Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As he walked slowly away, with the reception committee dancing attendance about him, she received a faintly mocking thought projection from him, became aware that he was enjoying her jealousy. She felt her face flame again, said, "_Ferkab!_"--all but stamped her foot.

"What was that?" Tony Willis asked politely.

"Nothing--my clout slipped," she replied, embarrassed.

Lynne was taken to a gaunt office whose chief piece of furniture was an immense Martian globe, upon which all the chief Martian cities, all the human settlements, all the communications posts were marked. She began to understand, from looking at it, how very different conditions upon the red planet were from the Earth norm.

The home planet, heavily over-populated, was skilfully disguised to appear roomy. Virtually every inch of its land surface was devoted to giving crowded humanity the illusion of privacy. Aloneness was one of its most prized cultural assets.

On Mars, with its scant million humans and solitude ever-present, all cultural efforts were bent the other way--to create the illusion of a large number of people that did not exist. Instead of seeking privacy the inhabitants gratefully crowded close together in their small communities, seeking strength through numbers.

"We're making progress--tremendous progress," Tony told her seriously, tapping a point on the globe. "The more ground we get under cultivation the more atmosphere we reclaim through the plant-breathing process. What we actually need is a few hundred million more people--but the planet will barely support those we have. It's a slow and laborious process."

"Operation bootstrap," said Lynne, wondering how she could even briefly have found this dedicated young man ridiculous.

"Exactly," he told her. "I take it Rolf has briefed you a little about your job here."

"A little," she said. "I'm to relieve my brother--right?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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