The Planet with No Nightmare Part 3

Nogol shrugged his wiry shoulders. "Playing dead is easier than fighting."

"More likely it's a method of fighting," Ryan suggested. "They play dead until they see an opening. Then--_ripppp_."

"I think they're trying to hide some secret," Ekstrohm said.

"What secret?" Ryan demanded.

"I don't know," he answered. "Maybe I'd better--sleep on it."

III

Ryan observed his two crewmen confidently the next morning. "I did some thinking last night."

_Great_, Ekstrohm thought. _For that you should get a Hazardous Duty bonus._

"This business is pretty simple," the captain went on, "these pigs simply play possum. They go into a state of suspended animation, when faced by a strange situation. Xenophobia! I don't see there's much more to it."

"Well, if you don't see that there's more to it, Ryan--" Nogol began complacently.

"Wait a minute," Ekstrohm interjected. "That's a good theory. It may even be the correct one, but where's your _proof_?"

"Look, Stormy, we don't have to have proof. h.e.l.l, we don't even have to have theories. We're explorers. We just make reports of primary evidence and let the scientists back home in the System figure them out."

"I want this thing cleared up, Ryan. Yesterday, you were accusing me of being some kind of psycho who was lousing up the expedition out of pure--pure--" he searched for a term currently in use in mentology--"_demonia_. Maybe the boys back home will think the same thing. I want to be cleared."

"I guess you were cleared last night, Stormy boy," Nogol put in. "We saw one of the 'dead' pigs get up and walk away."

"_That didn't clear me_," Ekstrohm said.

The other two looked like they had caught him cleaning wax out of his ear in public.

"No," Ekstrohm went on. "We still have no proof of what caused the suspended animation of the pigs. Whatever caused it before caused it last night. You thought of accusing me, but you didn't think it through about how I could have disposed of the bodies. Or, after you found out about the pseudo-death, how I might have caused _that_. If I had some drug or something to cause it the first time, I could have a smaller dose, or a slowly dissolving capsule for delayed effect."

The two men stared at him, their eyes beginning to narrow.

"I could have done that. _Or either of you could have done the same thing._"

"Me?" Nogol protested. "Where would my profit be in that?"

"You both have an admitted motive. You hate my guts. I'm 'strange,'

'different,' 'suspicious.' You could be trying to frame me."

"That's insubordination," Ryan grated. "Accusations against a superior officer ..."

"Come off it, Ryan," Nogol sighed. "I never saw a three-man s.p.a.ceship that was run very taut. Besides, he's right."

Beet-juice flowed out of Ryan's swollen face. "So where does that leave us?"

"Looking for _proof_ of the _cause_ of the pig's pseudo-death. Remember, I'll have to make counter-accusations against you two out of self-defense."

"Be reasonable, Stormy," Ryan pleaded. "This might be some deep scientific mystery we could never discover in our lifetime. We might never get off this planet."

That was probably behind his thinking all along, why he had been so quick to find a scapegoat to explain it all away. Explorers didn't _have_ to have all the answers, or even theories. But, if they ever wanted to get anyplace in the Service, they d.a.m.ned well _better_.

"So what?" Ekstrohm asked. "The Service rates us as expendable, doesn't it?"

By Ekstrohm's suggestion, they divided the work.

Nogol killed pigs. All day he did nothing but scare the wart-hogs to death by coming near them.

Ryan ran as faithful a check on the corpses as he could, both by eyeball observation and by radar, video and Pro-Tect circuits. They lacked the equipment to program every corpse for every second, but a representative job could be done.

Finally, Ekstrohm went scouting for Something Else. He didn't know what he expected to find, but he somehow knew he would find _something_.

He rode the traction-scooter (so-called because it had no traction at all--no wheels, no slides, no contact with the ground or air) and he reflected that he was a suspicious character.

All through life, he was going around suspecting everybody and now _everything_ of having some dark secret they were trying to hide.

A simple case of transference, he diagnosed, in long-discredited terminology. He had something to hide--his insomnia. So he thought everybody else had their guilty secret too.

How could there be any deep secret to the pseudo-death on this world? It was no doubt a simple fear reaction, a retreat from a terrifying reality. How could he ever _prove_ that it was more? Or even exactly that?

Internal glandular actions would be too subtle for a team of explorers to establish. They could only go on behavior. What more in the way of behavior could he really hope to establish? The pattern was clear. The pigs keeled over at any unfamiliar sight or sound, and recovered when they thought the coast was clear. That was it. All there was! Why did he stubbornly, stupidly insist there was more to it?

Actually, by his insistence, he was giving weight to the idea of the others that he was strange and suspicious himself. Under the normal, sane conditions of planetfall the phobias and preoccupations of a s.p.a.ce crew, nurtured in the close confines of a scout ship, wouldn't be taken seriously by competent men. But hadn't his subsequent behavior given weight to Ryan's unfounded accusations of irrational sabotage? Wouldn't it seem that he was actually _daring_ the others to prove his guilt? If he went on with unorthodox behavior--

That was when Ekstrohm saw the flying whale.

Tension gripped Ekstrohm tighter than he gripped the handlebars of his scooter. He was only vaguely aware of the pa.s.sing scenery. He knew he should switch on the homing beacon and ride in on automatic, but it seemed like too much of an effort to flick his finger. As the tension rose, the capillaries of his eyes swelled, and things began to white out for him. The rush of landscape became blurred streaks of light and dark, now mostly faceless light.

The flying whale. He had seen it.

Moreover, he had heard it, smelt and felt it. It had released a jet of air with a distinctive sound and odor. It had blown against his skin, ruffled his hair. It had been real.

But the flying whale _couldn't_ have been real. Conditions on this planetoid were impossible for it. He knew planets and their life possibilities. A creature with a skeleton like that could have evolved here, but the atmosphere would never have supported his flesh and hide.

Water bodies were of insufficient size. No, the whale was not native to this world.

Then what, if anything, did this flying alien behemoth have to do with the pseudo-death of the local pig creatures?

I'll never know, Ekstrohm told himself. Never. Ryan and Nogol will never believe me, they will never believe in the flying whale. They're explorers, simple men of action, unimaginative. Of course, I'm an explorer too. But I'm different, I'm sensitive--

Ekstrohm was riding for a fall.