She sat on somebody’s lap, securely wedged with the others into a land-runner for the half-kilometer trip to the reception hall. Around her, Rolf and the rest, joined in the rousing, ribald first chorus of The Farmer’s Martian Daughter, making her head ring with a volume of sound which was almost unbearable inside such a confined space. At that moment, she hated them all.

Nor was her dislike merely a matter of personal pique. She had felt the malaise for some time, felt it so gradually, so far below the level of her conscious mind, that she had been unaware of its creeping progress. Like the ping of an antique radar, a subconscious thought from the mind of her twin, Revere Fenlay, registered. He was thinking of his bride, Lao Mei-O’Connell, and his thought ran, I’m glad she’s going to be away from Mars for the next ten months. There’s bound to be trouble and I don’t want her in danger--especially while she’s carrying our child.

Lynne stifled an impulse to probe Revere’s mind with a telepathic inquiry as to the nature of the danger. She decided there would be time for that after Lao Fenlay and the other brides of the season were safely on their way to the home planet. But with awareness of Revere’s awareness, Lynne realized that some of her unhappiness was rooted not in homesickness but in unaccepted telepathic fears of her own--fears whose nature she could not pin down.

She probed Rolf’s mind carelessly and received a wholeheartedly carnal picture of Rolf and herself that caused her to drop that line of inquiry instantly. She was not in the mood for--what did he call it?--such ferkab canoodling. At the moment she hated the man--and not the least of her hatred’s causes lay in the very inevitability of her ultimate surrender to him. The marlet.

Watch your language, you ZWIRCHY VINRAL, came his answering thought. Lynne sealed her mind as tightly as her lips the rest of the way to the reception hall.

Here, beneath a girdered ceiling adorned with the stunted evergreens grown by Earthmen on Mars, a table had been set up for the marriage parties of each city, according to tradition. Accustomed to the fabricated foods of Earth, Lynne was astonished at the lavish display of barbecued boar, Marsapples and other delicacies, including plump forty-pound capon-turkeys, the pride of the husbandry labs.

She told herself she was not hungry. But she ate notwithstanding--while Rolf and the other men went right on drinking. Thanks to the small, closely interrelated population of the Red Planet, there was much intermingling of the groups, and Lynne, to her surprise, found herself facing a grinning, strapping, dark-skinned girl who said, “Welcome, Lynne Fenlay. Try some of the food at our table.”

It was the young animal husbandry girl--Joanna Wheatley--who had shared a cabin with her on the spaceship during the journey from Earth the year before. Joanna seemed to have entered into the festivities with all the vitality of her youth and her uninhibited mixture of Caucasian, Oriental and Hamitic blood strains. But when Lynne asked her how her work was going, Joanna’s face fell.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “We must irrigate to support any sort of animal life, and irrigation is draining the moisture from the atmosphere table faster than we can create it. But you must know the problem, Lynne. It’s the farbish curse of all Mars.”

“I know,” said Lynne, trying to encourage the girl. “But one of these days we’ll have it licked and, if I know farmers, you’ll all be complaining because too much rain is spoiling the crops.”

Joanna failed to smile. She said, “I’d give my right arm for that day to come tomorrow. If we hadn’t been able to install a transmuter to feed a small pond recently, our cattle would be dead. And our farm--Woomera Station--has the most fertile soil on Mars. Right next door, it’s so radioactive we’ve had to fence it off.”

“Radioactive?” said Lynne, wondering why she hadn’t heard of such a deposit.

“Maybe that’s not the exact word,” said Joanna. “Crehut, I’m no geologist--I’m in husbandry. But it has remarkable health-giving qualities--and some deadly ones as well. Still, it’s not solving the moisture problem for us.”

“You really feel it’s serious?” asked Lynne, sensing the deep concern in the girl’s mind, the fright.

“Unless some new factor can be found that will increase moisture, it will defeat us,” said Joanna solemnly. Then, actually shaking herself out of her despondency, the dark girl went on, “But this is not the time for care. My best friend has just married and will soon be off for Earth to have her baby. You come and see our farm as soon as you can, will you, Lynne? I think you’d be interested.”

“I know I shall be,” Lynne said, pressing the girl’s hand. “As soon as I can.”

She joined Joanna in a toast to her friend and groom, then brought the girl to the Barkutburg table to meet Revere, Lao Mei-O’Connell and Rolf.

Rolf leered at Joanna and said, “I’ll be out to see you the first time Lynne’s not looking.”

And Joanna threw back her head and laughed, revealing twin rows of flashing white teeth.

Lynne knew the amorously mocking banter was harmless enough in itself. Rolf worked tirelessly, conscientiously for months on end, and surely he had a right to make love lightly with his eyes. But her Earth indoctrination would not permit her to approve of such uninhibited revelry as was the custom on Mars when the bars were let down. She thought of Rolf’s thousand women subordinates in his post as Communications Coordinator, and wondered how many of them....

Watch yourself, VINRAL, came his mocking thought.

Lynne felt herself blush. She turned away and took a beaker of lichenwasser and downed it quickly. But it didn’t intoxicate her--it merely increased her physical discomfort and spiritual irritation. She said farewell to Revere’s bride, elected leader of the Barkutburg center, and then, when the others took off, roistering, for the spaceport, she stayed behind in the cloakroom. Though it was what she wanted, her wretchedness was not lessened by the fact that apparently no one missed her. Especially Rolf....

She decided to return to Nampura Depot alone, to reassure her ego by being of some practical use to somebody. It was, she thought miserably, beginning to look as if the only real happiness and fulfillment she was ever to achieve lay in her work alone. The growth of her telepathic talent had been responsible for the breakup not only of her engagement to a young man on Earth, but for the loss of her job as coordinating member of one of the highly specialized human brain-teams that, operating in conjunction with electronic computers, solved the more difficult and intricate material and mechanical problems of the mother planet.

It had been her job, as coordinator, to obtain problem solutions that humanized and made realistic the sometimes over-abstruse answers that emanated from the machines, in response to the data fed into them by her human teammates. As her telepathic talent improved, her answers had become too perfect, which meant she had fallen into rapport with the computer rather than the human elements of the team--a psychological maladroitness which had led to her dismissal. It was a desperate need for telepaths on Mars that had brought her to the Red Planet.

Climbing aboard one of the bi-hourly transports for Nampura Depot, Lynne faced the fact that her entire life, up to her transfer to Mars, had been planned and lived with the single aim of enabling her to adjust to the manners and mores of a densely populated, highly civilized, almost effete Earth. On Mars, with its vast open spaces and freewheeling pioneer anarchy and virility, she was a misfit.

As the transport jetted upward through the paper-thin atmosphere, soaring above the miracle medley of towering, lacy, ancient Martian ruins and rough, utilitarian Earthman-built structures alongside the old canal, Lynne wondered unhappily what she was going to do about Rolf.

She adored his every pore, his every muscle, but whether she could long endure the strain of living with him in Martian wedlock was something else again. There was a wild, undisciplined streak in Rolf that violated her ultra-civilized Earth-bred restraint. It could be exciting--marriage to Rolf--but it would be distasteful, too.

Lynne opened her mind to exchange thoughts with him when another, more powerful, more urgent message reached her from the teleteam on duty at Nampura Depot. Its combination of two telepathic minds in unison was overpowering. It said, we’re in touch, we’ve finally found it, we’re about to make contact--

Then came a brain-wrenching flash, and--nothing at all.

II

Something had happened at Nampura Depot and the resultant confusion was frightening. Lynne tried vainly to sort out the welter of disorganized and often completely unintelligible thoughts that radiated from the recently set-up telepathic laboratory of Mars. The team on duty--plump, delicate Rana Spinelli and lanky, awkward Juan Olsen--had been stricken from some mysterious source. Juan was dead, Rana mentally erased by whatever had happened. That much a suddenly depersonalized Lynne Fenlay clearly understood.