Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside her, the baby kicked feebly.

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Stay with it, Joanna,” said Lynne.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about the zombie?” Lynne asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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