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. With the food program safeguarded and the child—Martin Juarez Marcein—thriving, the family returns to Nampura Depot on a hopeful, humorous note. (This is an automatically generated summary.)