The white rain came
intermingling of the groups, and Lynne, to her surprise, found herself
facing a grinning, strapping, dark-skinned girl who said, “Welcome,
Lynne Fenlay. Try some of the food at our table.”
It was the young animal husbandry girl--Joanna Wheatley--who had shared
a cabin with her on the spaceship during the journey from Earth the
year before. Joanna seemed to have entered into the festivities with
all the vitality of her youth and her uninhibited mixture of Caucasian,
Oriental and Hamitic blood strains. But when Lynne asked her how her
work was going, Joanna’s face fell.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “We must irrigate to support any sort
of animal life, and irrigation is draining the moisture from the
atmosphere table faster than we can create it. But you must know the
problem, Lynne. It’s the _farbish_ curse of all Mars.”
“I know,” said Lynne, trying to encourage the girl. “But one of these
days we’ll have it licked and, if I know farmers, you’ll all be
complaining because too much rain is spoiling the crops.”
Joanna failed to smile. She said, “I’d give my right arm for that
day to come tomorrow. If we hadn’t been able to install a transmuter
to feed a small pond recently, our cattle would be dead. And our
farm--Woomera Station--has the most fertile soil on Mars. Right next
door, it’s so radioactive we’ve had to fence it off.”
“Radioactive?” said Lynne, wondering why she hadn’t heard of such a
deposit.
“Maybe that’s not the exact word,” said Joanna. “_Crehut_, I’m no
geologist--I’m in husbandry. But it has remarkable health-giving
qualities--and some deadly ones as well. Still, it’s not solving the
moisture problem for us.”
“You really feel it’s serious?” asked Lynne, sensing the deep concern
in the girl’s mind, the fright.
“Unless some new factor can be found that will increase moisture, it
will defeat us,” said Joanna solemnly. Then, actually shaking herself
out of her despondency, the dark girl went on, “But this is not the
time for care. My best friend has just married and will soon be off for
Earth to have her baby. You come and see our farm as soon as you can,
will you, Lynne? I think you’d be interested.”
“I know I shall be,” Lynne said, pressing the girl’s hand. “As soon as
I can.”
She joined Joanna in a toast to her friend and groom, then brought the
girl to the Barkutburg table to meet Revere, Lao Mei-O’Connell and Rolf.
Rolf leered at Joanna and said, “I’ll be out to see you the first time
Lynne’s not looking.”
And Joanna threw back her head and laughed, revealing twin rows of
flashing white teeth.
Lynne knew the amorously mocking banter was harmless enough in
itself. Rolf worked tirelessly, conscientiously for months on end,
and surely he had a right to make love lightly with his eyes. But
her Earth indoctrination would not permit her to approve of such
uninhibited revelry as was the custom on Mars when the bars were let
down. She thought of Rolf’s thousand women subordinates in his post as
Communications Coordinator, and wondered how many of them....
_Watch yourself_, VINRAL, came his mocking thought.
Lynne felt herself blush. She turned away and took a beaker of
lichenwasser and downed it quickly. But it didn’t intoxicate her--it
merely increased her physical discomfort and spiritual irritation.
She said farewell to Revere’s bride, elected leader of the Barkutburg
center, and then, when the others took off, roistering, for the
spaceport, she stayed behind in the cloakroom. Though it was what she
wanted, her wretchedness was not lessened by the fact that apparently
no one missed her. Especially Rolf....
She decided to return to Nampura Depot alone, to reassure her ego by
being of some practical use to somebody. It was, she thought miserably,
beginning to look as if the only real happiness and fulfillment she was
ever to achieve lay in her work alone. The growth of her telepathic
talent had been responsible for the breakup not only of her engagement
to a young man on Earth, but for the loss of her job as coordinating
member of one of the highly specialized human brain-teams that,
operating in conjunction with electronic computers, solved the more
difficult and intricate material and mechanical problems of the mother
planet.
It had been her job, as coordinator, to obtain problem solutions that
humanized and made realistic the sometimes over-abstruse answers that
emanated from the machines, in response to the data fed into them by
her human teammates. As her telepathic talent improved, her answers had
become too perfect, which meant she had fallen into rapport with the
computer rather than the human elements of the team--a psychological
maladroitness which had led to her dismissal. It was a desperate need
for telepaths on Mars that had brought her to the Red Planet.
Climbing aboard one of the bi-hourly transports for Nampura Depot,
Lynne faced the fact that her entire life, up to her transfer to
Mars, had been planned and lived with the single aim of enabling her
to adjust to the manners and mores of a densely populated, highly
civilized, almost effete Earth. On Mars, with its vast open spaces and
freewheeling pioneer anarchy and virility, she was a misfit.
As the transport jetted upward through the paper-thin atmosphere,
soaring above the miracle medley of towering, lacy, ancient Martian
ruins and rough, utilitarian Earthman-built structures alongside the
old canal, Lynne wondered unhappily what she was going to do about Rolf.
She adored his every pore, his every muscle, but whether she could
long endure the strain of living with him in Martian wedlock was
something else again. There was a wild, undisciplined streak in Rolf
that violated her ultra-civilized Earth-bred restraint. It could be
exciting--marriage to Rolf--but it would be distasteful, too.
Lynne opened her mind to exchange thoughts with him when another, more
powerful, more urgent message reached her from the teleteam on duty at
Nampura Depot. Its combination of two telepathic minds in unison was
overpowering. It said, _we’re in touch, we’ve finally found it, we’re
about to make contact--_
Then came a brain-wrenching flash, and--nothing at all.
II
Something had happened at Nampura Depot and the resultant confusion was
frightening. Lynne tried vainly to sort out the welter of disorganized
and often completely unintelligible thoughts that radiated from the
recently set-up telepathic laboratory of Mars. The team on duty--plump,
delicate Rana Spinelli and lanky, awkward Juan Olsen--had been stricken
from some mysterious source. Juan was dead, Rana mentally erased by
whatever had happened. That much a suddenly depersonalized Lynne Fenlay
clearly understood.
But the rest was telepathic bedlam. “..._simply working on Problem
Outpost ... and I had a date after dinner with Juan ... as if he’d
been mashed flat ... can’t understand how it happened ... Rana’s not
breathing ... yes, but she’s in coma--almost catatonic ... after
lunch, she told me she and Juan were going to try ... and Rolf Marcein
would be at the weddings ... Fenlay, too, and his sister ... we’ve got
to_....”
The Nampura Depot transport hit an atmospheric dead spot and the
messages faded out. In her anxiety to join her fellow-telepaths and
help them in whatever emergency had arisen, Lynne’s malaise, her
revulsion toward Rolf in his cups, vanished. She was needed--and that
was all that mattered at the moment.
The transport moved swiftly toward the reddish sun, enlarged almost
to Earth-size as it sank toward the western horizon. Below, the
red-and-green desolation that was most of Mars seemed to stretch
endlessly toward the horizon. A vast ruined city, running parallel for
twenty-seven miles with the left bank of one of the great dry canals,
lifted its filigree spires above the purple dusk to trace patterns of
breathtaking beauty in the sunset. This was Mars, a vast mausoleum
stirring faintly with new raw life breathed into it by the colonists
from Earth.
Moving uneasily in her seat as she smoked a cigarette of excellent
canalside leaf, Lynne felt her homesickness vanish. This was the real
world, the real job--restoring to life a long-dead world. Compared
to it the constricted existence of overcrowded, static Earth seemed
artificial, even a trifle inhuman.
She was glad Rolf had let himself go at the weddings. At least he had
had more to drink and had concealed it better than anyone else at the
ceremony. If you lived as hard as Rolf and the other Martians lived--as
they had to live to make headway against the cruel remorseless
environment--you had a right to get drunk on occasion, she told herself
vehemently. Colafizzes were for children, or the puling neurotics
of Earth. Lynne slipped a coin into the dispenser-slot by her seat,
and drank the cup of lichenwasser she received in return. This time,
she felt no discomfort--the Martian distillation sang its happy song
through her veins.
_Mars_, she thought, silently toasting the Red Planet, _you may have
destroyed your own species, but you won’t destroy us!_
Sobering a little, Lynne considered the fact that Mars had not totally
destroyed all native forms of existence. Outside of the lichens
and other flora, there were still the ugly czanworms that burrowed
ceaselessly beneath the planet’s arid surface and were the despair of
cable layers.
And there had been the disembodied descendants of the aboriginal
subject species which, revivified by the Earthmen’s use of the
electricity upon which they thrived, had for decades made open-circuit
electronic communication impossible, and had then sought possession of
the telepaths with which the colonists had supplanted mechanical means
of talking over long distances around the Red Planet’s surface.
Might there not be still other life-forms, unseeable, unapproachable
by Earthmen, surviving on Mars? That was one of the problems Nampura
Depot T-teams were trying to solve. Had Spinelli-Olsen found something
to their sorrow? Had they left records? Probably not. Lynne cursed the
competitive instinct that flourished on Mars and, at times, made the
cooperative sharing of knowledge so difficult.
Yes, there were problems. She recalled, somberly, what Joanna had told
her about the necessity of improving irrigation methods if domestic
animal life was to be maintained and developed. There were the black,
short-tusked boars, of course--fiftieth-generation descendants of pigs
imported by Earthmen, who had, as always, adapted themselves to their
environment and run wild.
But you couldn’t live on pork alone. Lynne looked into the sunset
and, by its soft light, at the endless aridity around her. Until the
atmosphere was re-thickened--it would take many decades and a miracle
of human accomplishment through slow mechanical processes--there could
be no rain on Mars. And until there was rain there could be no regular
plant-growth cycle with its symbiotic animal relationships.
If the miniscule amount of animal husbandry on Mars used up the
atmosphere too rapidly, the entire Earth settlement project, which
already numbered almost a million human beings, would be imperilled.
You couldn’t feed a million men and women on what could be brought from
the home planet in space cargo vessels. But how could you get rain
when there was no moisture in the atmosphere, almost no atmosphere to
moisten?
It was, Lynne decided, the most frighteningly disheartening of vicious
cycles.
The ship came out of the atmospheric dead spot and the fear and
confusion of Nampura Depot encroached alarmingly on Lynne’s thoughts
again. So difficult was it to follow the babel of minds that she gave
up and waited impatiently while the transport described its slow