Chapter I: Front Matter

Snowstorm on Mars

by Jacques Jean Ferrat
[Pseudonym of Sam Merwin, Jr.]

_We might have known it would be dangerous to publish a
science fantasy novel as well-liked as Jacques Jean Ferrat’s_
NIGHTMARE TOWER, _followed by a sequel in much the
same exciting vein. Unhappily for us the popularity of_ THE
WHITE RAIN CAME _spread in widening circles all the way to
Mars and brought dire threats of telepathic reprisal for our delay
in enlivening our pages once again with Lynne and Rolf Marcein
in Martian splendor arrayed. Here then is a second sequel, made
mandatory by our desire to keep all such threats at bay._

=So bright and fateful was Lynne Marcein’s destiny that it set her
apart from all other women. She was soon to have a baby--on Mars!=

Lynne Fenlay Marcein was the most conspicuous landmark at Nampura Depot--or, for that matter, on all of Mars. Although the Red Planet was sparsely populated, with only a little over a million men and women to cultivate its vast, waterless land-area, she could go nowhere outside of the Depot itself without finding a crowd of the curious, the awestruck, and the morbidly pessimistic about her.

She had long since given up her weekly visits to New Samarkand, the Martian metropolis and capital city. She could not enter a store, a theater, or an office without finding herself a focus of a mass interest that brought all normal traffic to a standstill. Women eyed her with sympathy and disbelief, men with downright incredulity. For Lynne was the only visibly pregnant woman on the entire planet.

“Not only visible, but apparently downright shocking,” she told her husband, Rolf Marcein, over the Earth-Mars radarphone during their weekly conversation. “Hold on tight, _vinral_,” Rolf told her, using the Martian term of supreme endearment. She longed to see his face, but so far there was no vidar communication between Mars and the mother planet. With obvious concern, he asked, “How soon?”

“Dr. Smetana says another two weeks, at least,” she replied. “Don’t worry, darling. If that little snip Rana Willis could have her baby here on Mars, I can be lucky too.”

Rolf said, “I could kill these _ferkab_ VIP’s in Paulo City for their _czanworm_ sluggishness. We’ve had their E-source taped for a solid Martian month. It’s right smack under the Eastern Siberian topsoil. I’ve laid down a reserve power-program, but they won’t let me go until they’ve adapted it officially. Right now the date seems as far away as ever.”

“I know,” said Lynne soothingly. “You stick there until the job is done. I’m doing wonderfully well, according to Dr. Smetana. It’s just that I’m getting a little tired of being a freak.”

“And I’m getting fed up with being an engineering genius fifty million miles away while a lot of politicians check endless brain-team coordinates to make sure E-power on Earth won’t upset their wretched little _ferkab_ arrangements. Also, _vinral_, I miss you _farbly_.”

“Doubled in diamonds,” said Lynne warmly. Before she could add further words of affection her transmission time expired and she was cut off from her husband for another Earth-week.

The fact that Lynne Marcein was pregnant was no small thing on the Red Planet. From the very first, when pioneering space ranging humanity sought to colonize Mars, the combination of rarefied atmosphere and light gravity had rendered child-bearing impossible. Since the rigors of settling a planet alien to humanity demanded the highest-level young minds and bodies, the genetic solution had originally been through induced identical twins and a better solution had not been found.

From birth one twin was conditioned and trained for life on the Red Planet, while the other was trained for life on Earth. Thus, Earth was not stripped of its most gifted and adventurous young men and women, and Mars was equally favored. Both Rolf and Lynne were the products of such training.

But Lynne was especially remarkable. She had not only been one of a pair of identical twins of opposite sexes--she had been trained for life on Earth, while her brother, Revere, had been the Mars-bred one. And yet, here she was, a Martian in the fullest sense.

“Once a freak, always a freak,” she told herself wryly, as she left the Earth-Mars communications chamber and walked slowly across the courtyard of Nampura Depot Center. Her objective was the residence wing where both she, and Rolf--and the Willises--had their apartments.

Rough lichen-shrubs, a triumph of creative botany, bordered a smooth pathway that had a short while previously been as bare of foliage as the aluminum, cold-resistant coverall that housed both Lynne and the unborn life within her. She halted for a moment to look upward at the incredible blaze of the night heavens in the black-velvet sky, noting the brilliant passage of Deimos, one of Mars’ two small moons, as it slowly blacked out of the three-starred belt of Orion.

Since she had become partially inured to the rarefied atmosphere that had made breathing difficult on her first landing, and since she hadn’t far to go, she did not bother to use her oxyrespirator. The cold air stung her nostrils like fine sand and caused her to inhale deeply.

She was grateful for the air’s lack of density, since its very sparseness enabled the heavens to blaze without atmospheric hindrance. She would never, being Earth-conditioned, cease wondering at the incredible splendor of the Martian skies.

And yet it seemed to her that the spectacle was infinitesimally less brilliant than it had been during her early months on the Red Planet. She could remember vividly how, abetted by her husband-to-be, she had helped save the telepaths, on whom all Mars depended for lateral planetwide communications. By themselves they would have succumbed to the maddening onslaught of the bodiless, electricity-devouring aborigines who had so nearly driven her twin insane with their insidious mind-destroying suggestions.

She had been virtually shanghaied to Mars by Rolf Marcein and, later, had helped him to discover and harness the E-power sources--those mysterious mineral brains that seemed to exist either on or within every stable planet and atmosphere-bearing satellite. It was E-power that had brought atmospheric moisture to Mars, where virtually no atmosphere existed, and had thereby speeded up the process of making the planet increasingly fertile and habitable.

Yet it was E-power that was holding her husband on faraway Earth, when she longed more than ever before to have him by her side. Not, she thought, that Rolf or any man could help her with the ordeal of giving birth to the second baby born on Mars. And it was the result of E-power that would someday blanket the spectacle of the night skies by giving the Red Planet a new atmosphere.