Snowstorm on Mars

About Snowstorm on Mars

"Snowstorm on Mars" by Jr. Sam Merwin is a science fiction novella written in the mid-20th century. Set on a colonized, slowly terraformed Mars, it follows a telepathic woman nearing childbirth while a new crisis erupts: alien, disembodied Martian entities begin possessing range cattle, threatening the planet’s vital food program. Lynne Fenlay Marcein, the only visibly pregnant woman on Mars, steadies her condition with telepathy-and-yoga techniques pioneered by her friend Rana Willis, whose infant was the first Mars-born child. While her engineer husband Rolf is stuck on Earth, reports from Woomera and Patagonia Stations reveal bizarre cattle behavior; recordings expose that ancient electrophagic “zombies,” strengthened by positive charges released during E-power weather-making, are riding bovine minds. Lynne narrowly averts a deadly stampede by triggering the herd leader’s panic via telepathic contact with its animal brain, then attempts mass hypnosis with a tri-di lure and a TP team, but the cattle won’t fix their gaze and the effort fails. Exhausted, she goes into labor; veterinary chief Martin Juarez delivers a healthy son, confirming Mars’s denser new atmosphere can now support normal human births. Rolf arrives, conjures a snowstorm to force the herd to orient so they must face the projector, and the telepaths successfully hypnotize the cattle, walling off their minds and breaking the zombies’ control.

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