Chapter VI

They rode a two-place tractoscooter together, with Joanna driving the rugged, almost-springless vehicle recklessly out over the expanse of the growing station toward the scene of incipient disaster. Lynne hung onto her perch with both hands, her lips white as they rocketed over grassland that had looked level on the vidarscreen, but proved in reality to be savagely bumpy and uneven.

Joanna, dominated as she was by a desperate concern for the safety of her cattle, did not realize her recklessness until she had braked the vehicle, almost in the midst of the zombie-driven beasts. She plucked a long bullwhip from a boot at her side, and a stunner from the dashboard pocket in front of her. She marched boldly toward the herd, which had ceased all movement and was regarding her with massed, owlish eyes.

Then, suddenly, she stopped and turned to Lynne, a look of utter consternation on her face. “Lynne!” she exclaimed. “What a _ferkab marlet_ I am. I completely forgot about the baby! Are you all right?”

“So far everything’s _purt_,” said Lynne, reassured by her own lack of distress. She was all right, she decided, and felt relief flood through her. “Get on with it, Joanna,” she urged. “I needn’t tell you how important it is.”

Alarm rang like an old-fashioned radar _ping_ in her brain, and she swung about just in time to see a long-haired musk-ox rising from the tall grass in which he had been lying concealed, and advancing on the tractoscooter they had just abandoned.

She experienced a chilling sense of triumphant malice as the shaggy beast reared and brought its forefeet viciously down on the dashboard and steering apparatus of the vehicle. Instantly the scooter was wrecked beyond immediate hope of repair.

Fear became so much a part of Lynne she could feel its copper taste at the base of her tongue.

“Joanna!” she cried, her voice strangely weak. “Look behind you.”

The girl turned, her eyes narrowed in desperate rage. Raising the stunner she felled the zombie-ridden creature with a perfect shot between the eyes, and watched it collapse beside the vehicle it had wrecked.

“That should put you to sleep for a while, you _czanworm_,” she said, furiously.

Lynne had turned again. The massed herd was advancing remorselessly now, spear-headed by an even larger creature. She recognized it as the leader she had seen in the vidar screen in Joanna’s office. There was still blood on its horns, and tumultuously heaving flanks. Lynne could feel the triumphant malice pouring from the zombie in control, and an even greater horror came upon her.

“Joanne,” she called desperately, wondering in an extremity of panic, what had possessed her to expose herself to so great a danger at such a time. She had no doubt at all concerning the deadliness of the danger. And it was increased immeasurably seconds later when the dark girl swung about and fired pointblank at the menacing ovebos. As the echoes of the blast died she hurled her weapon away with a Martian curse.

“Forgot to recharge it,” Joanna said bitterly. Swinging about and whirling the bullwhip about her head, she advanced straight toward the herd, cracking the whip at them, the flicks sounding like a series of rifle-shots.

Some of the cattle shifted uneasily and refused to come forward. Here and there a steer even turned and broke away. But the leader, and those close behind him continued their inexorable advance.

Lynne got a flash of a too-familiar alien thought, and cried aloud, “Careful, Joanna, they’re going to stampede.”

The leader executed an odd, an un-oxlike little shuffle. Then he lowered his bloody horns for the charge.

Lynne Marcein, at that moment of great peril, became telepathically hyper-acute. She received, sifted, analyzed, and identified a series of terrifying mental impressions which came in such quick succession that they seemed dreamlike and unreal. There was Joanna, whatever fear she felt sublimated to outrage at the grotesque derelictions of the animals whose breeding and care was her job. Joanna was going to use her whip until the stupid, insane creatures turned and fled in blind panic.

But the creatures were neither stupid nor insane. At least, the brains and beings that controlled them were not craven. They were as determined as Joanna to destroy her, an obstacle in the path of their appalling urge for such degenerate pleasure as their bovine embodiment would permit. She caught the mass urge to destroy, and instantly thereafter the driving mental force of the leader with his gore-soaked horns.

By concentrating telepathically on the leader, Lynne automatically shut out all other minds from her consciousness. This was a weapon that would have stood all telepaths in good stead when the zombies threatened their sanity with mass possession. For the Martian aborigines, standing alone, lacked the strength to overpower and possess a human TP brain. Their power lay in numbers, not in the individual mind.