Part 1

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.