Chapter III

The days that followed Rolf Marcein's arrival at Mother Weedon's became, to Lynne, a period of waiting. It was a period of waiting games as well. No summons came from the eightieth floor of the brain-station to give her a clue as to the nature of her next assignment. For the first time in her life she found herself hung in a vacuum with nothing definite to do or to look forward to.

Naturally she wondered whether Rolf Marcein might not be the answer to this facet of her problem. But not even her growing telepathic abilities could pry a response out of his mind. He seemed to be visiting the home planet on the vaguest sort of business--something to do with development and transport of specially-bred plant and animal stock for the red planet.

It seemed absurd on the face of it that such an obviously able adjustee should be returned to Earth on such a mission, especially with every gram of interplanetary ship-space at a premium. Yet either it was truth or Rolf had developed some method of screening his thoughts against telepathic probing--a frightening idea in itself.

He hung around Mother Weedon's most of the time. As a result Lynne saw a lot of him throughout the days and evenings, a fact which both pleased and alarmed her unreasonably. It was during the third night of his stay that he invaded, or tried to invade, her nights as well.

Before drifting off to sleep she found herself dwelling on him with relaxed reverie. Ray and Janet had had some sort of quarrel and the atmosphere that evening had been far from pleasant. It was a relief to lie alone, to let her thoughts roam and quest as they would.

Rolf had talked of Mars during a stroll to the bazaar-mart during the afternoon. He had described a boar-hunt on Earth's sister-planet during a night when both Deimos and Phobos were describing their rapid orbits across the cloudless sky.

The pig, as man's most adaptable food-animal, had been the first livestock imported to Mars less than three decades earlier. Now, according to Rolf, the animals had in large measure reverted to their feral state and constituted a menace to man and his works alike.

"We used flashlights and small-arms paralyzers on that hunt," Rolf said. "We flushed a whole herd of them in an erosion-gully along the border of the Great Southern Canal--didn't get so much as a smell of the brutes until we were right on top of them.

"At that we managed to nab a baker's dozen for de-tusking and redomestication. _Ferkab_, it was touch and go for a bit! One big brute slipped under my ray and if I hadn't been lucky enough to jam my flashlight tube into his mouth he'd have taken my leg off."

"What does _ferkab_ mean?" Lynne asked, a little annoyed at feeling an atavistic thrill from the account of the primitive hunt.

To her delight Rolf actually blushed beneath his tan. He began with, "I don't think you'd appreciate its meaning," then recalled her telepathic powers and shut up and blushed more deeply.

At which it had been Lynne's turn to feel her face grow hot. The meaning of _ferkab_, an approximate translation of certain graphically illustrated ancient Martian runes, was explicit to the point of bawdiness. Yet on Mars, apparently, it was used in mixed company.

So, lying half asleep, Lynne not surprisingly visualised the boar hunt as Rolf had described it. She could see his weatherproof aluminum clothing gleaming in the pale light of the swift tiny moons, shining in the occasional ray of a flashlight as he and his shadowy companions worked their way along the eroded bank of the canal.

Then the sudden rustle and thump and grunting of the beasts as they came charging out of their threatened shelter, their vast menacing shapes with huge tusks and little red eyes glittering in the confused crisscross of flashlight rays. She saw the paralyzers' brief glow, heard the thud of falling animal bodies, saw the sudden rush of one furious beast inside the protective sweep of Rolf's hand-weapon, saw his quick graceful evasive movement, heard the champ of savage tusks crushing the hard alloy of the metal tube.

* * * * *

Once, on the vidarscreen, she had watched a toreador do his dance of death with a furious bull, in an historical show. Rolf, she thought, was slim as a toreador, slim and graceful and equally accustomed to facing danger and death as an accepted part of life.

Then, she told herself scornfully, she was reverting to the primitive as if she were a Martian sow herself. She thought of the word _ferkab_ and what it meant and felt her face grow hot in the darkness. For she could visualise Rolf and--herself--in a way she had never been able to think of herself with Ray Cornell.

_It's not confined to Mars, darling_, came the sudden probe of Rolf's thought over hers. _But it takes a Martian to be the best._

Reverie was obliterated by rage. She sent back a string of thoughts that should have blistered Rolf's brains--if he had any decency. He withdrew before her counterattack and she wondered if he really did have any decency--or if her rage were all she had pretended.

She was cool to him the next day--and the arrival of the new member of the group-machine gave her opportunity to avoid him. Her replacement was a dark stocky quiet young man named Alan Waters and he seemed quite smitten with her--a fact which made Janet visibly jealous. Lynne found herself quite enjoying her triumph.

But the day after, when the other three reported for work at the brain-station and Mother Weedon visited the bazaar-mart for some needed household supplies, Lynne found herself looking at a mischievously contrite Rolf across the breakfast table.

He said, "I'm sorry if I've offended you, Lynne. Apparently I made the mistake of thinking you had blood in your veins."

Lynne acted without volition for the first time since early babyhood. She picked up the plastisaucer in front of her and flung it across the neoplast tabletop at him. He ducked and for a moment his dark eyes blazed with laughter and then he sensed her distress and helped her with the atocleaner.

She tried to apologize but the words refused to come. And he never mentioned the incident afterward. Instead he took her for a walk through the park and talked to her of the more feral beauties of his own planet. "It's far wilder than this," he told her, gesturing at the neat clusters of trees and flowers, the perfectly clipped hedges about them. "Wilder and deadlier and far more beautiful."

"This is perfection," she told him.

"And perfection is death," was his reply.

"I thought Mars pretty much a dead planet," she said.

"It's a vast mausoleum," he said, his eyes lighting. "A mausoleum visited by new life, a mausoleum in which the very souls of the dead themselves seem beginning to stir. It's raw new life burgeoning on the old."

He talked on and she felt the beginnings of small responses stir within her and frighten her. For she had been conditioned to Earth and to wish for Mars was wrong. Finally he stopped and faced her and captured both her hands in his incredibly strong ones.

"Lynne," he said. "I haven't much longer here. I want to take you back home with me. Will you come?"

"Home--on _Mars_?" she countered. The idea was impossible. Yet, somewhere within herself, she wanted to go. Then the reasons, the millions of reasons why she couldn't say yes, came flooding up within her. Surely Rolf knew them--or did he?

"You know the system and the reasons behind it," she reminded him. "You have a twin right here in the city. I've talked to him--it was he who gave me my walking papers from the group-machine."

"He told me," said Rolf quietly. "He told me a lot about you. Enough so I wanted to see you and get to know you. Now that I do know you I want you to go back with me. Can't you see, darling? There's little use for telepaths on Earth. On Mars we need them desperately. I think I can arrange a transfer."

"But my brother is already there," she told him a little desperately. "I--we--they can't leave two of us on one planet. And what right have I to ask him to come to Earth? He's not conditioned."

"But maybe he'd like to come back," Rolf suggested. "Maybe he's not happy on Mars."

"It's not just that," she said miserably. Nor was it. For the first time the entire system by which the Mars project was functioning seemed to her vastly unfair. Until that moment she had accepted it, considered it as immutable as the need for the sun itself.

The Earth Government, which was what the U.N. had evolved into after its first tortured half-century of birth, was determined not to repeat upon alien planets the mistakes of imperialism and colonization that had caused the home planet all but to tear itself to pieces during the twentieth century.

No convicts, no misfits, no refugee cultists were to be sent out to settle the newly-opened red planet--instead, the cream of Earth's best trained, most gifted and strongest young men and women were to do the preliminary settling. For it would still be many years before the arid world would be able to support much humanity.

There had been protests--chief among them a group of eugenicists who felt that loss of such a large group of qualified young folk would cost the home planet more genetically and socially than it could afford. The answer had been genetically-induced twins on the part of parents qualified to pass a wide variety of mental, physical and psychiatric tests, open to all who wished to join the project.

* * * * *

One of each set of such induced identical twins was early selected to go to Mars, the other to remain on Earth. Thus Earth lost nothing, yet had its potential Martians, ready for conditioning and training in special seminaries for lifetime work on the red planet. When one of a pair of twins was a girl, the other a boy, the boy was the one sent out--since life on Mars was still a rugged affair. Thus it was that Lynne had been reared for an Earth-career while her brother, Revere, had been educated and coached for a Mars-life.

Lynne's entire twenty-four years had been passed for the purpose of integration into and work for the improvement of humanity on her native planet. The very idea of Mars was terrifying, as was the idea of traveling there through space. She simply _couldn't_ endure the wrench of the trip, the separation from all that mattered.

Rolf stood there quietly, letting her thoughts flow without interruption. Then he said, "I see--but it's not as bad as all that, darling. After all, _I_ made the trip in reverse."

"But that's different--you're a man!" she protested.

"Nor is being a man as bad as you seem to think," he said and she sensed that he was teasing her and was grateful for the change in mood. Before she realized what she was doing she called him mentally a thoroughly bawdy Martian word.

"Where did you learn that?" he asked, startled.

"Where do you think?" she countered--and enjoyed seeing him blush again. They had a pleasantly innocuous time together the remainder of that day and evening.

The following morning Lynne awoke from another horrible nightmare of alien worlds to find her headache back in full force. So bad was it, in fact, that after making a half-hearted effort to get up she fell back on her plastomat, actually moaning a little. She felt as if she were undergoing some long-forgotten sort of Inquisition torture.

Rolf walked into her room within the hour and so sick was Lynne that she didn't even protest his presence. He said, "Lynne, darling, you've got to get over this. Believe it or not you're killing me."

"Then stay in your own mind." She managed a whisper of a smile.

"You're like a bad tooth," he said inelegantly. "You know it's going to hurt if you touch it but you can't stop running your tongue over it."

"Oh, shut up," she said rudely. "So now I'm an ulcerated tooth. I've never had one so I wouldn't know."

"Nor have I," he replied promptly. "But I've read about them. Come on. I'm going to take you to Centromed and get you fixed up."

"I'm too ill to move," she quavered, alarmed at the prospect.

But he simply moved in and took over, virtually forcing Lynne firmly but gently into her clothes, getting her downstairs and onto a moving strip, escorting her through the prophylactic entrance of the huge vertical cross of the Centromed, giving her in charge of a stern-faced but kindly physician in white, who put her in turn in the hands of a giant red-headed nurse in steropants and white cap.

Lynne never did find out what they did with her. She recalled lying down and looking up at a hypnotic ceiling, drifting quickly into merciful unconsciousness. When she recovered her headache was gone and she had a sense of having undergone an important experience.

"Miss Fenlay," the doctor said, "you're undergoing a period of mental growth and change that in your case seems to make such suffering periodic."

"What can I do about it?" she asked in panic.

"I believe your trouble is one of environment," he replied. "During this period of readjustment you find familiar surroundings unsufferable. In plain English, you need a change."

"But how am I to get it?" she asked.

"That is hardly our department," he told her. "You'll have to take it up with your Integration Chief, I'm afraid. Naturally we'll be glad to make a recommendation for transfer on medical grounds."

"Thanks--thanks a lot," she said uncertainly. She walked out of the building and discovered it was already late afternoon. Unsureness chewed at her for the first time in her well-ordered life. The headache was gone but it might return if she didn't make a change--and she didn't want to leave the only home she'd ever known.

Rolf rose from an alloybanc on which he had been sitting and said, "Headache gone, Lynne? You look upset."

"Headache's gone," she replied. "But it may come back."

"Not if I can help it," he told her and she took his arm in hers and squeezed it to show her appreciation. Rolf might be a barbarian, she thought, but he _had_ been kind and helpful.

"Thanks for the crumb anyway," he told her and her confusion grew almost to tears. They rode back to Mother Weedon's in silence.

Because of her fear at finding herself becoming so dependent on Rolf she flirted outrageously with Alan Waters, the team replacement, after dinner. When he followed her out into the garden and told her he was madly in love with her she didn't exactly discourage him. Just then her soul and body alike craved appreciation.

A furious Ray Cornell interrupted their third kiss. He strode through a gap in the hedge-wall and pulled Waters from her roughly and said, "They _told_ me I'd find you two out here."

"What right have you to interfere?" countered Waters.

"_This!_" snapped Ray, throwing a clumsy punch at his rival, who threw one back in return.

Lynne let out a gasp of alarm and tried to move between them but was brushed rudely to the ground. So hard did she land that for a moment the world seemed to swim.

She shook her head to clear it, felt the alarm gongs she had come to know preceded a return of her headache. Then she saw a third taller male figure take Ray in one hand, Alan in the other and pull them apart by the collars of their bolo packets as if they were a couple of dogs squabbling over a bone.

"You men are supposed to work together," he said quietly. Then, his voice rising a half-tone and increasing in force, "Why in _farb_ don't you?" With which he cracked their heads together with stunning force, tossed them to the turf like a pair of sacks and came over to help Lynne gently to her feet. She collapsed into his arms, for the first time let his lips seek hers, responded to them.

Later--how much later she didn't know, for during that day and evening she seemed destined to lose large chunks of time--she looked up at him, reveling in his controlled strength and leanness.

"Rolf," she said, "I'm sorry--that was my fault."

"You'd have been less than a woman if you hadn't done something like it to put me in my place," he whispered.

"But it seems so cheap now," she said. "And my head...."

"It wasn't cheap because you didn't know," he told her. "As for your head, you need a change. You're going to get one. You're leaving with me for Mars tonight."

"But, Rolf--" she began.

"Come on, honey," he told her. "It's all arranged. We've only got a couple of hours to make the ship."

She walked back to Mother Weedon's with his arm around her, stumbling a little from time to time like a blind woman. She was going to Mars and the mere idea scared her almost to death.