Part 2

Tony Willis, the non-telepathic, stout, bespectacled communications wizard who served as Depot Seneschal, greeted Lynne with a hug and a “_Crehut_, I’m glad you’re here, angel. Something pretty ugly has happened. Where’s Rolf?”

“Something happened to him, too--he got drunk at the weddings,” said Lynne, stepping out of her coverall. “But I’d like to know just how serious the situation here is, Tony. I got some pretty mixed-up flashes on the transport. Am I right in believing that poor Juan is dead--and Rana still unconscious.”

“Total blackout,” said Willis grimly, escorting her to the cubicle that served as his office, a windowless, brightly-lighted room decorated with the wiry, brown-skinned maidens that passed as pinup girls on Mars. Seated behind a desk across from her, he said, “You know I’m a mess on this TP stuff. But Juan and Rana were on to something. They’ve been thick as the proverbial thieves, waiting for you and Rolf to get away so they could do some experimenting on their own. Then, about an hour ago--” He looked at her, and his lips tightened--“Juan was flattened as if a ’dozer had passed over him and Rana was blasted against the wall of the Rec Room and hasn’t come out of it since.”

“An explosion?” Lynne asked swiftly, anxiously.

Tony Willis shook his sandy head. “Not the way you think,” he told her. “Oh, there was an explosion, all right. It blew the Rec Room all to hell and gone. _But it had no mechanical origin!_”

Somehow, in his grimness, tubby Tony looked gaunt. Lynne probed his mind swiftly, and got a vivid picture of the shattered room, of Rana lying crumpled at the foot of a wall, and--she shuddered and clenched her fists tightly as the vision became almost unendurable. She asked, “Any records, Tony?”

He shrugged his shoulders in despair, and thrust a folder toward her. It contained a single sheet of paper on which Rana had drawn a crude self-portrait, depicting her face in caricature, with her tongue out and her eyes crossed. Beneath it she had scrawled, _This is what you get for snooping._

Silently cursing the Hindu-Italian girl’s immaturity, Lynne sat frowning, elbows on Tony’s desk, trying to recall what she could of Problem Outpost and the role of the Spinelli-Olsen team in the project. The concept of telepathy actually bringing physical destruction was so shocking that she found it kept impinging on her thoughts, and she was forced to make three false starts before she began to make any sort of orderly progress on the problem.

Nampura Depot was primarily a research unit. When the abolishment of the electrophagic aborigines released Martian telepaths from their jobs as planetary communicators, Rolf and other top-level Martian authorities had decided to set up the Depot to enable TP workers to develop their gifts, individually and collectively, in an effort to discover new and advanced uses for their talents.

Thanks to her work as a brain-team coordinator on Earth, Lynne had become almost indispensable to the project. For part of her education had entailed a thorough grounding in the theory of relays and relay hookup alignments which was the basis of all computer-work on the mother planet. Every computer was a relay of calculators, aligned according to their nature in relation to the problem which was to be solved. It was the same with the human teams, or relays, which supplemented and complemented the work of the computers on Earth.

On Mars, where heavy and complex computer machinery was as rare as it was unneeded, Lynne’s training and knowledge had proved invaluable. As Rolf had told her, shortly after the project was commenced, “Sure, we’re all bright enough here. We _farbly_ well have to be. But you have the teamwork integration picture imbedded in that _zwirchy_ little head of yours. You can put two and two together and get ninety.”

The trouble was, she had been putting two and two together by testing first this pair, then that, in every conceivable combination of telepathic teamwork, and she had been getting precisely nowhere.

For a while, it had seemed exciting to be able, working in proper tandem, to receive and probe minds on Earth, some forty million miles away. But when Lynne discovered that many of her teams were amusing themselves by tapping the pleasure-houses for their own ribald entertainment, she had asked Rolf to put a stop to that branch of the project--although she suspected the ban was far from totally effective.

She had, gradually, come to type telepaths much as blood donors had once been typed on the mother planet. There were three basic types of telepaths: A--those who could _receive_ mental messages as delivered from all directions and distances, B--those who could not only _receive_ but grade the thoughts that came to them directionally and tune in or out selected thought waves as they chose, and, C--those who were capable of _projecting_ their own thoughts and impulses into the minds of others and possessed as well the capabilities of groups A and B.

A types were almost a norm on Mars, Lynne had learned. In the sympathetic environment of the Red Planet, latent telepathy was at least faintly active in eight out of ten Earthfolk, The B’s were less common--only about three in a thousand Martians could _tune_ the messages their minds received. And only one in a hundred thousand was a C type.

All in all, there were two hundred and seventeen telepaths at the Depot--two hundred and sixteen now that Juan Olsen was dead--and the variations among them was what complicated the problem. Curiously enough, the A’s could receive from the greatest distances, even though they couldn’t tune the messages unaided. But a B, linked with an A, could tune in from a further distance than a B working alone. Similarly, a C lined up with an A, could broadcast almost infinitely. On record was one contact with a spaceship far out beyond Pluto’s orbit.

But human contacts were not the main purpose of the Depot. What the investigators were seeking was contact with alien life-forms, either on, or beyond Mars. If telepaths had been able to make contact with the aborigines that had so nearly destroyed them, it seemed reasonable to suppose that they should be able to make contact with other alien intellects.

Apparently, judging by what had happened, they had done so. But what monstrous life-form had they contacted--and where was it located?

For more than a Martian month, Lynne had been aware of a force--strangely stimulating--lurking just beyond range of her probing. She had, on two occasions, felt a sudden surge of power while working with Revere or one of the others, a power that flared up and faded quickly, leaving irritation in its wake.

There had been a restlessness in the Depot atmosphere, a restlessness that had shown itself in such lapses as poor Rana’s childish drawing in the folio. Other C types had reverted now and then to basic nature--to ill-temper, to ridiculous practical jokes, to fits of melancholy, even to overindulgence in lichenwasser.

“Angel, how about a drink? You’ve been sitting in a brown study for two hours now--and the color scheme of this room is baby-blue.” It was Tony, bless him, bringing her out of it.

Involuntarily Lynne began to shake her head in refusal, telling herself that Tony had chosen a very poor time to urge indulgence in lichenwasser. Then it occurred to her that her recent primness might have had something to do with the mysterious restlessness that seemed to be affecting all the members of the Depot.

She said, “All right, Tony,” and drained the plastic tumbler. With the warmth of the drink she felt a soaring triumph. She was sure now that she had solved the problem of what was happening to the personalities of Nampura Depot. They _were_ in contact with some alien intellect, or mind, or personal force that reduced their complex human impulses to a few basic impulses and to basic impulse fulfillment.

She said, “Tony, have you noticed anything peculiar going on around the Depot the last few weeks?”

He thought it over, then nodded. “Two or three times I considered inveigling you into the supply room and making violent love to you, Lynne. I’ve had the impulse ever since I first met you at the New Samarkand Spaceport. But, _Crehut_, it was never like this.”

“Give me another,” said Lynne, holding out her tumbler. “I forgive you for your candor. We should have kept behavior charts on everybody here, instead of just on the experiments. You’d better get psycho on it tomorrow, Tony. I’ve a feeling we’re in contact with that alien mind-force we’ve been looking for, and that it’s making like a psychological poltergeist.”

“It’s just barely possible.” Tony looked thoughtful behind his spectacles. Then he said, “But if you’re right, and if Juan and Rana actually found it, _it can kill_.”

Lynne looked somberly at the lichenwasser in her plastic tumbler. Then she said, “Yes, it can kill,” and drained it.

III

Lynne and Tony Willis were still discussing the problem when a somewhat haggard Rolf Marcein came in. Characteristically, he gave them no more than a perfunctory personal greeting. “I hopped the first transport after I got the flash, Tony. Lynne, what have you managed to find out about this ghastly mess?”

“Nothing for the record yet,” Lynne told him, admiring and detesting simultaneously Rolf’s ability to dismiss all other relationships when a work problem arose. “But I’ve got a pattern of sorts.”

“All right. Let’s hear it.”

She went on to tell him, as concisely as she could, what she had figured out since her arrival. Rolf listened attentively, without comment, until she had finished. Then he frowned.

“Tony, tell operations to set up the necro-recorder with the new psycho-muffler attached,” he said quietly. “We’re going to have to probe Rana’s mind while she’s still in shock. Otherwise, some of these Navajos will be trying their own _farbish_ experiments--and we may have a lot more corpses to worry about, or something even worse.”

“Sure you feel up to it, chief?” Tony asked as he flipped a switch on his desk, preparatory to giving the orders.

Rolf grunted and rubbed a hand across his brow. Lynne offered him a tumbler of lichenwasser, but he shuddered and turned away from her. “You _marlet!_” he said rudely. “Can’t you be serious for once?”

Lynne repressed a smile. She had not had a hangover since one school holiday, when she had consumed an entire bottle of crême de menthe alone in a hotel room on Earth--but thanks to their telepathic rapport she knew how Rolf felt. Furthermore, in view of her discovery, she understood what had happened to make him so boisterously uninhibited of late, just as she understood her own increased primness. Both of them had been in telepathic relay contact with the mysterious new entity that had caused the restlessness at Nampura Depot and, ultimately, had killed Juan Olsen.

Although Lynne had been in spasmodic telepathic touch with her twin brother, Revere, when the necro-recorder was used on him, shortly after her arrival on Mars, it was the first time she had been present at an actual demonstration of the dangerous instrument that had, until the psycho-muffler was discovered, either killed or driven permanently insane the persons on whom it had been employed.

Its original purpose had been to present visualization, as on an old-fashioned colored television screen, of the thoughts of a man or woman about to die--to reveal them and make it possible to record them. In bygone years it had been a police-force stand-by, one of the miracle gadgets that had all but wiped out crime on Earth and Mars.

She sat in a chair against a wall of the infirmary operating room, while the unconscious Indo-Italian was wheeled in on an operating wagon, her dusky face ash-white above the cloth that covered the pronounced curves of her tiny body. She watched while Rolf, abetted by the Depot practitioner, deftly applied the electrodes behind the girl’s ears, just over the sensitive mastoid areas, and then went to the grid-screen tuner and said to the practitioner, “Ready, Hambri?”

“Ready, Rolf,” said the practitioner quietly. “Try to tune fast. This girl is in a dangerous state of shock and we don’t want to expose her to any needless added risks.”

“We don’t want to--but we have to,” said Rolf grimly. Watching him, Lynne felt her fingernails dig into the palms of her hands. She was in perfect telepathic rapport with him and understood the tension, the very real emotional concern and sense of responsibility toward the girl that underlay his ruthlessness. And she knew she had never before understood or loved him so deeply and well.

Almost before she had savored the thought, the grid-screen was flashing a kaleidoscope of wild color. Purples, deep reds, turquoise blues, ivory, yellows, rolled aimlessly around the screen, superseding one another in erratic sequence. Rolf cursed and worked with the tuner but only the vaguest shapes emerged. Lynne felt herself grow taut.

Then, suddenly, she was in touch not only with Rolf but with the buried thoughts in the unconscious girl’s mind, as released through the necro-recorder. Inexplicably, she understood the machine itself. She flashed a _steady the horizontal--give the vertical another turn_, and was rewarded when Rolf flashed her a silent _thanks_, VINRAL in return. Quickly he obeyed her thought-order and the screen flickered to clarity.

There were the two of them--Rana and Juan Olsen, sitting side by side, working in telepathic tandem in the blasted Rec Room. She felt the urgent excitement that had gripped them course through her. The room faded and again there was confusion--but this time it was in Rana’s and Juan’s thoughts, rather than in the machine. There were pictures of love-making, of birth, of pain, of spiritual worship of a God that blurred between a celestial image and that of an eight-armed Hindu God. It was amazing, Lynne thought vagrantly, how the supposedly long-buried religious symbols survived, leaving a technically enlightened humanity chained to the creations of its own early priesthoods. She felt a surge of such primitive belief herself.

They were in touch with something, through the mind of the unconscious girl, but what? Lynne glanced at Rolf, and saw that beads of sweat were studding his brow as he pondered the visual-grid. Then, suddenly, they were following the trail of a skyrocket through space--a rocket that sped endlessly out against the dusty brilliance of the Milky Way to a spot on a suddenly expanding globe, whose sky was blazoned with the bulk of a monstrous cloudy planet, like an immense bladder that filled the very heavens themselves.

Lynne was about to cry out with fear when she saw the immense red lozenge high up on the curve of the huge world and heard herself cry aloud, “_Jupiter!_ It comes from one of the moons of Jupiter!”

“Callisto,” said Rolf. The screen went blank and he flicked it off. Moments later, the girl was wheeled from the room by an anxious orderly, with the practitioner in watchful attendance. Rolf put the necro-recorder on _rerun_ and played it back. When it was finished, he turned to Lynne and said, “_Vinral_, think you can be packed in an hour? We’re going out there and run this down.”

Lynne was horrified. She cried, “But, Rolf, darling--we can’t go to Callisto. All traffic to the Jovian moons is strictly under Earth Interplanetary Administration. They aren’t open to other traffic yet.”

“_Ferkab_ the E.I.A.,” said Rolf rudely. His dark eyes blazed as they glared at her. “We’re going out there. At any rate, _I_ am. If you think I’m going to sit around and wait while a lot of red tape is unwound and maybe some more of us get killed, you’re full of _purt_.” Lynne’s own reaction told the story. Even by coming in second-hand contact with the alien mind, they were reverting to their inner natures. She had turned into the convention-bound Earthwoman while Rolf, more than ever, was the determinedly reckless authority-hating man of Mars. But even awareness of the cause of their behavior was of little help. She forced herself to say, “Very well, Rolf, I’ll go to Callisto with you, but not until we’re provisionally married.”

Rolf said, “_Crehut, vinral_, how simple can you get? I’ve got news for you. We were married this afternoon at the weddings, when I had you sign the second book. Remember?” And, when she stared at him, stunned, “What did you think we were doing--playing moon-snaffle?”

Lynne felt as if she had been turned into some gelatinous substance, and dipped in a quickfreeze. She could barely manage to telepathize, much less speak. She thought, _And I suppose you think that makes everything intimately uninhibited between us?_

He was still playing the insensitive goon as he flashed back, _Well, it certainly makes everything legal_.

Lynne’s chill melted in the sudden heat of her anger. She sent a bludgeoning stream of fierce thoughts at him, attacking his crude concept of marriage, the travesty of the entire Martian mating system, the antique crudity of the accompanying drunken parties, overwhelming his desperate efforts to temper her wrath.

It was a great fight while it lasted--but it didn’t last long. Rolf simply lifted Lynne off her feet with one arm, pinioning her while he sealed her mouth with the other.

“Okay--but shut up, little wife,” he said, “or I’ll take off on my own. And you wouldn’t want that--remember, I can read your mind as easily as you can read mine.” He deliberately broadcast a detailed vision of what he intended to do to her once they were alone in the privacy of the spaceship.

Lynne flashed back a vision of what she intended to do to him if he tried anything of the sort and, moments later, they were glaring at each other in a sort of uneasy armed truce. Lynne found herself seething with a hatred she had never believed herself capable of feeling toward any living creature.

Then, silently, she prepared herself for the journey ahead. Mostly, it was a matter of arranging for records to be kept properly during her absence. There was nothing to pack--not for an interplanetary journey in a two-man triple-drive.

As she stepped uneasily aboard, she saw that Rolf had been deceiving her with his thoughts of a sybaritic interior. Instead of the pneumatic couches with cushions and soft carpets, instead even of the limited creature comforts of the big liner that had brought her to Mars, Lynne found herself in a tiny, cluttered cabin, surrounded by an incredible complex of instrument boards and machinery.

Frightened, she protested, “But what if something happens to you, Rolf? How am I supposed to run all this mixed-up machinery?”

“Use your woman’s intuition,” he growled at her. “And keep the monkey wrench away from my ear.” But his thoughts revealed reassuring pictures of IBM hookups working smoothly and automatically, with the gauges and other indicators and buttons, merely for emergency use.

She sent him a silent okay, then said, horrified, “What’s that?”

“That,” came Rolf’s answering thought, “is the plumbing.”

Thus, he confirmed her worst fears. _It_ was amazingly, appallingly open, occupying as it did almost the center of the floor. Her thought was one of horror--_I couldn’t possibly. It’s too undignified._

To which Rolf, busily preparing for takeoff, flashed back, _So what, you little prig? We’re married aren’t we?_

_In name only_, she replied. _That was a real_ MARLET _trick. Wait till we get back! I’ll have it wiped off the books._

“Meanwhile,” he reminded her aloud, “it’s a long way to Callisto--and back. You’re caught fair and square, _vinral_, so why not enjoy it?” He had the further ill-grace to laugh in her face as words failed her and she sank down with a despairing sob.

Minutes later, they were off on their unauthorized trip--and Lynne forgot her anger and outrage at Rolf’s casual male high-handedness long enough to feel terror as her Earth-conditioning reasserted itself. This was no space-liner she had embarked in, no interplanetary hotel with its staff of experts and countless safety devices.

This was a two-place interplanetary spanner; a sort of hot-rod, a tiny non-seagoing submarine that was little more than an atomic power plant with operating instruments and a tiny cockpit stuck on top of it. She felt right out among the stars, even though vision-screens showing television pictures of their surroundings were the only instruments through which she could see out.

By the chronometer high on the instrument board, it took them exactly nine days, eleven hours and twenty-six minutes to cover the 360,000,000-odd miles between Mars and Callisto, but to Lynne the journey seemed to last a tedious forever. And, from the thoughts that occasionally leaked through Rolf’s tight guard, she gathered it seemed even longer to him. She wanted him to suffer and she made him suffer.

It became a sort of game. She would appear to relent for a while, and listen to him quite seriously. Then, when he would take her outer friendliness for encouragement, she would pull the switch and freeze him colder than Callisto itself. On the seventh day out, she found herself thinking, _I never knew I could be such a heel. I guess love can turn any girl into a witch at times._

Rolf’s quick answering thought, _Let’s face it, Lynne, you mean all the time, don’t you?_ served only to stiffen her wavering resolve to make him pay through his aquiline nose for this second trick he had pulled on her. Of course she intended to marry him--but not by any such drunken, underhanded ruse as he had used on her. Nor did she intend to let him get away with it. _The marlet!_

His snicker at her thoughts did little to improve her temper.

Then Jupiter loomed up, increasingly, ominously, in the bow vision screen and, faced with the problem of tracking Callisto and making a landing in the proper location, Rolf forgot his outraged ego and concentrated on bringing the tiny spaceship in safely. Lynne, who admired his rough-hewn efficiency, watched him in adoration, some of which must have seeped through to warm his frozen id.

Once Rolf said, “A good thing this entity or whatever it is we’re following seems to be located almost on top of the Earth Interplanetary Administration outpost. This is supposed to be a frozen hellhole.” He added a silent, _You should feel right at home there, enchilada_, and anger once more reigned voiceless but supreme in the little ship.

But the terrifying splendor of Jupiter, seen from such close range, caused them again to forget their puny problems. Its sulphurous yellow cloud envelope was almost blindingly bright until, mercifully, they skirted its twilight edge and emerged into shadow, lit only by the large inner moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, the last two of them larger than the planet Mercury. A dazzling spectacle.

Then the frozen sweeps of Callisto were flattening out beneath them, its frozen air lying in great white drifts in the Moonlike chasms between the jagged peaks that splintered the horizon on every hand. It was, Lynne thought, the most desolate sight she had ever seen. She turned away, shuddering, from the screen, only to be recalled by an urgent thought-summons from Rolf.

They were over one of the satellite’s few comparatively level surface areas--and approximately in its center was an unmistakable Earthmen’s camp--or what had been an Earthmen’s camp! It looked as if it had been flattened out by a tremendous blow with the heel of some giant hand. Only a pair of spaceships, sheltered behind a natural craggy embankment, seemed to have survived intact. And on the frozen air of the planet, close alongside the desolation, the letters SOS were spelled out with empty fuel tins.

“Looks as though maybe I followed the right hunch coming out here after all--with or without E.I.A. authorization,” said Rolf.

Lynne said nothing--she was too scared to talk.

IV