Chapter 2

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 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.