Chapter 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.