The Planet with No Nightmare Part 1

The Planet with No Nightmare.

by Jim Harmon.

The creatures on the little planet were real bafflers. The first puzzler about them was that they died so easily. The second was that they didn't die at all.

I

Tension eased away as the s.p.a.ceship settled down on its metallic haunches and they savored a safe planetfall.

Ekstrohm fingered loose the cinches of his deceleration couch. He sighed. An exploration camp would mean things would be simpler for him.

He could hide his problem from the others more easily. Trying to keep secret what he did alone at night was very difficult under the close conditions on board a ship in s.p.a.ce.

Ryan hefted his bulk up and supported it on one elbow. He rubbed his eyes sleepily with one huge paw. "Ekstrohm, Nogol, you guys okay?"

"Nothing wrong with me that couldn't be cured," Nogol said. He didn't say what would cure him; he had been explaining all during the trip what he needed to make him feel like himself. His small black eyes darted inside the olive oval of his face.

"Ekstrohm?" Ryan insisted.

"Okay."

"Well, let's take a ground-level look at the country around here."

The facsiport rolled open on the landscape. A range of bluffs hugged the horizon, the color of decaying moss. Above them, the sky was the black of s.p.a.ce, or the almost equal black of the winter sky above Minneapolis, seen against neon-lit snow. That cold, empty sky was full of fire and light. It seemed almost a magnification of the Galaxy itself, of the Milky Way, blown up by some master photographer.

This fiery swath was actually only a belt of minor planets, almost like the asteroid belt in the original Solar System. These planets were much bigger, nearly all capable of holding an atmosphere. But to the infuriation of scientists, for no known reason not all of them did. This would be the fifth mapping expedition to the planetoids of Yancy-6 in three generations. They lay months away from the nearest Earth star by jump drive, and no one knew what they were good for, although it was felt that they would probably be good for something if it could only be discovered--much like the continent of Antarctica in ancient history.

"How can a planet with so many neighbors be so lonely?" Ryan asked. He was the captain, so he could ask questions like that.

"Some can be lonely in a crowd," Nogol said elaborately.

"What will we need outside, Ryan?" Ekstrohm asked.

"No helmets," the captain answered. "We can breathe out there, all right. It just won't be easy. This old world lost all of its helium and trace gases long ago. Nitrogen and oxygen are about it."

"Ryan, look over there," Nogol said. "Animals. Ringing the ship. Think they're intelligent, maybe hostile?"

"I think they're dead," Ekstrohm interjected quietly. "I get no readings from them at all. Sonic, electronic, galvanic--all blank. According to these needles, they're stone dead."

"Ekstrohm, you and I will have a look," Ryan said. "You hold down the fort, Nogol. Take it easy."

"Easy," Nogol confirmed. "I heard a story once about a rookie who got excited when the captain stepped outside and he couldn't get an encephalographic reading on him. Me, I know the mind of an officer works in a strange and unfathomable manner."

"I'm not worried about you mis-reading the dials, Nogol, just about a lug like you reading them at all. Remember, when the little hand is straight up that's negative. Positive results start when it goes towards the hand you use to make your mark."

"But I'm ambidextrous."

Ryan told him what he could do then.

Ekstrohm smiled, and followed the captain through the airlock with only a glance at the lapel gauge on his coverall. The strong negative field his suit set up would help to repel bacteria and insects.

Actually, the types of infection that could attack a warm-blooded mammal were not infinite, and over the course of the last few hundred years adequate defenses had been found for all basic categories. He wasn't likely to come down with hot chills and puzzling striped fever.

They ignored the ladder down to the planet surface and, with only a glance at the seismological gauge to judge surface resistance, dropped to the ground.

It was day, but in the thin atmosphere contrasts were sharp between light and shadow. They walked from midnight to noon, noon to midnight, and came to the beast sprawled on its side.

Ekstrohm nudged it with a boot. "Hey, this is pretty close to a wart-hog."

"Uh-huh," Ryan admitted. "One of the best matches I've ever found. Well, it has to happen. Statistical average and all. Still, it sometimes gives you a creepy feeling to find a rabbit or a snapping turtle on some strange world. It makes you wonder if this exploration business isn't all some big joke, and somebody has been _everywhere_ before you even started."

The surveyor looked sidewise at the captain. The big man seldom gave out with such thoughts. Ekstrohm cleared his throat. "What shall we do with this one? Dissect it?"

Ryan nudged it with his toe, following Ekstrohm's example. "I don't know, Stormy. It sure as h.e.l.l doesn't look like any dominant intelligent species to me. No hands, for one thing. Of course, that's not definite proof."

"No, it isn't," Ekstrohm said.

"I think we'd better let it lay until we get a clearer picture of the ecological setup around here. In the meantime, we might be thinking on the problem all these dead beasts represent. What killed them?"

"It looks like we did, when we made blastdown."

"But _what_ about our landing was lethal to the creatures?"

"Radiation?" Ekstrohm suggested. "The planet is very low in radiation from mineral deposits, and the atmosphere seems to shield out most of the solar output. Any little dose of radiation might knock off these critters."

"I don't know about that. Maybe it would work the other way. Maybe because they have had virtually no radioactive exposure and don't have any R's stored up, they could take a _lot_ without harm."

"Then maybe it was the shockwave we set up. Or maybe it's sheer xenophobia. They curl up and die at the sight of something strange and alien--like a s.p.a.ceship."

"Maybe," the captain admitted. "At this stage of the game anything could be possible. But there's one possibility I particularly don't like."

"And that is?"

"Suppose it was _not_ us that killed these aliens. Suppose it is something right on the planet, native to it. I just hope it doesn't work on Earthmen too. These critters went real sudden."

Ekstrohm lay in his bunk and thought, the camp is quiet.

The Earthmen made camp outside the s.p.a.ceship. There was no reason to leave the comfortable quarters inside the ship, except that, faced with a possibility of sleeping on solid ground, they simply had to get out.

The camp was a cl.u.s.ter of aluminum bubbles, ringed with a spy web to alert the Earthmen to the approach of any being.

Each man had a bubble to himself, privacy after the long period of enforced intimacy on board the ship.