II

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.