Revere and Rana unpacked the light but sturdy
gear. She had asked for and secured a three-dimensional projector,
knowing that the eyes of cattle would not respond to a picture
on a flat screen. Her plan was to flash a series of flickering,
bright-moving objects before the animals, hoping to attract their
attention willy nilly, very much as a toreador’s cape attracts a ring
bull. Then, when the cattle were all focused, she planned to use the
combined TP power of three minds like a trebly stepped-up battery--to
hypnotize the entire herd and build a protective mental wall around
each of the stupid steer brains.

If all went well, the zombies would be locked in their new bodies, but
would be unable to control them at all.




                                  VIII


Three hours after its inauguration, Lynne Marcein realized that the
experiment was a failure. The cattle showed no signs of being menacing
or resentful. They did not stampede or go into weird parade formations,
or gore one another for sport. They were evidently spent of body from
their exertions earlier in the day.

But, save for a few individuals, they simply refused to pay attention.
Having glanced at the screen that was supposed to fix their interest
they would lower their heads and resume grazing, or would simply turn
away.

Five times, Lynne had Revere and Rana move the tri-di projector, in an
effort to so arrange its viewing curvature so that general attention
would be compulsory. Five times the possessed beasts figuratively
shrugged, humped their shaggy shoulders, and mooed, _So What?_
Then they went about their bovine business.

“_Farbish_ clever, these Mars-steers,” said Revere with a weak
attempt at humor, when Lynne finally called a halt.

“I’ve worn my _ferkab_ brain to the bone,” put in tiny Rana
inelegantly, “trying to bring those stupid creatures under my spell.
The _farb_ of it is, I can feel those zombies snickering at me. I
should like to twist them out of their silly cow-brains with my bare
hands.”

“I know,” said Lynne with a wan smile, suddenly close to the outer
limits of physical, nervous and mental endurance. “I feel like....” She
paused, her face turning deathly pale, and then said in a wondering
tone, “I feel like I’m going to have the baby right here.”

They got her back to adjoining Woomera Station in a hurry, where she
was soon stretched out on a dispensary plastomat, sobbing with pain,
with fatigue and with the sickening sense of double failure. Not only
had she failed to destroy zombie possession of the Patagonia Station
cattle, but she had put aside her primary duty to handle the big
problem--had neglected to take care of the precious unborn life she had
fought so hard to keep for all but a tiny fraction of nine months.

She knew she was acting like a baby herself--whimpering, crying out
when the pain grew severe, making an idiot of herself.

“Where’s Dr. Smetana?” she said to Martin Juarez, who was standing over
her bed with rolled-up sleeves and a deep concern in his eyes.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” he told her soothingly, bending to inject
something into her left arm. “Just relax now--”

“I want my husband,” she heard herself scream. “Where’s Rolf? He should
be here at this time.”

Then, mercifully, she blacked out, riding a storm-tossed ocean such
as Mars had not known for half a million years. Coming out of it, an
indeterminable time later, she realized she must have been delirious.
She had actually dreamed Rolf was there at her side--though she knew he
was still on Earth trapped in an octopus monster of Mother-Planet red
tape. She had dreamed of actually having her baby....

_Baby!_ Her hands flew to her abdomen. It was flat! All at once
tears of utter desolation and defeat rolled down her cheek. She had
lost the child--and through her own heedlessness and neglect, after
working so hard, so faithfully, for so long.

“You’ve got nothing to cry about,” said a familiar voice.

She opened her eyes, and there was Dr. Smetana, sitting by her
plastomat. She murmured, “Thank God! You got here, Doctor.”

“I got here,” he replied quietly, “but too _swackish_ late. By the
time I arrived, your son was already born and howling.”

“_My son!_ Where is he?” Lynne cried eagerly, trying to sit up.

Dr. Smetana gently but firmly pushed her flat. “You’ll be up soon
enough,” he told her. “When you’ve walked the floor a few nights with
this he-banshee of yours you’ll regret every minute you didn’t lie down
in your life. A good baby--eight pounds, thirteen ounces.”

“_Crehut!_” said Lynne inelegantly, pushing back the light hair
from her forehead. “But how--I mean, who delivered it if you didn’t?”

“Dr. Martin Juarez, in person,” was the reply.

Lynne was puzzled. “I didn’t know he was a doctor,” she said.

“One of the finest,” said Dr. Smetana with a wry smile. “It’s his proud
claim he never lost a calf, a foal, a kid or an egg. And now he’s
batting a _zwirchy_ one thousand with a human birth.”

“You mean--he’s a veterinary?” Lynne asked incredulously. The idea
that her child, the second human baby born on Mars, should have been
delivered by an animal doctor was appalling. Then, suddenly, it was
funny. Lynne laughed until tears again ran down her cheeks. Recovering,
she gasped, “I want to see my baby.”

Dr. Smetana had it wheeled alongside the plastomat in a jerry-built
incubator. “Afraid we can’t take him out yet,” he said. “Got to make
sure he’s ready for the Martian atmosphere.”

“I understand,” said Lynne, turning her head to look at the bright red,
tiny creature, asleep under its coverlet with its eyes squeezed tightly
shut. _Did that come out of me?_ she thought, in the immemorial
self-question of all new mothers. She probed gently for its thought,
caught a blanket of sleep, and knew she was going to love it and care
for it as no mother on any planet had cared for her child.

“As a matter of fact, you gave Dr. Juarez a pretty bad time,” said Dr.
Smetana. “That boy of yours didn’t want to leave at all.”

“Then my neglect and carelessness these last few days didn’t hurt?”
asked Lynne, with relief. “I thought that bumpy ride with Joanna--was
it yesterday?”

“The day before,” said the doctor. “We’ve kept you under to give you
some rest. As for that bumpy ride, it’s a good thing you had it, or you
might have been carrying that infant another month.”

“You mean, I did my exercises too well?” Lynne asked.

“I mean, you didn’t need to do them at all,” was the reply, “although
I’m beginning to believe they’re a good idea for any mother-to-be. You
and the boy have proved exactly what I _farbish_ well hoped you’d
prove, Lynne. Thanks to the increased density of atmosphere caused by
E-power, Mars is safe for human birth.”

He paused, then added, “Two swallows don’t make a summer, of course,
but I don’t believe either your TP or Rana’s had much to do with it.”

“All that work wasted!” mourned Lynne as one of the Station girls, in a
striped nurse’s clout and bolero, wheeled the infant away.

“_Wasted!_” Dr. Smetana was indignant. “You and Rana have taken
the biggest step forward since the first passenger ship landed on Mars.
You’ve brought the planet out of a biological iron lung. When Dr.
Juarez vidared me what was happening, I actually cheered.”

“Where _is_ Martin?” Lynne inquired. “I’d like to thank him.”

“You can--later,” said Dr. Smetana. “Right now, he’s out on Patagonia
Station, watching your husband hypnotize those goofy cows.”

“Rolf!” she asked tremulously. “Rolf here? I thought I was only
dreaming....”

“He wouldn’t stir from your side until the infant was safely born,”
said the doctor. “He took the birth like a man--never so much as a
whimper out of _him_. Then he got busy--_look!_” He nodded
toward the big vidar screen on the opposite wall.

It was keyed to a Patagonia Station tower. Lynne stared at the picture,
first with incomprehension, and then with admiration for the man
she had married, the father of her child. Almost out of the screen
were four small gleaming dots humans in their aluminum climate-proof
coveralls. They were clustered around a black cube that was the tri-di
director. They were standing ankle-deep in snow!

Facing them, as if polarized by some invisible magnet, was a great
herd of Martian cattle. The animals were clustered close together,
and were all looking directly at the projector. Rolf had done it, she
thought with relief. He had converted her failure into triumph. The
cleverness with which the possessed cattle avoided looking at the
projector proved, to her satisfaction, that they were not strong enough
to withstand the hypnosis directed at them.

“Who thought of using a snowstorm?” asked Lynne. “Was it--?”

“It was Rolf,” said Dr. Smetana. “It seems he had been keeping in
telepathic touch with your problem all the way from New Samarkand. When
he got here, he simply gave the orders.”

“That’s the trouble with Earthtraining,” said Lynne. “I read somewhere
that cattle always turn their backs on a snowstorm. But it didn’t
really register. I never saw cows, or steers outside of a zoo--until I
got to Mars.”

“We have all the disadvantages of Earth, here on Mars, Lynne,” Dr.
Smetana said, smiling. “Including, from now on, children. You get some
rest now, and let me get a little. If you’re restless think about your
first PTA meeting. That should drop you off in a hurry.”




                                   IX


When next Lynne woke up, Rolf was there, his hair still wet with snow.
Lynne’s heart went out to him in a manner that left her, weak and spent
as she was, aware that she had never been so glad to see anyone in her
life, even the baby. His eyes were suspiciously moist.

“Well, my _zwirchy_ darling,” he said, “you went and did it.”

“I’ll have them bring the baby in,” she said.

“I just had a look at him,” Rolf told her. “I’m the proudest father on
Mars.” He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. Then he lit another for
himself. “I don’t know if you’re marked ‘Fragile, don’t break’ but I’d
like very much to kiss you.”

“Since when did you ever ask to kiss me--or any girl!” said Lynne,
reaching for him.

“They couldn’t hold me on Earth,” said Rolf, standing up and exhaling
twin plumes of smoke through his nostrils. “With you using the team
on the cattle at Patagonia, I got the pickup on Earth. When you and
Revere and Rana start TP’ing, the whole Solar System gets it. Wild
_czanworms_ couldn’t have held me.”

“But I flopped,” said Lynne, feeling safe and comfortable and secure,
merely having Rolf on the same planet with her. “You had to come up
with the snowstorm idea.”

Rolf grinned. “Didn’t you ever see anyone come along and put the last
piece in a jigsaw puzzle?” he asked.

Lynne said, “Come back here.” She held out her arms.

It was three full Mars-days later when Lynne, Rolf, the baby--whose
name was, by unanimous decision, Martin Juarez Marcein--Revere Fenlay
and Rana Willis flew back to Nampura Depot, with Rolf at the controls.
The time had been employed, not only in preparing the infant for
travel, but for testing and re-testing the processed cattle, until all
were satisfied that the zombies’ power had again been broken--this
time, it was hoped, for good.

Revere Fenlay said, “I hope this does it for keeps.”

Rolf replied, thoughtfully, “So do I. But I’d like to be sure they’re
safely contained in their new bodies.”

“I’ll never eat steak again,” said Rana, shivering.

“Neither will I--without mushrooms,” said Lynne. She looked backward,
to check the baby, who was sleeping peacefully.

Rolf and Revere Fenlay raised their voices in the old Martian refrain,
“There’ll never be brisket on Mars. For that we must go to the stars.
Give me some tablets with vitamin Q. If you don’t like it, to Earthside
with you!”

It was dark when they reached the Depot under a blazing Martian night
sky that looked to Lynne definitely less spectacular than it had a mere
Martian year before.

With the new baby safely asleep in his incubator, they crossed the hall
to visit Rana and Tony Willis, leaving Revere and Lao Mei to watch the
tot.

They found Tony up to his elbows in baby-suds in the bathroom.
Regarding them fondly, he said, “Congratulations, Lynne. I hear you
were tactful enough to provide Ranita with a future boy-friend.”

“If I know kids,” Rana said, “they probably won’t speak to each other,
except to bring down the other one’s crushes.”

“When were you ever a child?” Tony Willis asked.

“She’s still a child,” said Lynne. “And a truly _zwirchy_ child,
too. So stop kicking each other around.”

“Well,” said Tony, thoughtfully. “When I had the time, which was
_farbish_ seldom, I did miss the little character.”

Rolf, who had appeared to be in a brown study, came out of it with,
“You know, _czanworms_, we ought to help Tony out.”

“Take over,” said Tony, nodding toward the sink full of baby wash.

Rolf made a gesture of disdain. “Use your wits, man,” he said. “You and
I are going to pay a visit to New Samarkand. _On business._”

“What business?” asked Tony.

Lynne and Rana, being TP’s, were already laughing.

“What do you think?” Rolf asked. “We’ve got to get busy and start a
diaper service. If you think I’m going through what you’ve been through
for the last week, you’re mad!”




Transcriber’s note:


 This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe, June 1956 (Vol. 5,
No. 5.). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.

 Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version.



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SNOWSTORM ON MARS ***


    

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