Chapter 1

Had Lynne Fenlay been less proud, she would have wept, openly and unashamedly. Standing before the altar, directly in back of her twin, Revere Fenlay, and his bride, Lao Mei-O’Connell, she felt acutely homesick for Earth. Intellectually, of course, she understood and accepted the need for multiple marriages on Mars. But she could not evade a sense of emotional outrage at the assembly-line method of marriage which circumstances had made mandatory on the alien planet that was now her home.

The marrying officer, who trebled in brass as a circuit judge and an electronics expert on the thinly settled Red Planet, wore only a shabby-looking, round-cornered apron. Although it bore the twin-worlds insignia, emblem of his high office, it was tucked with a careless lack of dignity into the top of his wellworn clout, and everyone could see that one of the tie-strings was missing.

A bald-headed little man with an incipient paunch and knobby knees, he intoned the brief ceremony from rote, never glancing either at the book in his right hand, or at the faces of the four couples standing directly in front of him.

“...and to be mutually faithful during the period of enforced separation, to work honorably for one another and for the planet upon their reunion, to provide a home for the sons and daughters of their union. For these purposes, by the virtue of the power embodied in my....”

He mumbled on, running the words together in his haste to conclude the ceremony which would unite the four couples from far Barkutburg, and enable him to get on with the marriages from New Walla Walla, Cathayville, Zuleika and the other major settlements of Mars. A few kilometers away, a spaceship was waiting to take the brides of the Red Planet home to Earth to bear their children—a function which was not possible of fulfillment in the light gravity of Mars.

All of the brides were pregnant. In tacit accordance with the dictates of expediency in frontier settlements all through man’s history on Earth and, more lately, on Mars, a marriage was not a marriage until offspring were on the way. When a couple decided to mate, it was only necessary for them to sign a register and share quarters as provisional husband and wife. The arrangement would remain in force as long as it gave satisfaction to both parties. If it failed divorce became merely a matter of signing another registry.

But once a child had been conceived, casualness vanished, for the bringing of Martian children back to Mars was a major factor in the effort to populate the planet. Such children were its hope, its future, against the time when man should have conquered his new environment, and child-bearing no longer necessitated a hasty return to Earth.

For the rest, Mars was populated by expert technicians, officials and the halves of genetically induced identical twins—of which Lynne and Revere Fenlay were unusually gifted examples. The purpose of this plan was to give the new planet Earth’s hereditary best without stripping the home planet of its most promising young folk. One twin, conditioned for Earth, stayed at home—the other, carefully trained from infancy to endure and triumph over the hardships of life on the Red Planet, went to Mars.

Lynne was one of the few Earth-trained twins ever sent to Mars to join her brother. Her telepathic genius, of a range and sensitivity almost unknown on the home planet, with its dense atmosphere and other inhibiting factors, had been urgently needed in a desperate crisis when the telepathic lateral communications of Mars had been threatened with destruction by strange electronically-revivified survivals of the original Martians. She had been needed, and once the crisis had been conquered, she had stayed on to aid in new telepathic research. She had stayed on, and now—she was rebellious and homesick.

There was a gaunt, stripped-down, machine-shop look to the great hall. In New Samarkand, the planetary capital where the ceremonies were being conducted, the established ritual never varied. The marrying officer stood on a low platform, and at his back rose a portable altar surmounted by the symbol of universal faith. This consisted of a cross for Christianity, in a circle representing the “wheel of life” religions, and outside its circumference smaller crosses with their ends bent at right angles to represent the symbol of still older faiths.

It had been battered by constant usage, and one of the tips was rudely broken off. Recalling the symbolic beauty of the ritual that still enhanced marriage ceremonies on Earth, and contrasting it with the crude matter-of-factness of Martian multiple weddings Lynne wished, and not for the first time, that she had not permitted Rolf Marcein to talk her into coming to Mars.

She cast a quick sidelong glance at Rolf. He stood almost directly behind the second bride, a lean, sun-bronzed figure towering over the other guests, a sensually suggestive smile on his lips which was anything but reassuring. He winked as he returned her glance. Even less reassuring was her certain knowledge that Rolf was drunk. The monthly, multiple marriages on Mars accompanied as they were by the prospects of incipient parentage and immediate long separation, had degenerated into one big farewell carnival.

This one, as far as Lynne was concerned, had begun three Martian days earlier when the settlers of the Barkutburg station—the residence of Lao, Revere and, until recently, of Lynne—had thrown a thirty-six hour wingding for the departing bride. Lynne had attended, of course, out of devotion to her twin and his wife. But since her neuro-emotional makeup was too fine-tuned to enable her to enjoy alcohol in quantity, she had been something of a spectre at the feast.

The journey to New Samarkand had been a brief interlude between binges, followed by another revel on the eve of the official wedding. This time, Rolf had been on hand and, under his prompting, Lynne had taken a little too much and was suffering the inevitable after-effects. Rolf, apparently, was just getting up a full head of steam. She wondered if the travesty of a ceremony was ever going to end.

“... and so I now pronounce you men and wives,” the marrying officer finally finished. Ushers hastily escorted the couples and their attendants to a vestry, where the record books were signed, while another group of brides, grooms and attendants, came forward to be joined in wedlock.

Ceremony, Lynne thought, by courtesy only. Travesty would have been a far more accurate term. She glanced at Rolf again as he signed his name with a flourish in the book, wondering what her wedding would be like—if she ever married. At the moment, the idea was thoroughly repugnant to her.

“Come on, vinral,” said Rolf, using the Martian term of endearment as he gathered her in with his huge left hand. “Sign here—and then over here, in this book. Crehut, I thought old Bretinslov would never finish that blah-blah of his.”

Signing dutifully, Lynne said, “That blah-blah, as you call it, legalizes the serious vows of a marriage ceremony.” It seemed a little incredible to her that she should find herself defending a ritual which she had decried mentally only moments before. But Rolf’s attitude somehow infuriated her.

Rolf, whose eyes seemed pinker and foggier than usual, ran his tongue between his teeth and said, “Come on, vinral, my mouth is drier than desert dust. Let’s get over to the reception room and kiss the brides and get a drink. They’re serving some of the new champagne-lichenwasser the bio lab has synthesized, to its everlasting credit and glory.”

Lynne, unable to adjust herself to the recklessly riotous spirit of Mars on a binge, said, “Rolf, dear, don’t you think you’ve had enough? After all, there’s a limit to—”

“Enough?” Rolf interrupted her, with an incredulous grimace. “Lynne, this party’s just getting started. After we see off the brides, we’re going to settle down to some real drinking.” So saying, he pinched her, hard, where men have pinched women since time immemorial.

To her horror, she found herself on the verge of tears. She was glad she could cover her weakness by struggling with an outward display of assurance into the aluminum-fabric coverall that was uniform protection against the chill Martian outdoors, and the oxy-respirator worn for occasional revivifying whiffs against the thinness of the atmosphere.

She sat on somebody’s lap, securely wedged with the others into a land-runner for the half-kilometer trip to the reception hall. Around her, Rolf and the rest, joined in the rousing, ribald first chorus of The Farmer’s Martian Daughter, making her head ring with a volume of sound which was almost unbearable inside such a confined space. At that moment, she hated them all.

Nor was her dislike merely a matter of personal pique. She had felt the malaise for some time, felt it so gradually, so far below the level of her conscious mind, that she had been unaware of its creeping progress. Like the ping of an antique radar, a subconscious thought from the mind of her twin, Revere Fenlay, registered. He was thinking of his bride, Lao Mei-O’Connell, and his thought ran, I’m glad she’s going to be away from Mars for the next ten months. There’s bound to be trouble and I don’t want her in danger—especially while she’s carrying our child.

Lynne stifled an impulse to probe Revere’s mind with a telepathic inquiry as to the nature of the danger. She decided there would be time for that after Lao Fenlay and the other brides of the season were safely on their way to the home planet. But with awareness of Revere’s awareness, Lynne realized that some of her unhappiness was rooted not in homesickness but in unaccepted telepathic fears of her own—fears whose nature she could not pin down.

She probed Rolf’s mind carelessly and received a wholeheartedly carnal picture of Rolf and herself that caused her to drop that line of inquiry instantly. She was not in the mood for—what did he call it?—such ferkab canoodling. At the moment she hated the man—and not the least of her hatred’s causes lay in the very inevitability of her ultimate surrender to him. The marlet.

Watch your language, you ZWIRCHY VINRAL, came his answering thought. Lynne sealed her mind as tightly as her lips the rest of the way to the reception hall.

Here, beneath a girdered ceiling adorned with the stunted evergreens grown by Earthmen on Mars, a table had been set up for the marriage parties of each city, according to tradition. Accustomed to the fabricated foods of Earth, Lynne was astonished at the lavish display of barbecued boar, Marsapples and other delicacies, including plump forty-pound capon-turkeys, the pride of the husbandry labs.

She told herself she was not hungry. But she ate notwithstanding—while Rolf and the other men went right on drinking. Thanks to the small, closely interrelated population of the Red Planet, there was much 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.