Chapter IV

Lynne, who had been largely brought up on stories of pioneer space-flights in which the passengers had to endure tremendous initial acceleration, was pleasantly surprised by the takeoff. She probably would have known better had her conditioning and training not geared her to such complete uninterest in anything beyond the atmosphere that she seldom thought of the stars except as pretty lights in the sky.

She did have to strap herself to her bunk before the immense silver teardrop rose slowly upward toward space--but as the stewardess explained in routine tones the strap was a mere precaution against a possible lurch caused by brief failure of one of the launching jets. And within five minutes after takeoff a tiny sign lit up over the cabin door that read UNFASTEN BELTS--SMOKING PERMITTED.

She sat up and loosened the strap and swung her feet to the deck, noted her roommate was doing likewise. In the turmoil of catching the Mars-ship Lynne had had little time to notice her. She managed to recall that her name was Joanna-something and that she was an expert in animal husbandry. She was a handsome immense South African girl whose dark complexion wore traces of both Caucasian and Oriental, as well as Hamitic ancestry. She offered Lynne one of the new skinless cigarettes.

"You on Integration business?" she asked.

Lynne, who knew nothing of affairs on Mars, probed quickly and discovered what the girl had in mind was a coordination trip by an Earth Government executive. She shook her head, said, "No, I'm going for good. I understand there's a job there for me."

The African girl regarded her curiously, then said, "I don't want to sound rude but aren't you a bit old to be going home?"

"I guess maybe I am." Looking more closely at her cellmate Lynne saw that for all her evident maturity she was still a girl in her late-middle teens. "They came after me."

As the girl nodded uncomprehendingly Lynne wondered if what she had uttered as a polite brush-off lie might not be the truth. There was a definite pattern of continuity to events following her first headache and her non-variant answers at the brain-station.

"Let's go to the saloon and see the stars," Joanna suggested.

It seemed like a good idea--besides, Lynne wanted to talk to Rolf, to discover if there actually _was_ considered motive behind her apparently aimless emigration to the red planet.

She said, "How long does this trip take anyway?"

Joanna's jaw dropped and her black-satin hair gleamed with liquid highlights as she shook her head. "_Crehut_, you are green!" she exclaimed. Then, assuming sociability with an effort, "You're mighty pretty though. The trip takes a little more than one Earth-day."

"Thanks--I see," replied Lynne. She felt she was beginning to see a lot of things. Along with her archaic ideas about the rigors of a space-ship takeoff, she had apparently retained some mighty obsolete theories about the speed of space-travel, at least on the Earth-Mars run. In her mind it was a matter of weeks if not months, depending upon the relative positions of the two planets.

A little over one Earth-day--if her growing feeling that she was the victim or core of some vast unseen conspiracy were correct, then there would have been plenty of time for Rolf to be summoned from Mars after her non-variant answers had given the brain-station bosses the clue to her newly-developed telepathic powers.

But why all the secrecy? It didn't take her long to find an answer. Had she been asked immediately to come to Mars she would have refused point-blank to make the trip. Her conditioning, her whole life would have forced her to reply in the negative.

So Rolf Marcein had been sent for with orders to make her want to leave Earth with him, by fair means or foul. And he had not hesitated to employ the foul. She felt her whole body blush as she recalled some of the brazen suggestions he had made, some of her responses, especially to his embraces earlier that evening.

It was going to be a very interesting session, she decided, as she followed the girl into the single small but beautifully compact central lounge or saloon that space requirements permitted on the Mars-ship. She looked around but failed to see his tall figure and saturnine face--treacherous face, she thought--among the half-dozen passengers already reclining in plastolounges, watching the amazing panorama projected on the ceiling from the viewplate recorders in the prow and stern of the huge space-vessel.

She followed Joanna to a chair, tried to share the girl's tremulous excitement. After all, she thought, she had felt much the same on emerging from the seminary to take her first position as a data-recording supplement for the biggest of all cybernetics machines, the "brain" that occupied six thousand acres of the Sahara Desert.

"Look!" the girl whispered enthusiastically. "There's X-Three, the last of the derelict space-stations."

Lynne watched the oddly complex structure, that resembled a pair of unrooted pyramids fastened point to point, as it revolved slowly across and out of the plane of vision.

"What do they use it for now, Joanna?" she murmured.

"Nothing," the girl said with a trace of scorn.

Lynne knew she should have known about that. She recalled now a vidar newscast in which the abandonment of the last of the space-stations had been mentioned. In the years before A-engines were finally perfected space-stations were vitally necessary as change-over stops for interplanetary rocket flights. But once fuel ceased to be a problem they had been used merely as meteor-warning points and weather stations.

In the first function they had proved useless--in fact one of them had been destroyed by a large space-missile--and weather forecasting and control were practised far more efficiently by electronic mastery of the Heaviside Layer. Lynne shouldn't have forgotten--but when she heard it the matter of space-stations had been utterly unimportant in her life.

A steward in space-black bolo and clout offered them vari-flavored colafizzes from a rack strapped about his waist. Lynne wondered at this mode of serving the drinks while she sipped hers but decided not to ask Joanna. She didn't want to appear a total numbskull to a girl whose whole life had consisted of conditioning for Mars.

She found out soon enough when Rolf Marcein walked into the saloon before she had finished sipping her drink. She rose to greet him, to haul him off somewhere so they could talk alone--and as she did so she automatically dropped her colafizz in the receptacle ready to receive it in one arm of her plastolounge.

Joanna made a grab for it as it bounced off and rose lazily in the air and turned slowly over. The African girl caught it before it released any of the liquid remaining in it, pushed it firmly down into the hollow space reserved for it, where it was magnetically held.

But Lynne was not paying much attention. She was having enough trouble holding herself upright as her feet displayed an astonishing reluctance to keep on the floor while the rest of her wanted to describe a lazy parabola across the saloon. She did an off-to-Buffalo and wound up against Rolf's chest with his arms about her.

Embarrassed she whispered fiercely, "Put me down, you _marlet_!"

He grinned at her infuriatingly, replied, "I'm no _marlet_--that's a very nasty word on Mars and most of these people understand it. Don't you know you're in space?"

He set her gently back on her feet, holding her steady with one hand gripping an upper arm. She knew she looked like an idiot, felt certain everyone in the saloon was laughing at her. "I thought they had artificial gravity on these ships," she said.

"They do," he told her. "But it's nothing like Earth-gravity. It would use up all power if it were. You'll learn to navigate. Come on, I'll show you how." He led her unprotesting into one of the corridors outside the saloon.

She pulled herself free, promptly smacked her head none too gently against the corridor wall. "I don't want a lesson now," she told him angrily. "Besides, why aren't I sick?"

"You would be," he informed her with what she interpreted as a smug expression, "if you hadn't been given your full quota of shots in the Centromed this afternoon. You don't think they'd have allowed you aboard otherwise, do you?"

"You had it all figured out, didn't you?" she snapped at him angrily. "I'll give odds you even said something to Alan and Ray tonight that got them involved in that horrible brawl!"

"It was nothing," he said with false modesty, flicking a non-existent speck of dust from a bare forearm. "Just a bit of premeditated Machiavelli. Anyone could have managed it."

"What are you trying to do to me?" she asked him desperately. "I'll even bet my headaches were induced. Why pick on _me_? I don't want to go to Mars--I never wanted to go there."

"Maybe because I'm in love with you," he said simply.

She ignored the intensity of his dark eyes, said, "You're not in love with me. You didn't come to Earth until that twin of yours at the brain-station sent you a message I was telepathic. You've only made love to me to get me to Mars--for some selfish purpose of your own. Try and deny it."

"In view of your current mood," he replied quietly, "I'd be seven kinds of a sand-_lurtonk_ to try. You seem to have things all figured out yourself. Very well, it's your privilege to look at my actions any way you choose. But my purpose is not selfish!"

Something in the ring of his voice, in the determined set of his lower face, told her he was speaking the truth. She said, "All right, what purpose gives you the right to come to Earth, to violate everything I cherish, to make me a voluntary kidnapee, to wreck my life and drag me off to a planet I haven't even been trained for? What's to prevent me from reporting it and having you arrested?"

"Nothing," he replied, "except that I'd probably be released as soon as we reached Mars. If you still feel like this when we get there tomorrow I shan't stand in the way of your returning." There was a new sag in his shoulders, a weariness to the lines about his mouth.

"Oh, great!" she retorted. "Smash my job, my personal life, then say you won't try to stop me from going back to it. How _can_ you go around with so few ethics? What sort of person are you anyway?"

"A very serious one--a very worried one," he told her quietly and her quick probe of his thoughts revealed him again to be speaking the truth. He captured both her arms again, held her gently against the wall, and so great was the hypnotic force of his personality that despite her anger toward him she made no move to break away.

"You have a right to know--_now_," he told her. "I'm a Martian, a third generation one, even though I was born and trained on Earth. Conditions out there are only just beginning to be fit for human infants. We're building the biggest thing Man has ever accomplished on Mars--making a barren ruined planet live again, making it fit for men and women and babies to inhabit.

"Right now we're up against the greatest danger we've faced since the first few desperate years--maybe an even greater threat. We can't see it, we don't even know what it is. But men and women on Mars are going mad. Only a few of us can reach them--and thanks to a condition of the planet we're all too overloaded to do the psychiatric work we should do. We need telepaths."

A flash of something she had heard or read somewhere about the red planet occurred to her. She said, "But doesn't the atmosphere or something of Mars encourage telepaths? _You're_ one. Why come to Earth for them? Why pick on me?"

"Because," he told her with the patience of exasperation, "we need at least to maintain those telepaths we have--which aren't nearly enough. You don't seem to realise that a genuine two-way telepath, even among fourth generation Martians, occurs only about once in eleven thousand six hundred births. And we need more than the few we have for communications alone."

"Communications!" Lynne was honestly shocked. "Do you mean to tell me that Mars has no--"

"No form of lateral electronic communications functions reliably on Mars," he told her bluntly as if admitting a fact he hated to mention about the planet he loved. "Don't ask me why--it's just so, that's all. _Crehut_, do you think our best scientific brains haven't tried? They believe the thinness of the atmosphere and the resulting weakness of the Martian Heaviside Layer has something to do with it. We get messages from Earth and the other planet-stations clearly and, with the ato-reduced time lag, in a matter of seconds."

"And you have to use telepaths to transmit and receive?" She was almost incredulous but her mind informed her he was telling the truth without reserve.

"Whatever we can't heliograph or send over wire cables," he said unhappily. "And the climate of Mars is rough on cables. Above the ground the winds snap 'em. Underground they rot or the _czanworms_ eat through them. Now do you begin to understand?"

"A--little," she replied hesitantly, unable to maintain her entirely justified anger against his sincere appeal. "But what about this threat--this madness? What is it?"

"We don't know." His face was shadowed. "There may still be life-forms on Mars of which we know nothing--or perhaps manifestations of those we thought safe that are dangerous. But something apart from atmosphere or weather or diet or drink is creating insanity. And it seems to be affecting our telepaths rather than others. Maybe our telepathic minds are more open to whatever the influence is. I don't know." His expression turned grim. "I've never allowed them--it--to affect _me_."

All at once she remembered the nightmare, the being alone in the crystal tower, the crowding in upon her of unseen things that whispered dreadful alluring suggestions, the sense of panic. She began to understand it with growing certainty.

Lynne said, "My brother--Revere--he's one of those who's been affected, isn't he?"

He hesitated, evidently felt the probe of her questing brain, nodded reluctantly. He said, "Your brother is one of them. The _purt_ of it is we don't dare send him back to Earth."

"I understand." She shuddered, felt a reassuring hand on her shoulder, added, "He's mad, isn't he." It was statement, not query.

"I'm afraid so--at least part of the time," he replied. "But don't worry. We have marvelous clinics on Mars. Once we get him to one of them there's a good chance of a cure."

"You mean he isn't getting care now?" she asked, shocked.

Rolf shook his head, replied, his voice low, "Not yet--not until you replace him. That's how short-handed we are. We've lost too many the last few months. And there simply aren't any replacements. That's why I rushed to Earth when I heard about you, why perhaps I used unscrupulous methods to get you to come. There are less than a million people on all of Mars."

She understood his unspoken analogy. Less than a million people--less than a hundred telepaths, to maintain communications over the entire planet. Then she thought of something else, said, "My headaches--they're telepathic, aren't they? Caused when my brother has one of his attacks?"

"That's right as nearly as we can judge," he told her. "You seem to have an intense sympathetic affinity. It's not unusual between identical telepaths."

"And there aren't many of those," she said idly. She looked at him. "How about your brother, Rolf. Isn't he...?"

"Unfortunately not," he replied. "He has some tendency toward E.S.P. but insufficiently strong to be reliable."

Lynne sensed his thoughts shifting to his brother, then to hers--and was astounded by the depth of dislike he suddenly projected. It came as another shock and she said, "You hate my brother, don't you, Rolf? If you didn't you'd have managed to get him the care he must have to survive."

"I don't hate your brother," he said wearily and she realised he spoke the truth. What he felt for Revere Fenlay was the rather arrogant dislike and distrust toward a weaker man that is so frequent among the strong. Lynne resented it, resented him, bitterly.

She said, "Then why haven't _you_ replaced him? You're a telepath--why haven't _you_ given him relief?"

Again he looked defeated and, with feminine illogic, her heart went out to him. He said, "I wish I could--unfortunately I'm not permitted to go out in the field alone."

Annoyed by her heart's betrayal she let herself think, _Ah, an armlounge admiral, a user of men who saves his own skin!_ She watched anger wash defeat from his face, for a moment felt fear at its intensity. Then, without a word, he turned and left her alone in the corridor.

She felt a cheap victor as with difficulty she made her way back to her cabin. Nor was her self-esteem lifted when Joanna, sitting up in her bunk, said, "You must be real _zwirch_, Fenlay, if Marcein came for you. He's Communications Integrator for the whole ruddy planet--a real big bomb. How about introducing me before we land?"