"And do we need you!" Willis led the way toward a pharmabar.
"Thank you, sir." Lynne turned on the charm, enjoying the inner growls
of resentment from Rolf. Well, he'd played a game with her, she
thought. He had no right to resent her playing a few herself.
_But I wasn't playing for fun!_ The message was sharp and resentful. _I
was playing for the safety of my planet._
_You mean one little girl like me can save a great big world like
this?_ It must be the oxygen, she decided, that was making her behave
so giddily. Or perhaps she couldn't help tormenting him a little--a
very little.
"Hey, cut it out!" Tony Willis looked aggrieved. "It's bad enough
having one of you telepaths around--but with two of you together anyone
else is out in the cold. What do you want for breakfast?"
They apologized and kept their special talents under wraps. Lynne
felt a certain disappointment at the prosaic familiarity of the food
and drink they were served. She didn't know exactly what she had been
expecting but there was no trace of the exotic.
Nor was the aircar in which Willis drove them from the spaceport to
New Samarkand any different from similar vehicles on Earth--save that
it seemed somewhat battered and in need of a refinish. She and Rolf
rode in silence, letting Tony do the talking.
They traveled at about five hundred meters altitude toward a low range
of reddish hills, sprinkled here and there with green. The sky was
cloudless, the ground beneath them innocent of roads, of cultivation,
of homes. For the first time Lynne began to appreciate the immensity of
the task these emigrées from Earth had undertaken, the rehabilitation
of a near-dead planet.
And then, when they crested the hill, there were rectangular patches
of vegetation on its lee side. But she gave this man-made miracle only
the briefest of glances--for beyond lay the vast bank of the canal,
stretching as far as the eye could see, in a straight line from horizon
to horizon. And beyond the canal lay the city.
Here, on the far bank of the incredible dry ditch, men had built well.
Plastic half-domes and metallic towers, spare and functional, rose from
the newly-buttressed escarpment for a good two kilometres. Beneath the
buildings, on the bank itself, were broad terraces upon which passenger
and freight-craft and landing engines made a busy and familiar pattern,
kaleidoscopic with movement.
And behind the man-made city, its incredible soaring half-ruined
spires and obelisks cutting a jagged rampart across half the sky,
lay the once-vast Martian metropolis. Crystaline minarets, revealing
materials and a beauty of design unknown as yet to Earthmen, reflected
the rays of the distant sun in prismatic showers of color, coruscating,
almost blinding, yet so weird and beautiful that they brought tears to
Lynne's eyes.
_I'm glad you can capture their beauty._ Rolf's thought shared the
excitement of her own. _So many of us see nothing but ruin._
"Quite a sight, isn't it?" said Tony Willis complacently. "We get a
_farbish_ howl from the archeological boys whenever we have to clear
any of it away."
"It seems a shame," said Lynne with feeling.
Willis shrugged. "Can't be helped. We haven't the time or resources to
build from scratch in the sand. Besides, there's oceans of ruins left
for them to poke around in."
He brought them in with practised skill to a landing on one of the
terraces, where Rolf was quickly gobbled up by a waiting group of men
and women. Before they led him off he said to Lynne, "I'm sorry if
I've seemed unfair, Lynne. But I think you'll understand in time. This
is a frontier world and we can't always take time out to observe the
niceties."
Some inner emotion she refused to recognize caused her to ask, "When
will I see you again, Rolf? You aren't leaving me...."
"Tony can take care of you as well as I," he informed her. "I'd like to
get you started myself but I'm way behind in my work. I'll be paying
you a visit at the post--perhaps sooner than you expect."
"I see." She felt frozen. Now that he had her here he was discarding
her like an old clout. She recalled what Tony Willis had said at the
spaceport about his having a thousand women eating out of his hand, how
eagerly Joanna had expressed a desire to meet him the night before. She
was glad there had been no opportunity to perform that introduction.
Why make it a thousand-and-two?
As he walked slowly away, with the reception committee dancing
attendance about him, she received a faintly mocking thought projection
from him, became aware that he was enjoying her jealousy. She felt her
face flame again, said, "_Ferkab!_"--all but stamped her foot.
"What was that?" Tony Willis asked politely.
"Nothing--my clout slipped," she replied, embarrassed.
Lynne was taken to a gaunt office whose chief piece of furniture was an
immense Martian globe, upon which all the chief Martian cities, all the
human settlements, all the communications posts were marked. She began
to understand, from looking at it, how very different conditions upon
the red planet were from the Earth norm.
The home planet, heavily over-populated, was skilfully disguised to
appear roomy. Virtually every inch of its land surface was devoted to
giving crowded humanity the illusion of privacy. Aloneness was one of
its most prized cultural assets.
On Mars, with its scant million humans and solitude ever-present, all
cultural efforts were bent the other way--to create the illusion of a
large number of people that did not exist. Instead of seeking privacy
the inhabitants gratefully crowded close together in their small
communities, seeking strength through numbers.
"We're making progress--tremendous progress," Tony told her seriously,
tapping a point on the globe. "The more ground we get under cultivation
the more atmosphere we reclaim through the plant-breathing process.
What we actually need is a few hundred million more people--but the
planet will barely support those we have. It's a slow and laborious
process."
"Operation bootstrap," said Lynne, wondering how she could even briefly
have found this dedicated young man ridiculous.
"Exactly," he told her. "I take it Rolf has briefed you a little about
your job here."
"A little," she said. "I'm to relieve my brother--right?"
"Right." He nodded. "We can short-cut your training because you are his
twin. Ordinarily we take a couple of weeks fitting each communications
worker to his or her post--finding in just which their telepathic
sensitivity will work the best. But since, in a way, we _know_ about
you through Revere, we can save time."
"Revere," she said, "what about him? Is he very sick?"
Tony Willis shrugged. "It's periodic," he told her. "This whole
business is so new and so sudden it hit most of them without warning.
Since you know the score you ought to be able to fight it."
"But mightn't I have my brother's weaknesses?" Lynne asked.
"We're hoping not," was the reply. "In most cases women resist better
than men. The suggestions these creatures make are so _swackably_ lewd
they clash with the feminine propriety-barrier."
"While men, being Casanovas, give in," she said, thinking again of Rolf
and his thousand-and-two women.
"Something like that," he replied, went on to tell her how telepathic
messages were keyed and directed and addressed to reach the proper
destinations. "You'll be here"--tapping a spot on the globe, a third of
a world away from New Samarkand--"at Barkutburg, within mentarange of
Zuleika, New Walla Walla and Cathayville. So here will be the code-keys
for you to remember...."
The final briefing took sixteen hours. If Lynne, through her years of
coaching for and year of work on the integration-team, had not been
trained to complete concentration over long periods, she would never
have been able to absorb all the new knowledge Tony Willis and other
communications experts pumped into her.
At the end of that time he looked at her with red-rimmed but admiring
eyes, shook his head and said, "My hat is off to you, Lynne. You're the
quickest study I've ever met."
"Thanks--most of it's a matter of training," she replied modestly. She
was glad he was not telepathic or he would have read the bright glow of
far-from-modest pride that ran through her. _Wait till Rolf hears about
it_, she thought. _Maybe he won't think I'm such a_ marlet _after all._
With this went added pride in that she was obviously less exhausted
than her mentor.
When it was over she was fed real meat for the fourth or fifth time in
her life--ham from lean Martian-bred hog, basted in some curious alien
sauce. With it went real potatoes and non-processed vegetables, raised
on the red planet. Rugged or not, Lynne decided as she was bundled into
a planetcar, life on Mars had its compensations.
When the ship landed at Barkutburg a tearose-pale Martian dawn was
lighting the dark eastern sky. Lynne felt a tingle of anticipation,
mixed with dread, a stir of _déja vu_--the I've-been-here-before
feeling--as she alighted with her strangely light bag in hand and
paused to sip sparingly of her oxyrespirator.
For here was her nightmare city, though seen from the ground. Here
were the widely-spaced transparent towers, similar to yet oddly unlike
those of New Samarkand. Here were the scant human dwellings, clustered
like alien mushroom growths amid the towering demi-ruins.
Two aluminum-coveralled figures were awaiting her at the rim of the
airport. One was tiny, feminine, despite the bulk of her costume, her
exotically delicate Eurasian features roughened by wind and sunburn.
She was Lao Mei-O'Connell, qualified and elected leader of the pioneer
settlement. The other was--Revere Fenlay.
It was add to see oneself mirrored in the features of another human
for the first time in one's life, Lynne decided. She noted her brother
looked unexpectedly healthy, that his handclasp was firm, his eyes
probably clearer than her own sleep-puffed ones.
His thought was warningly clear. _Don't be fooled by externals, Lynne.
These creatures can move in on me every time I open up my mind to
receive a message. They're murder!_ Aloud he said, "Lord, I had no idea
my counterpart was a beauty."
Quite naturally she linked arms with Revere as they walked toward
the cluster of Earth-dwellings. It was, she thought, a rare event
for twins, separated by the gulf between planets, ever to meet after
incubation--except of course on such rarified levels as those trod by
Rolf Marcein and his brother. She sensed a discomfort, a reserve,
behind the routine welcome of Lao Mei-O'Connell, decided swiftly there
was some sort of guilt feeling there.
As swiftly her twin replied telepathically, _Of course she has feelings
of guilt. Thanks to her I was given the coldwrap treatments--even when
I was not under Their control. There was no need for them and they made
me feel my head would burst. Thank_ farb _you're here!_
_When did you receive these treatments?_ she thought sharply. And the
answering thought confirmed her sudden suspicion. Revere had been
placed in coldwrap restraint each time a headache had assailed her on
Earth. He had been deliberately tortured as part of the campaign to get
her to come to Mars and replace him.
_That Rolf--that_ marlet! Fury assailed her, fury and frustration. But
Revere's grip tightened on her forearm.
_I don't mind--now_, he informed her. _We need you here._
It was pathetic but she managed to still the thought aborning. With
Revere, as never before in her life, she felt as if she belonged to
someone, as if someone belonged to her. But she had not been with him
an hour when he said good-bye. He was returning to New Samarkand on the
planet-ship for treatment, perhaps ultimately to Earth to replace her.
"Don't worry," he told her. "You'll do great, Lynne. Wring their
_farbish_ invisible necks."
She checked the thrill of panic that caused her, managed _a Look up Ray
Cornell when you hit Earth. And ruin Janet just for me._
_Don't be too rough on Rolf_ was his farewell thought. _You'll
understand him better--later on._
She watched the takeoff, walked back with Lao Mei-O'Connell in silence.
And, twenty minutes later, she stepped off the uplift platform and
found herself alone in the patched tower-room of her nightmare.