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.

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!”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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!”