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AJAX Creating Web Pages with Asynchronous
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Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Nightmare tower
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Nightmare tower

Author: Sam Merwin

Release date: December 27, 2023 [eBook #72522]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1953

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIGHTMARE

TOWER ***
 nightmare tower

By Jacques Jean Ferrat

Lynne disliked the man from Mars

on sight. Yet drawn by forces
beyond her control she let him
carry her off to the Red Planet.

A new magazine should bring a

new name to science fiction—
and in this very novel and
moving story we believe we are
launching a career that will help
make 1953 memorable.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Fantastic Universe June-July 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Lynne Fenlay had had a few headaches in the course of her twenty-
four years. But she had never had a headache like this.
There had been one as a result of her first field-hockey practice at
the seminar, when she was twelve and the hard rubber ball caught
her squarely above the left eye. There had been another, five years
later, when she had used a guided trip to Manhattan during the
Christmas holidays to experiment with a bottle of crême de menthe
in the unaccustomed solitude of a hotel room. There had been a
third as the result of overwork, while she was adjusting to her job
with the group-machine.
Each of them had been the result of an easily discovered cause.
This headache had come out of nowhere, for no perceptible reason.
It showed no signs of going away. Lynne had visited a health-check
booth as soon as she could find the time after the discomfort
became noticeable. The stamped response on the card had been as
disconcerting as it was vague—Psychosomatic.
Lynne looked across the neoplast tabletop at Ray Cornell and
wondered with mild malevolence if her fiancé could be responsible
for her discomfort. His spoonful of Helthplankton halfway to his
mouth, Ray was smiling at something Janet Downes had said. In her
self-absorption Lynne had not heard Janet's remark. Knowing Janet
as she did, however, she was certain it had undertones of sex.
With his fair height and breadth of shoulder, his tanned good-looking
features beneath short-cropped light hair, Ray wore all the outward
trademarks of a twelfth-century Viking chief or a twentieth-century
football hero. But inside, Lynne thought, he was a Mickey Mouse. His
very gentleness, his willingness to adjust, made him easily led.
Lynne forced herself to down another spoonful of Helthplankton and
thought it tasted exactly like what it was—an artificial compound
composed of sea-creatures, doctored up to taste like cereal.
Mother Weedon looked down at her from the head of the table and
said, "What's the matter, Lynne—don't you feel well?"
"I'm all right, Mother Weedon," she said. She felt a pang of fear that
stirred the discomfort between her temples. If she were really sick,
mentally or physically, Mother Weedon might recommend that she
be dropped from the team. After therapy she would be reassigned to
some other group—and the thought was insupportable.
"Don't worry about our Lynne." Janet's tone bore a basis of mockery.
"She has the stamina of a Messalina."
Damn Janet! Lynne regarded the other third of the team with
resentment. Trust her to bring a name like Messalina into it. Even
Ray caught the implied meaning and blushed beneath his tan.
Mother Weedon looked at Lynne suspiciously.
"Better take things a bit easier," Mother Weedon suggested
tolerantly. "After all, the team comes first."
"I know," Lynne said listlessly. She pushed her food away from her
and waited sullenly while the others finished theirs. Unable to face
the possibility of mental illness, she concentrated on Janet,
wondered what the girl was trying to do.
There was always danger of conflict, she supposed, when two young
women and a young man were set up as a team. Usually the
members were balanced the other way or were all of one sex. But
mentally at any rate Lynne and Janet meshed perfectly with Ray. So
they had been assigned to live and work together on the group-
machine under Mother Weedon's watchful eye. They had been
together now for eleven months.
The trouble with Janet, Lynne thought, was that she wasn't the sort
of girl who registered on men at first sight. She was tall, her lack of
curves concealed by astute willowiness of movement, her half-
homely face given second-glance allure by a deliberately and
suggestively functional use of lips and eyes. Janet was competitively
sexy.
Lynne, who was as casually aware of her own blond loveliness as
any well-conditioned and comely young woman, had not considered
Janet seriously as a rival when she had fallen in love with Ray
Cornell. Now, rubbed almost raw by the discomfort of her headache,
Lynne decided she had underrated Janet. She was either going to
have to get Ray back in line or turn him over to the other third of their
team. Either way promised complications for the future....
The three of them walked the thousand meters to the brain-station,
avoiding the moving sidewalk strips that would have sped them there
in three minutes instead of fifteen. Lynne, who usually enjoyed the
stroll through the carefully landscaped urban scenery, found herself
resenting its familiarity. Besides, her head still ached.
As they moved past the bazaar-block, halfway to their destination,
Lynne found herself wincing at the brightness of the window-
displays. Usually she found the fluorescent tri-di shows stimulating—
but not today. Nor was her mood helped when Janet, nodding toward
the plasti-fur coats in one of them said, "I wish I'd lived a century
ago, when a girl really had to work to win herself a mink coat."
And Ray replied with a smile she could only interpret as a leer,
"You'd have been a right busy little mink yourself, Jan."
Janet gurgled and hugged his other arm and Lynne barely repressed
an anti-social impulse to snap, "Shut up!" at both of them.
Lynne wondered what was wrong with her. Surely by this time she
ought to be used to Janet's continuous and generally good-humored
use of the sex challenge on any male in the vicinity. It hadn't
bothered her much until the headache began two days ago. Nor had
Ray's good-nature seemed such a weakness. Hitherto she had
found it sweet.
On impulse she said, "You two go ahead. I'm going to have a
colafizz. Maybe it will knock some of the beast out of me."
"You could stand having a little more of it knocked into you, darling,"
said Janet. This time Ray said nothing.
Lynne entered a pharmabar and pressed the proper buttons, sipped
the stinging-sweet retort-shaped plastitumbler slowly. The mild
stimulant relaxed her a little, caused the ache in her head to subside
to a dull discomfort. She felt almost human as she took one of the
moving strips the rest of the way so as not to be late to work.
Their studioff was situated halfway up the massive four-hundred
meter tower of the brain-station. It was shaped like a cylinder cut in
half vertically and contained a semicircular table with banks of
buttons in front of each seat-niche. The walls were luminous in
whatever color or series of colors was keyed to the problem faced by
the team. At the moment it was blank, a sort of alabaster-ivory in
tone.
Ray and Janet were already in their places. Their conversation
ceased abruptly as Lynne entered and slid into her lounger and
slipped on the collar that keyed her to the machine. She wondered
what Janet had been saying about her, what Ray had been replying.
I'm turning into a paranoiac, she thought, managed a smile of sorts
and said aloud, "What's today's problem?"
"Feel better, honey?" Ray asked her. Lynne nodded.
Janet, obviously uninterested, said, "Disposal of waste-foods so as
to be useful to highway construction in Assam—without disruption of
traffic-loads in Patagonia."
"Another of those!" said Lynne with a sigh. But she got to work
almost automatically, keying her impulses to fit those of Ray and
Janet. For the time being personal and emotional problems were laid
aside. They were a single unit—a machine that was part of the
greater machine—that was in turn part of the administration of Earth.
For this work they had been trained and conditioned all their lives.

Early in the century—some fifty years back—when the cybernetic

machine had been regulated to their proper functions of recording
and assemblage only, of non-mathematical factors, the use of
human teams, working as supplements to the machines themselves,
had been conceived and formulated by the Earth Government.
No machine, however complex and accurate, could reflect truly the
human factors in a problem of social import. For such functions it
possessed the fatal weakness of being non-human. Hence the
integration of people and atomo-electrical brains. Thanks to their
collars the human factors received the replies of the machine-brains
through mental impulses instead of on plasti-tape.
By means of the buttons before them they could key their questions
to the portion of the machine desired. For specific requests and
interkeying with one another they used, respectively, a small throat
microphone attached to their collars and direct oral communication.
Janet was the analyst of the team—it was a detail job, a memory job,
one which usually went to a woman. And she was good. She culled
from the messages given her by the machine those which bore most
directly upon the problem.
Assam—vegetarian culture—grain husks unused for plastics
because of blight-weakness following second A-war—could serve as
fifth-depth foundation for second-run non-moving byways....
Patagonia first-line producer of non-weakened grain husks—
transportation limited by seasonal deep-frost—atomic heat
considered uneconomical for this problem—transportation limited to
third-class surface vehicles—
Ray checked the stream of information selected by Janet. Seek
possibility of using synthetic mesh on temporary laydown basis....
Ray was team coordinator, who assembled the facts selected by
Janet, put them in shape toward solution of the problem.
Then it was Lynne's turn. In a way, save that all three of them were
vital to team-success, she was top-dog. It was up to her to listen to
Janet's stream of information, to follow Ray's assembly job, to say,
"This will work," or, "This will not work," or perhaps, "This will work if
we do such-and-such, rather than thus-and-so."
There weren't many who could fill this job of synthesizer without too-
wide variance from the judgments of the machine itself.
Consequently there weren't very many teams actually at work—
perhaps a score, give or take a few, at any one time. Such
synthesization demanded a quality almost akin to intuition—but
intuition disciplined and controlled to give results as often as needed.
She concentrated now, though her head was troubling her again,
keying her whole being to Janet, then to Ray. And to her horror she
began to get a picture—not of the problem of using waste matter to
abet highway construction in Assam without disrupting the climate-
limited transportation of Patagonia, but of the thoughts and feelings
of Janet Downes.
It was frightening to realize that she was reading everything Janet
kept carefully concealed behind the sardonic mask of her
personality. It was disturbing to discover how much she herself was
resented and hated and feared by Janet. It was horrifying to learn
how hungry was Janet, how she thirsted to smash Lynne's
attachment to Ray, how she planned to use the problem of the
headache to discredit Lynne, not only with Mother Weedon and the
Mind-Authority but with Ray himself.
I must be going crazy, Lynne thought and became sickeningly aware
that she had missed a query from Ray. She turned her attention
toward him, found herself enmeshed in a confused jumble of
thoughts in which Janet figured with shocking carnality, while she
herself was fully clothed and placed on a pedestal resembling a
huge and grotesquely ugly frog. Why, she thought, Ray fears me—
almost hates me!
Once again she had lost the thread. Desperately she strove to catch
up, found herself issuing an answer. Suggest employment of sea-
transport to solve problem.
Where had that one come from? Lynne wondered. The ocean lanes
had not been used for two-thirds of a century, save for fishing and
excursions. But hundreds of the old double-hulled cataliners of the
pre-atomic air-age were still in their huge cocoon-capsules in various
nautical undertakers' parlors.
She watched the large indicator breathlessly, wondering what the
machine would answer. Almost certainly a 1.3 variation—which
would mean the problem would be shunted to another team. An 0.2
variation was considered normal. Lynne's decisions, over the eleven
months of her assignment, had averaged 0.13. Her best mark had
been an 0.08.
She caught a flash of Janet's thoughts ... lucky SSG so-and-so! She
wasn't even paying attention! Rigorously Lynne forced herself to
concentrate on the large indicator. It flashed a warning blue, then
yellow, then red—and then showed a round single 0!
It was, Lynne thought, impossible. No team had ever, in the entire
history of human-cybernetic integration, produced an answer without
a single variance with the machine. The best on record was an 0.056
by Yunakazi in East-Asia Center. And he had never come close to it
again.
Lynne nodded to the rest of them and unfastened her collar. She felt
a little sick to her stomach. An 0-variant answer was supposed to be
impossible. But she had attained one, and at a time when her mind
had been wandering, thanks not only to her malaise but because of
her shocking telepathic experience. She wondered dully if the two
factors were integrated in her incredible result.
"... like the monkeys with fifty million typewriters composing a
Shakespearean sonnet, probability ultimately favors it," Ray was
saying. "Lynne, let's try another. What's the next problem, Jan?"
"Poor reaction of 11th age-group children in Honduras to gnomics
during the months of July and August," Janet said promptly. "Wanted
—its causes and cure."
Lynne listened in a sort of stupor. When she felt telepathic messages
impinging upon her mind she forced them out. She only half-heard
Janet's smooth assemblage of facts. Ray's coordination and
selection of those most relevant. And then she thought quickly,
Climate change to 42 per-cent lower humidity, expense contained by
use in schools only and segregation of children during crucial
months.
Again the flashes from the indicator—again the zero.
Janet regarded Lynne with odd speculation in her hazel eyes, Ray
looked a little frightened. Lynne said, "I don't know what's going on
but my head is killing me. I'm going home and rest."
"What about our date tonight?" Ray asked quickly—too quickly.
She studied him a long moment. She did love him, she did want to
marry him, she did want to bear his children—or did she? She was
going to have to face the problem squarely and do it soon. She said,
"I guess you'd better give me a rain-check, honey."
She walked out the door with a vivid picture of what Janet was
thinking. Janet was going to do her damnedest to take Ray away
from her that night by the oldest and still the most effective weapon a
woman could use. And if Lynne tried to make trouble about it she
intended to make trouble for Lynne.
As for Ray—he didn't seem to have any thoughts at all. He was a
sort of Thurber male, cowering in his corner while the dominant
females fought over him. The only hitch, Lynne decided, was that
there wasn't going to be any fight. Janet could have him ... in
spades!

She took the moving sidewalk back to Mother Weedon's. For almost
a year the trim white dome with its curved polarized picture windows
and pink Martian vines had represented home and shelter and a
prized individuality after the group-existence of school dormitories.
Now it looked like half an egg of some menacing unearthly bird, half
an egg into which she must crawl and hide, unsure of how long it
would afford her shelter. Even Mother Weedon, a shrewd and kindly
widow of sixty whose strength and good-humor made her the ideal
team-matron, looked alien and oddly menacing.
She caught the older woman's thoughts as she entered the house.
What's happened to Lynne? Always thought that girl was too bottled
up. She should have married Ray six months ago. He's not the sort
of male even a girl as pretty as Lynne can keep on a string
indefinitely—not with a harpy like Janet in the picture....
Mechanically Lynne ran her fingers down the magnezipper of her
blue plastifleece jacket, deposited it carefully against the magnetic
hook on the wall of the entry. She felt a renewed weakness, a
sickness that made her head throb more severely than ever. All the
way back from the brain-station she had been seeking reassurance
in the probability that her sudden telepathic ability was caused by
some stimulation of the machine, would vanish when she broke
contact with it.
Now she knew better—and her panic increased. She almost ran to
the escalator so she wouldn't have to exchange chatter with Mother
Weedon. She literally had to be alone.

II

Lynne stirred uneasily on her plastomat. She knew she was there,
felt sure she was not asleep. Yet the dream persisted, holding her in
a grip that was tighter than reality.
She was alone in a strange crystaline chamber, high, high up in a
strange crystaline tower. Thanks to the fact there was no metal in its
construction, nowhere was there rust. Yet her chamber, like the
tower itself, showed definite signs of age and ruin.
An irregular segment of one wall had been penetrated by a missile of
some sort and patched with plastic spray to keep out the thin, chill,
unending wind. On lower levels, she knew, were larger scars of long-
forgotten destruction. Just above the transparent arched ceiling what
had been an elaborate tracery of gleaming flying buttresses, their
functional purpose long since lost, stood precariously in a pattern of
ruin.
Here and there about her, other surviving towers of the city rose in
more serious stages of decay. And far below, on the windswept
square, huddled the gleaming egg-shaped shelters of the Earthfolk.
Beyond the city area the red desert and green oases stippled off to
the dark horizon or advanced to invade the steep scarp of the far
bank of the great canal.
Lynne was alone in a tower on Mars. Instruments, strange to her
eyes but stamped with the familiar patterns of Earthly design and
manufacture, lined three walls of the chamber. She knew she should
take the downlift and return to the tiny cluster of Earth-dwellings in
the court below, that her tour of duty was ended.
Yet she could not leave. Voices whispered within her head and
tugged at her emotions, voices whose owners she could not see,
whose embodiment lurked ever just beyond the range of her eyes,
no matter how quickly she rolled them. Voices that begged for her
assistance, offering unheard-of pleasures as a reward, unthought-of
torments as punishment for her refusal to cooperate.
They were strange voices, whose message bore the corrupt
cynicism of the very old, coupled with the naïve enjoyments of long
deferred second childhood—alien voices. Or were they alien? Wasn't
it rather that she was the alien, like those other Earthfolk who lived in
the cluster of pathetic little huts below, who strove to reclaim the too-
lean atmosphere of a planet, most of which had long-since escaped
into the star-studded black-velvet backdrop of space.
Yes, it was she who was alien. And with the thought came another, a
human picture, so horrible, so gruesome, that her mind refused to
accept it. Yet she knew it was vitally important she see it clearly. But
the others, the invisibles, kept derailing her concentration with their
whispers of joys unknown before to mortal man or woman, their soft
threats of torments beyond those conceived by Dante himself.
"Let us in," they offered softly, with the mischief of the very old. "Let
us in and we shall romp and travel and find new uses for your
bodies. We shall live side by side within you and lead you to
pleasures no souls contained by bodies can ever know. We shall...."
There was something Lynne should ask them, an answer to their
Saturnalian bribery—but like their visibility it refused to rise to the
upper level of her consciousness. She felt sudden shame at not
being able to speak, fear at her inability to marshal needed thoughts,
fear that grew quickly into terror while the all-important question
struggled vainly to make itself uttered.
Laughing like rollicking imps, the whisperers closed in a hemisphere
about and above her, dancing in weird joyous malicious rhythm and
bottling up reason as effectively as a plastivial. All at once she found
herself holding her head and screaming at them to go away....
Lynne woke up. She discovered herself already sitting erect on the
plastomat, supported by hands that dug into its pneumatic surface.
She looked wildly around her, noted the familiar tri-di picture of
Victoria Falls on the wall, the blank vidarscreen on its stand beside
the magnicloset entry, the picwindow with its familiar vista of morning
sunlight and greenery outside Mother Weedon's.
Only then did she become aware that her headache was worse. It
seemed to grow with each successive morning. During the day it
lapsed at times to mere vague discomfort, and with the aid of a
couple of syntholaud pills she was able to sleep. But when she
awoke each following morning it seemed a trifle worse.
She stepped into the bathostall, which performed all functions of
cleansing and elimination simultaneously, felt briefly better and got
into sandals, clout and bolero, polarizing them to a gaudy scarlet,
which clashed with her fair coloring but expressed her mood of
defiance, not only at her own ailments but the personal treachery of
Janet and the waverability of Ray Cornell.
Mother Weedon smiled approval of this gay gesture when Lynne
took her place at the breakfast table. "I'm glad you're feeling better,
Lynne," she said. "I've been worried about you lately."
"Really putting it on, aren't you, honey?" Janet asked with a trace of
resentment. She had polarized her own costume to a soft pink,
which was washed out by Lynne's bold color-scheme. Nor could she
change it during the day without revealing her defeat.
"Delicious!" exclaimed Ray, ogling her with delight and pouring
paprisal instead of sucral on his Helthplankton.
Lynne laughed as she hadn't laughed in days. She wondered why
she felt so suddenly light-hearted and happy, especially after her
waking nightmare. Then, suddenly, she realised she was utterly
unaware of what the others were thinking. She was no longer
telepathic. She was normal once more!
However, it required no telepathic powers to sense that Ray was in a
sadly shattered state over whatever had happened between Janet
and himself on their date the night before. Lynne surmised that her
rival had enticed Ray into full courtship, that he was now suffering
from remorse, revulsion and a resurgence of desire for herself.
She wondered why she didn't care, then realised that Janet was no
longer her rival. Ray was a nice boy, a highly trained and talented
boy—but she wasn't in love with him any more. There were, she
thought, probably half a billion unattached males in the world at any
given moment, many of them far more interesting and attractive than
Ray Cornell. All she had to do was look for them....
Headache and nightmare receded further with each mouthful of
breakfast she ate. Her appetite was back and she kidded brightly
with a miserable Ray and a rather sullen and suspicious Janet all the
way to the brain-station. And then things began to happen that
shattered her new-found adjustment.
She was barred from entry to the studioff. The electroscreen
admitted Ray and Janet as usual but remained an invisible wall that
refused her admittance. She was no longer keyed to the group-
machine. Before she could try again a magnovox said, "Please
report to Integration Chief on Floor Eighty. Please report to
Integration Chief on...."
Ray looked scared. Disruption of a team during working hours was
an emotional shock. Even Janet showed traces of fright. But she
managed a grin and said, "Give him the old treatment, Lynne, and
you can't lose." She accompanied the remark with a thoroughly
carnal bump.
Lynne said nothing, being incapable of speech. She turned and
made her way to the mobilramp, had a sudden vivid recollection of
the older but far more efficient lift on the Martian tower in her dream.
She felt sick to her stomach and her headache was thumping again.
She had never been on the eightieth floor before—it was reserved
for guiding geniuses, who had no time for mere group-machine
members except in case of trouble. Lynne wondered what she had
done as she entered a room with walls of soft rolling colors.
The man on the couch, a tall lean saturnine man with dark eyes that
seemed to read right through her from out of a long lined white face,
didn't leave her long in doubt. He said, "Miss Fenlay, I'm afraid I have
bad news for you. As a result of your amazing performance
yesterday your usefulness as a group-machine worker is ended."
"But I was right," she protested. "I had the first zero-variation in
integration history."
"You needn't be so frightened," he said more gently. "I know this
must be a severe emotional shock. You were right—by the machine.
We need human factors in cybernetics to show us where the
machines are wrong, not where they are right. To come up with two
successive zero-variant answers implies some sort of rapport with
the machine itself. We can't afford to take further chances."
Lynne sat down abruptly on an empty couch. She felt empty inside,
said, "What am I to do?"
The tall dark man's smile was a trifle frosty. He said, "We've been
watching you, of course. About all I can tell you, Miss Fenlay, is that
your—er—aberration is not exactly a surprise."
"You mean you've been spying on me?" Even though Lynne was
thoroughly conditioned to accept her life as part of a complex
mechano-social integration, she found the idea of being spied upon
unpleasant.
"Not really," he told her. "And don't worry. We have no intention of
letting your remarkable gifts go to waste." He paused, added, "I hope
your headache is better soon."
"Thank you," she said. She was outside before the full implications of
his parting shot sank home. How had he or anyone known she was
suffering from headache? She had reported it to no one—and the
helth-check booth machine was not geared to give confidential
evidence or to retain personality keys for checking.
It was a puzzle. She worked on it until she was almost back at
Mother Weedon's, then realised the Integration Chief had given her
no hint of a new assignment—had only suggested she was to be
used. She began to wonder if laboratory test-animals suffered from
headaches like the one which seemed to have led to her undoing.
There was no escaping Mother Weedon, who was enjoying a tri-di
vidarcast in full view of the front door as Lynne came in. Well, the girl
thought, she was going to have to be told anyway—if she hadn't
already got the news from the brain-station.
Evidently Mother Weedon had heard. She motioned the girl to sit
beside her on her couch and said, "Don't worry, Lynne. You're going
to be fine. The trouble with you is you've outgrown your job—yes,
and Janet and Ray and me too. You can't help it. You're too good for
us and that's that. They'll be moving you on."
"But I like it here," cried Lynne. "I like you and Jan and Ray and our
work with the group-machine. I don't want it to change."
"But it will—everything changes," said Mother Weedon gently. "I'm
glad you've been happy here. But your happiness has meant Janet's
unhappiness and, more lately, Ray's."
"I—see," Lynne said slowly. She hadn't thought of things in that light
before. But of course it was true. The first real home she had ever
known was about to be taken from her and the experience was too
personal to allow much detached thinking.
Like most genetically-controlled children whose double-birth had
been successful, she had been brought up with functional rather
than sentimental care. Not having known her parents, not having
known her twin brother on Mars, she had never missed them. The
teachers and matrons at the seminary had been carefully selected
for their warmth and competence. There had always been plenty of
playmates, plenty of interesting things to learn.
Living at Mother Weedon's had been a new and emotionally opening
experience, as had the blossoming of her romance with Ray Cornell,
her now-fractured friendship with Janet Downes. It was not going to
be easy to leave, to tear up only recently established roots, to set
down new ones which might in time be as ruthlessly sundered.
She felt frightened and very much alone, as if she were again in the
Martian tower of her nightmare with only alien and disembodied
voices speaking to her. Mars—she wondered a little about it.
Somewhere on Mars was her twin, Revere Fenlay, the brother she
could not remember. She wondered if he too were having troubles.
There were stories floating about of twins whose rapport spanned
lifetimes separated by the distance between the planets. But she
knew nothing of Mars.
She watched a vidarcast with Mother Weedon, an unreal historical
romance of love and adventure in one of the vast sprawling industrial
empires of the mid-twentieth century. There was, for twenty-second-
century folk, a vast emotional appeal in the job-competition, the hard
compulsory physical toil, the dangers of that exciting era. But Lynne
was too wrapped up in her own problem to react as usual.
While she and Mother Weedon were lunching on pineapple soup
and Bermudasteak with shadbacon and lacticola, Ray and Janet
came in. They pretended concern at what had happened to Lynne
and the team but were obviously excited with one another and the
prospect of integrating a new member of the team in Lynne's place.
After the meal Janet and Lynne were briefly alone in the vidaroom.
Janet eyed Lynne covertly and Lynne said, "It's all right, Jan. I'm not
going to put up a fight for Ray. Under the circumstances it's only fair.
I don't know what's going to happen to me and you and him—"
"Damn you, Lynne Fenlay!" Janet's sudden flare of hot emotion was
almost frightening. "You would be like this. Don't you realise that by
being noble you'll leave both of us with a guilt complex we'll never be
able to shake?"
"Sorry," said Lynne sincerely. "I can't help it."
Janet regarded her narrowly, shook her head. "Hasn't anything ever
touched you, Lynne?" she asked. "Haven't you ever wanted Ray or
anyone as I want him? Haven't you ever hated anyone as I'm
beginning to hate you? Haven't you ever been human?"