The white rain came

Do you remember Jacques Jean Ferrat’s NIGHTMARE TOWER ? We’re sure you do if we had the privilege of numbering you among our earliest readers, for the story appeared in the very first issue of FANTASTIC UNIVERSE , and its swift, unusual plot and brilliant characterization were so astonishingly vital as to make it quite unforgettable. Since then demands for a sequel have been so insistent that when Mr. Ferrat walked into our office with this exciting lead novelette in his briefcase our joy was unconfined. There was need on Mars for folly half sublime and a man’s delight in recklessness. But a woman’s steadfast gifts were needed more. Had Lynne Fenlay been less proud, she would have wept, openly and unashamedly. Standing before the altar, directly in back of her twin, Revere Fenlay, and his bride, Lao Mei-O’Connell, she felt acutely homesick for Earth. Intellectually, of course, she understood and accepted the need for multiple marriages on Mars. But she could not evade a sense of emotional outrage at the assembly-line method of marriage which circumstances had made mandatory on the alien planet that was now her home. The marrying officer, who trebled in brass as a circuit judge and an electronics expert on the thinly settled Red Planet, wore only a shabby-looking, round-cornered apron. Although it bore the twin-worlds insignia, emblem of his high office, it was tucked with a careless lack of dignity into the top of his wellworn clout, and everyone could see that one of the tie-strings was missing. A bald-headed little man with an incipient paunch and knobby knees, he intoned the brief ceremony from rote, never glancing either at the book in his right hand, or at the faces of the four couples standing directly in front of him. “...and to be mutually faithful during the period of enforced separation, to work honorably for one another and for the planet upon their reunion, to provide a home for the sons and daughters of their union. For these purposes, by the virtue of the power embodied in my....” He mumbled on, running the words together in his haste to conclude the ceremony which would unite the four couples from far Barkutburg, and enable him to get on with the marriages from New Walla Walla, Cathayville, Zuleika and the other major settlements of Mars. A few kilometers away, a spaceship was waiting to take the