UNDER THE SKIN

By LESLIE PERRI

Illustrated by ENGLE

The road to Ul was paved with danger, difficulty, and good intentions—and it's an open question which of the three was most disastrous!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Infinity Science Fiction, June 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I ran a story the other day about the arrival on Earth of a Martian diplomat and his wife. And I okayed a picture of the lady presiding over a tea at the Martian embassy. I looked at the picture for quite a while. The lady in her costume, fresh from the Couture Syndicate in Rio, was a carbon copy of every other woman. What was different about her was no longer very different. It was sad, and it was frightening, too.

It took me back to the days when Deborah and I were pioneering in the gloomy bureau Universal News had set up in Marsport. I remember the biggest story we ever covered; it was the only one we never wrote. And I've been waiting for a time when I could break it because sooner or later you can take the lid off anything. It illustrates a point I try to make when I can.

In the early days we were frequently involved in Martian difficulties. It was partly through genuine concern for their welfare; we liked the Martians without question. But it was also, curiously, motivated by an almost adolescent eagerness to demonstrate efficiency and speed and worth to a people who remained friendly and grateful but aloof and paternally amused by our energies.

This story started as suddenly and simply as most disasters usually strike on Mars, or anywhere. A news flash was relayed in from an interior hill community, Faleeng, to our Marsport office. The news flash to Universal News came almost simultaneously with the official SOS.

Disaster had struck a small community of Martians in the Ul Mountains—a mining region, remote and inaccessible to the Martian land machines. Power failure threatened the colony of 2,000 with extinction. Intense cold was slowly, inexorably moving in from the cheerless sandstone hills from which Ul had been carved.

It was top news as it stood, but there was an additional detail that made it a real 72-point type 

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