The white rain came
downward parabola to come to rest, in the violet dusk, on the flare-lit
airfield of the Depot. She thanked the captain for his courtesy and
hopped a supply truck to the Depot proper.
As the newest of official structures built by Earthmen on Mars,
the Depot represented the most advanced attempts to develop an
architectural blend between terrestrial utilitarianism and the eclectic
delicacy of ancient Martian building wizardry. In daylight, it looked
to Lynne like a Quonset hut with flying buttresses. She was grateful
for the darkness, as the supply truck rolled up to its service gate.
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