Chapter 3

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.