Lynne knew what Revere was thinking, and for a moment, there was shared horror between them. They _knew_ what had happened to the prize cattle of the Red Planet’s only ranch. Lynne said aloud, for the doctor’s benefit, “Joanna Wheatley isn’t crazy, Doctor.” “But what about those cattle?” the physician asked. “Revere will tell you,” Lynne replied. “I’ve got to put an emergency call through to my husband. He’s needed here--at once.” Absently, she cursed the fact of her advanced pregnancy, and the demands it made on her. If she hadn’t been so nearly incapacitated, she would have been able to handle the matter herself. How and where, she wondered, had the grotesque, bodiless aborigines of Mars--life forms that fed on electricity--managed to get enough of it to obtain strength for possession even of bovine brains? Rolf would have to come back at once, to deal with this new outbreak of a problem long considered under control. Lynne put through her call, and obtained Mars Central on New Samarkand. Fortunately, she was able to cut through red tape and obtain the chief supervisor without delay. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Marcein,” he said, in reply to her request for an immediate Earth-call to her husband. “Solar disturbances have temporarily blocked interplanetary communications.” Lynne hung up, feeling almost physically ill. All the terrors of Nightmare Tower, where she had battled the vicious aborigines alone in the darkness, returned to plague her. Then she rallied and remembered that a deadly threat that had been conquered before could be conquered again. She was going to have to go it alone. Inside her, the baby kicked feebly. 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.