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.