Chapter V

To her considerable surprise in view of her emotionally upset condition, Lynne slept like the proverbial top. It took the combined efforts of Joanna and the stewardess to get her awake and up and dressed in time for the landing outside of New Samarkand. After a momentary breathless hovering pause the big ship set itself down so gently there was a hardly perceptible jar as it touched ground.

Feeling cumbrous in cold-resistant parkaed coverall and curiously alone despite the cluster of passengers that waited with her in the airlock foyer, Lynne looked about her for Rolf Marcein. She felt a certain residue of guilt for her treatment of him during their last session, despite the justification of her anger. Here, on the threshold of an alien planet--_his_ planet--she needed him.

He might have betrayed her and her brother, kidnapped her, all but seduced her--yet he was the sole human being she knew here. Her eyes sought him desperately, finally saw him working his way through the waiting passengers toward her.

He thrust an oddly-shaped little packet toward her, said, "Here--fasten it on. It's an oxyrespirator--you'll need it. Use it whenever you feel faint."

His manner was gravely polite and his thoughts were carefully masked. He hadn't, she decided, forgiven her for that _armlounge admiral_ insult of the night before. She sent her apologies mentally, received only a curt acknowledgement. She began to feel miserable.

Then, abruptly, the port was opened. With his arm steadying her Lynne stepped out onto the escaramp platform, a couple of hundred meters above the flat blast-scarred surface of the field. A thin chill wind cut her face, a wind from out of a sky darker than that of Earth.

Her first reaction was of gauntness, of barrenness beyond anything she had known on her home planet. The grounds around the Sahara brain-center in which she had served her apprenticeship had been lush with tropical growths--and even the desert around them had been warm. But the vast reddish expanse of the spaceport looked cold and uninviting--even the row of oddly-shaped metal buildings at its edge had a shabby eroded untended appearance.

Her second reaction, as she rode the ramp down was of breathlessness. The icy air stung the insides of her nostrils, as it did her face, but failed to fill her lungs. Panic swept over her and she clutched at her breast. Then Rolf's arms were around her from behind, his long strong fingers were adjusting the oxyrespirator.

Lynne breathed deeply and felt a sudden surge of exhilaration. No wonder, she thought irrelevantly, the Martians were more volatile than Earthfolk. They must be constantly high on oxygen. She suppressed an impulse to giggle as she reached the bottom of the moving ramp.

Her third reaction, as she took her first step on Mars, was of weightlessness. Not the unhealthy weightlessness of the space-ship but a buoyancy comparable to that of swimming in the Great Salt Lake or the Dead Sea. Lynne sat rigidly on an urge to discover how high and far she could jump, even encumbered by the aluminum coverall. She realised her hair was blowing in the wind, pulled the parka over it.

"You'll do." Rolf looked her over disinterestedly, added, "Unless you still want to go back to Earth."

It must have been the oxygen that made her reply, "What for? Now that I'm here I might as well give it a run." Irresponsible or not, it was worth it to see the softness that came into his dark eyes.

He took her arm and said gruffly, "Come on. We've got things to do. I'm turning you over to Tony Willis. He'll brief you. He promised to be here.... There he is, by the Administration Building."

There was no doubt about the warmth of Tony Willis' greeting--outwardly or telepathically. He gave Rolf a bearhug, then turned quickly to Lynne, pumped her right hand, said, "_Crehut_, I'm glad you got here! But Rolf didn't warn us he was bringing a tearing beauty."

"Tearing mad most of the way," she said, unable to remain unresponsive to Willis' warmth. He was a tubby bespectacled young man with an irresistible grin. From him she felt no probe of her thoughts, knew sudden overwhelming relief. Despite Rolf's assurance that there were fewer than a hundred telepaths on Mars, subconsciously she had been expecting to land on a planet where her innermost thoughts were open to everyone. She was almost pathetically grateful that it was not so.

"Old Rolf must be losing his touch," said Willis, grinning. "He's our ace-in-the-hole when it comes to--personal management. Has a thousand lovely ladies eating right out of his hand."

"Shut up, you _czanworm_!" Rolf's thoughts revealed acute distress and Lynne felt a little glow of triumph.

She said, "Well, one way or another he got me here."

"And do we need you!" Willis led the way toward a pharmabar.

"Thank you, sir." Lynne turned on the charm, enjoying the inner growls of resentment from Rolf. Well, he'd played a game with her, she thought. He had no right to resent her playing a few herself.

_But I wasn't playing for fun!_ The message was sharp and resentful. _I was playing for the safety of my planet._

_You mean one little girl like me can save a great big world like this?_ It must be the oxygen, she decided, that was making her behave so giddily. Or perhaps she couldn't help tormenting him a little--a very little.

"Hey, cut it out!" Tony Willis looked aggrieved. "It's bad enough having one of you telepaths around--but with two of you together anyone else is out in the cold. What do you want for breakfast?"

They apologized and kept their special talents under wraps. Lynne felt a certain disappointment at the prosaic familiarity of the food and drink they were served. She didn't know exactly what she had been expecting but there was no trace of the exotic.

Nor was the aircar in which Willis drove them from the spaceport to New Samarkand any different from similar vehicles on Earth--save that it seemed somewhat battered and in need of a refinish. She and Rolf rode in silence, letting Tony do the talking.

They traveled at about five hundred meters altitude toward a low range of reddish hills, sprinkled here and there with green. The sky was cloudless, the ground beneath them innocent of roads, of cultivation, of homes. For the first time Lynne began to appreciate the immensity of the task these emigrées from Earth had undertaken, the rehabilitation of a near-dead planet.

And then, when they crested the hill, there were rectangular patches of vegetation on its lee side. But she gave this man-made miracle only the briefest of glances--for beyond lay the vast bank of the canal, stretching as far as the eye could see, in a straight line from horizon to horizon. And beyond the canal lay the city.

Here, on the far bank of the incredible dry ditch, men had built well. Plastic half-domes and metallic towers, spare and functional, rose from the newly-buttressed escarpment for a good two kilometres. Beneath the buildings, on the bank itself, were broad terraces upon which passenger and freight-craft and landing engines made a busy and familiar pattern, kaleidoscopic with movement.

And behind the man-made city, its incredible soaring half-ruined spires and obelisks cutting a jagged rampart across half the sky, lay the once-vast Martian metropolis. Crystaline minarets, revealing materials and a beauty of design unknown as yet to Earthmen, reflected the rays of the distant sun in prismatic showers of color, coruscating, almost blinding, yet so weird and beautiful that they brought tears to Lynne's eyes.

_I'm glad you can capture their beauty._ Rolf's thought shared the excitement of her own. _So many of us see nothing but ruin._

"Quite a sight, isn't it?" said Tony Willis complacently. "We get a _farbish_ howl from the archeological boys whenever we have to clear any of it away."

"It seems a shame," said Lynne with feeling.

Willis shrugged. "Can't be helped. We haven't the time or resources to build from scratch in the sand. Besides, there's oceans of ruins left for them to poke around in."

He brought them in with practised skill to a landing on one of the terraces, where Rolf was quickly gobbled up by a waiting group of men and women. Before they led him off he said to Lynne, "I'm sorry if I've seemed unfair, Lynne. But I think you'll understand in time. This is a frontier world and we can't always take time out to observe the niceties."

Some inner emotion she refused to recognize caused her to ask, "When will I see you again, Rolf? You aren't leaving me...."

"Tony can take care of you as well as I," he informed her. "I'd like to get you started myself but I'm way behind in my work. I'll be paying you a visit at the post--perhaps sooner than you expect."

"I see." She felt frozen. Now that he had her here he was discarding her like an old clout. She recalled what Tony Willis had said at the spaceport about his having a thousand women eating out of his hand, how eagerly Joanna had expressed a desire to meet him the night before. She was glad there had been no opportunity to perform that introduction. Why make it a thousand-and-two?

As he walked slowly away, with the reception committee dancing attendance about him, she received a faintly mocking thought projection from him, became aware that he was enjoying her jealousy. She felt her face flame again, said, "_Ferkab!_"--all but stamped her foot.

"What was that?" Tony Willis asked politely.

"Nothing--my clout slipped," she replied, embarrassed.

Lynne was taken to a gaunt office whose chief piece of furniture was an immense Martian globe, upon which all the chief Martian cities, all the human settlements, all the communications posts were marked. She began to understand, from looking at it, how very different conditions upon the red planet were from the Earth norm.

The home planet, heavily over-populated, was skilfully disguised to appear roomy. Virtually every inch of its land surface was devoted to giving crowded humanity the illusion of privacy. Aloneness was one of its most prized cultural assets.

On Mars, with its scant million humans and solitude ever-present, all cultural efforts were bent the other way--to create the illusion of a large number of people that did not exist. Instead of seeking privacy the inhabitants gratefully crowded close together in their small communities, seeking strength through numbers.

"We're making progress--tremendous progress," Tony told her seriously, tapping a point on the globe. "The more ground we get under cultivation the more atmosphere we reclaim through the plant-breathing process. What we actually need is a few hundred million more people--but the planet will barely support those we have. It's a slow and laborious process."

"Operation bootstrap," said Lynne, wondering how she could even briefly have found this dedicated young man ridiculous.

"Exactly," he told her. "I take it Rolf has briefed you a little about your job here."

"A little," she said. "I'm to relieve my brother--right?"

"Right." He nodded. "We can short-cut your training because you are his twin. Ordinarily we take a couple of weeks fitting each communications worker to his or her post--finding in just which their telepathic sensitivity will work the best. But since, in a way, we _know_ about you through Revere, we can save time."

"Revere," she said, "what about him? Is he very sick?"

Tony Willis shrugged. "It's periodic," he told her. "This whole business is so new and so sudden it hit most of them without warning. Since you know the score you ought to be able to fight it."

"But mightn't I have my brother's weaknesses?" Lynne asked.

"We're hoping not," was the reply. "In most cases women resist better than men. The suggestions these creatures make are so _swackably_ lewd they clash with the feminine propriety-barrier."

"While men, being Casanovas, give in," she said, thinking again of Rolf and his thousand-and-two women.

"Something like that," he replied, went on to tell her how telepathic messages were keyed and directed and addressed to reach the proper destinations. "You'll be here"--tapping a spot on the globe, a third of a world away from New Samarkand--"at Barkutburg, within mentarange of Zuleika, New Walla Walla and Cathayville. So here will be the code-keys for you to remember...."

The final briefing took sixteen hours. If Lynne, through her years of coaching for and year of work on the integration-team, had not been trained to complete concentration over long periods, she would never have been able to absorb all the new knowledge Tony Willis and other communications experts pumped into her.

At the end of that time he looked at her with red-rimmed but admiring eyes, shook his head and said, "My hat is off to you, Lynne. You're the quickest study I've ever met."

"Thanks--most of it's a matter of training," she replied modestly. She was glad he was not telepathic or he would have read the bright glow of far-from-modest pride that ran through her. _Wait till Rolf hears about it_, she thought. _Maybe he won't think I'm such a_ marlet _after all._ With this went added pride in that she was obviously less exhausted than her mentor.

When it was over she was fed real meat for the fourth or fifth time in her life--ham from lean Martian-bred hog, basted in some curious alien sauce. With it went real potatoes and non-processed vegetables, raised on the red planet. Rugged or not, Lynne decided as she was bundled into a planetcar, life on Mars had its compensations.

When the ship landed at Barkutburg a tearose-pale Martian dawn was lighting the dark eastern sky. Lynne felt a tingle of anticipation, mixed with dread, a stir of _déja vu_--the I've-been-here-before feeling--as she alighted with her strangely light bag in hand and paused to sip sparingly of her oxyrespirator.

For here was her nightmare city, though seen from the ground. Here were the widely-spaced transparent towers, similar to yet oddly unlike those of New Samarkand. Here were the scant human dwellings, clustered like alien mushroom growths amid the towering demi-ruins.

Two aluminum-coveralled figures were awaiting her at the rim of the airport. One was tiny, feminine, despite the bulk of her costume, her exotically delicate Eurasian features roughened by wind and sunburn. She was Lao Mei-O'Connell, qualified and elected leader of the pioneer settlement. The other was--Revere Fenlay.

It was add to see oneself mirrored in the features of another human for the first time in one's life, Lynne decided. She noted her brother looked unexpectedly healthy, that his handclasp was firm, his eyes probably clearer than her own sleep-puffed ones.

His thought was warningly clear. _Don't be fooled by externals, Lynne. These creatures can move in on me every time I open up my mind to receive a message. They're murder!_ Aloud he said, "Lord, I had no idea my counterpart was a beauty."

Quite naturally she linked arms with Revere as they walked toward the cluster of Earth-dwellings. It was, she thought, a rare event for twins, separated by the gulf between planets, ever to meet after incubation--except of course on such rarified levels as those trod by Rolf Marcein and his brother. She sensed a discomfort, a reserve, behind the routine welcome of Lao Mei-O'Connell, decided swiftly there was some sort of guilt feeling there.

As swiftly her twin replied telepathically, _Of course she has feelings of guilt. Thanks to her I was given the coldwrap treatments--even when I was not under Their control. There was no need for them and they made me feel my head would burst. Thank_ farb _you're here!_

_When did you receive these treatments?_ she thought sharply. And the answering thought confirmed her sudden suspicion. Revere had been placed in coldwrap restraint each time a headache had assailed her on Earth. He had been deliberately tortured as part of the campaign to get her to come to Mars and replace him.

_That Rolf--that_ marlet! Fury assailed her, fury and frustration. But Revere's grip tightened on her forearm.

_I don't mind--now_, he informed her. _We need you here._

It was pathetic but she managed to still the thought aborning. With Revere, as never before in her life, she felt as if she belonged to someone, as if someone belonged to her. But she had not been with him an hour when he said good-bye. He was returning to New Samarkand on the planet-ship for treatment, perhaps ultimately to Earth to replace her.

"Don't worry," he told her. "You'll do great, Lynne. Wring their _farbish_ invisible necks."

She checked the thrill of panic that caused her, managed _a Look up Ray Cornell when you hit Earth. And ruin Janet just for me._

_Don't be too rough on Rolf_ was his farewell thought. _You'll understand him better--later on._

She watched the takeoff, walked back with Lao Mei-O'Connell in silence. And, twenty minutes later, she stepped off the uplift platform and found herself alone in the patched tower-room of her nightmare.