IV

Lynne lay on her plastomat for the next two hours, one hour on her

stomach, the other on her back. Under the conditions of light Martian

gravity, these positions had been discovered to be better for yoga

breathing and trance than the cross-legged, sitting positions of

yoga on Earth. More important, they maintained a more normal flow of

circulation through the brain, a flow essential to full TP keying and

control.

At first, as she lay prone on the mat, it seemed to her that every

stray thought in the Depot came tripping, unwanted, into her

head--every stray thought in Mars. She could, had she wished, have

identified the senders, but to do so would have destroyed her purpose.

A vital factor in Rana’s success with the first Mars-born baby, had

been the isolation of her post, and her ability to shut out extraneous

thoughts, and concentrate entirely upon the union of her own existence

and the new life blossoming in her womb.

Lynne breathed deeply and closed her eyes. She relaxed the muscles

at the corners of her eyes and little by little awareness of outside

thoughts faded. At the end of the first hour, after rolling over on

her back, she was able to lose all outside interference in a matter of

mere minutes. Then her real concentration began. She grew conscious

of the unborn child she was carrying, even to sensing the faint and

fitful radiations of its thoughts. From time to time she felt the stir

of its body, the kick of its feet. She conveyed a message of union, of

_oneness_, of warmth and security to the embryo brain within her.

Then, after a while, she slept dreamlessly.

She awoke at the exact end of the second hour, feeling serene and

refreshed. A thought reached her mind, probing, a thought unmistakably

that of her twin, Revere. He was telling her, if she was awake, to go

immediately to the doctor’s office. Something about Joanna Wheatley and

a cattle plague and the DT’s....

Revere and the doctor were waiting for Lynne in the physician’s inner

laboratory. It was the room of a medical jack-of-all-trades, for Mars,

being thinly populated and in need of a variety of medical services,

was unable to afford the specialists of Earth. Dr. Smetana was not

only a fine general practitioner. He was also the only competent

psychiatrist in this entire sector of the Red Planet. It was therefore

not surprising that he had been assigned to Nampura Depot, since

the telepathic headquarters of Mars was a place where, presumably a

head-shrinker might be needed.

However, as Dr. Smetana was fond of saying, “In that department, I’m

merely an observer, since TP’s are mentally just about the healthiest

folk there are. Telepathy and repression don’t exactly walk hand in

hand.”

Revere spoke to Lynn aloud for the benefit of the doctor, who was

barely a Class-A telepath. “I’ve been doing some checking on conditions

at Patagonia Station,” he said. “Those _marlets_ have been

having a bucketful of _swackish_ troubles lately. It seems the

cattle have been showing every symptom of going off their collective

rails--stampedes, off-season breeding fits, berserk tempers, even

dancing.”

“That I’ll have to see,” said Lynne, lighting a cigarette.

“You will--in a moment,” said Dr. Smetana. “I’ve got Joanna Wheatley’s

tapes right here.” He turned on a switch.

At once a wall screen flashed on, revealing a set of file numbers.

Thanks to Rolf Marcein’s development of the formerly dangerous

necro-recorder, which reproduced on a screen the thoughts of a person

under certain hypnotic drugs, psychiatry on Mars had taken a long leap

ahead of parallel progress on the mother planet. There, because its use

hastened death or insanity through the strain it put on the patient’s

mind and body, the recorder was still used only in cases of extreme

urgency. On Mars, thanks to Rolf’s improvements its use had become mere

examination routine.

The screen flashed its polychromatic “adjustment” patterns, some of

which were highly revealing of Joanna’s normal young woman desires.

Then, in response to channeled suggestion, got to the matter under

examination. The miraculous green grasses of the newly-created

Patagonia Station veldt appeared in brilliant color with the dark blue

sky of Mars over them. Small herds of plump, carefully selected beef

cattle grazed peacefully on the grass which the wonder of E-power had

made possible. There was even a glimpse of Joanna, riding herd on a

tractoscooter, and smoking a cigarette.

Then the vehicle was halted close to a herd which the dark-skinned girl

was inspecting. A plump steer turned to watch her. It seemed to be

regarding her with speculation. There was a close-up of the creature’s

face, its eyes revealing a startling intelligence.

All at once, the steer went into a dance. It was a rhythmic swaying, at

first, but it quickly became a series of small steps in harmony with

some unheard rhythm or meter. The other steers looked, nodded or shook

their heads and finally joined in, following the leader. They performed

almost like a vidar chorus-line back on Earth, kicking in unison and

swaying as if to music.

Then they broke up into groups and entered into a series of

unbelievable revels that could only be described as immoral, even for

animals. There was a flash of Joanna, taking off on her tractoscooter,

followed by a picture of her back on the scene, with the neighboring

Woomera Depot superintendent, while the creatures placidly grazed.

“What do you make of it?” Dr. Smetana asked the instant the film ended.

He was frowning as he switched off the recorder. “Is she crazy?”

Lynne knew what Revere was thinking, and for a moment, there was

shared horror between them. They _knew_ what had happened to the

prize cattle of the Red Planet’s only ranch. Lynne said aloud, for the

doctor’s benefit, “Joanna Wheatley isn’t crazy, Doctor.”

“But what about those cattle?” the physician asked.

“Revere will tell you,” Lynne replied. “I’ve got to put an emergency

call through to my husband. He’s needed here--at once.”

Absently, she cursed the fact of her advanced pregnancy, and the

demands it made on her. If she hadn’t been so nearly incapacitated, she

would have been able to handle the matter herself. How and where, she

wondered, had the grotesque, bodiless aborigines of Mars--life forms

that fed on electricity--managed to get enough of it to obtain strength

for possession even of bovine brains? Rolf would have to come back at

once, to deal with this new outbreak of a problem long considered under

control.

Lynne put through her call, and obtained Mars Central on New Samarkand.

Fortunately, she was able to cut through red tape and obtain the chief

supervisor without delay.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Marcein,” he said, in reply to her request for

an immediate Earth-call to her husband. “Solar disturbances have

temporarily blocked interplanetary communications.”

Lynne hung up, feeling almost physically ill. All the terrors of

Nightmare Tower, where she had battled the vicious aborigines alone in

the darkness, returned to plague her. Then she rallied and remembered

that a deadly threat that had been conquered before could be conquered

again. She was going to have to go it alone.

Inside her, the baby kicked feebly.

V

Martin Juarez, Director of Woomera Station and Patagonia Station,

and the most influential single individual in the entire Martian

Agricultural Experiment Program, was a wiry, swarthy man whose face and

bare forearms had been burned almost black by the fierce Martian sun.

Looking at Lynne, across his office desk, he said, “Mrs. Marcein, I’m

almost beginning to wish Joanna was as crazy as a _czanworm_.”

“So am I,” said Lynne quietly. She turned and looked directly at the

dark-skinned young animal husbandry expert she had seen only the day

before in Dr. Smetana’s office at Nampura Depot. “Nothing personal,

Joanna,” she said.

“_Crehut!_” exploded the girl. “I wish I was crazy instead of

those steers. Mars can always ship out a replacement for me. But they

can’t breed cattle on Earth capable of surviving on this planet.”

Lynne thought Joanna had put the problem very eloquently. Somehow, the

zombies, as she termed the electrophagic aborigines that had supposedly

been routed forever shortly after her arrival, had discovered a new

source of dietary strength. This time, with appalling ingenuity, they

had evidently decided not to seek possession of human bodies--or, to be

more exact, human minds laid bare to them by telepathic exposure.

Instead, they had elected to take over the minds of the Patagonia

Station steers. Lynne would have given several years of her life to

know why and how the selection had been made. According to Martin

Juarez and Joanna, there had been no abnormal behavior on the part of

other species of food-on-the-hoof bred and raised at the two stations.

Sheep, fowl and pigs had been left entirely alone, either through

choice, or because they were invulnerable to zombie possession.

The zombies, whose visible record had been left for human study

on hundreds of magnificent murals in the ruins that had survived

for untold ages, owing to the airless and moistureless Martian

climate, had been one of the two dominant species on the Red Planet.

Somehow--probably through their ability to survive in electronic rather

than physical form--they had survived the long desolation of their

home world, where all animate life with the exception of the mindless

czanworms and the imbecilic sand-lurtonks had succumbed.

They were weird and utterly repulsive creatures--with complex multiple

bodies, undefined appendages and much-too-well-defined reproductive

organs. Their concept of proper mating behavior was utterly beyond the

pale from a human point of view. They were revolting--and Lynne well

knew that much of the horror they inspired in human minds was caused by

the fact that they managed to make their ghastly idea of fun and games

even momentarily alluring.

Lynne shuddered, remembering her previous combats with them, before

their positively-charged entities had succumbed to the telepathically

directed bursts of negative anion-gun barrages. Then she said, “The

first thing I’d like to do is examine every record you have of abnormal

behavior among the cattle.”

“Joanna will give you the tapes, Mrs. Marcein,” said Martin Juarez. He

paused, then added, “I’m sorry to be causing you such trouble at this

time.”

“Forget it,” said Lynne, lighting a cigarette. “I’ll manage. Even if

the worst should happen, I can always try again. You may not have the

chance if we don’t lick this thing right now.”

She knew that Juarez knew he should have reported the trouble

sooner--at least to Mars Agriculture Chief Radchev. But Mars was still

a pioneer planet, and a responsible project boss like Juarez was very

much on his own. Naturally, he had not wished to report a failure until

he could be sure it was real and that there was no possibility of

mastering it with the means at his command. Lynne liked him, sensed his

very real abilities, and had no wish to chide him.

While studying the record-tapes in Joanna’s neat office, with its

bright pots of flowering lichenheather, Lynne considered just how

serious the problem was. Until E-power had been harnessed to give

impetus to the restoration of Martian atmosphere, the planet’s human

population had had to subsist largely on synthetic foods, plus the

occasional lean, leather-tough meat from wild pigs which had somehow

survived exportation from Earth and reverted to savagery.

The small bits of grass and grain and vegetables that were painfully

nurtured in the bone-dry Red Planet soil were far too precious and

costly to be used for animal fodder. Not until the atomic transmuter

had been installed at Woomera Station could any cattle be grazed at

all. And here, the cost was way out of line with even experimental

results. Until E-power, through controlled moisture production, enabled

an ever-growing patch of Martian soil to become fertile, the effort to

grow cattle on Mars was doomed.

“Here’s the first case on record,” said Joanna, halting the tape

unwinding its record of pictures, written matter and her own clear,

precise accents on a vidarscreen. “It happened last May twenty-third,

Earth-calendar. Old Bill, one of our prize musk-Brahmas, went on a

rampage and tried to catwalk the drinking pool border and fell in. It

was pretty unusual, but not alarming. No harm was done.”

“Stay with it, Joanna,” said Lynne.

* * * * *

She was thinking of what failure of the husbandry program could mean

at this stage. Since the Red Planet had no water surface--above all

no salt water--the plankton which had become the staple diet of an

overpopulated Earth was simply not available. Mars needed beef, and

lamb, and good rich pork. No heat or energy tablets could make up for

the real things--especially on a sub-Arctic pioneer planet.

Other incidents of cattle aberration showed on the record with

increasing frequency and severity. It was a senseless duel that had

left two prime musk-oxen dripping their own insides. It was an utterly

out-of-season misbreeding in which the bull seemed to have been helped

to achieve his purpose in a sort of team operation--a senseless

miniature stampede that had run off tons of good meat from the bones of

its owners.

“You know about the dance I saw yesterday,” said Joanna, her bright

eyes falling away. “When I reported it, Martin went back with me

to witness it. The cattle were all as mild as turtles. He ordered

_me_ to report to Dr. Smetana.”

“_Crehut_, I was there yesterday--remember?” Lynne said.

She glanced at the biplanetary chronometer on her wrist--a trim and

amazing simplification of complexities which Rolf had given her on her

last birthday. She wondered if her brother or Tony Willis, back at

Nampura Depot, had got through to Rolf yet.

Then she became aware of the time, and realized that she had missed her

period of yoga-TP concentration on the precious burden she was carrying

inside her. As if in protest, the baby kicked vigorously, twice. Lynne

closed her eyes and sent a message to the unborn tot--_Easy, infant,

mummy’s right here_. There was no time for rest now. She had to try

to make some sense out of Joanna’s records.

She began to make sense out of the problem after a while. But it was an

understanding that deepened, rather than relieved her growing concern

and mounting fear. Fear of the zombies had never fully left her since

her first ghastly encounter with them in Nightmare Tower, when it

had seemed to her that her mind must forever stand alone against the

ghastly phantoms of an alien world.

Until the previous February Patagonia Station had been little more than

a blueprint addition to the rapidly spreading green acres of Woomera

Station. In the fenced-in, relatively small grazing areas of the parent

station there had been plenty of negative electricity protection

against zombie inroads. And similar fences had been erected around

every important official installation on Mars.

But the zombie threat was ancient history, and the broad new pastures

of Patagonia Station had been planned to enable the specially bred Red

Planet cattle to roam free--as they had done in the early days of the

American Southwest, the Argentina pampas and the tse fly-freed plateau

of Central Africa. The results of this mistake could be ticked off

almost by the calendar.

The zombies had moved in and were feeding on the vast electrical

discharges of the mysterious E-entity that provided the power--through

human-inspired irritation--to create the storms and moisture that made

the expanded station possible. Taking possession of the empty bovine

minds, they were beginning to play their monstrous games as their

new-fed strength waxed.

“_Crehut!_ Look at those _ferkab_ devils now!” Joanna had

risen and was staring in horror at a vidarscreen on which was projected

a fairly wide expanse of New Patagonia Station. “Come _on_!” she

cried.

Lynne paused for an incredulous moment to study the screen. It showed

level acres, bright with tough, waving grass, each green stretch dotted

with gray, long-haired cattle. The normally stupid and independent

beasts were clustering together in a strange way, forming distinct

group shapes, almost as if in response to some alien military command.

Even as she watched she saw the leader--a large long-horned

steer--deliberately lower his head and savagely attack an animal that

had managed to get in his way. She caught a glimpse of blood dripping

from its torn flanks and spreading like a sun-reddened shadow over the

emerald-green grass.

“I’m _coming!_” she said grimly in response to another plea from

Joanna.