The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Planet with No Nightmare, by Jim Harmon
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Title: The Planet with No Nightmare
Author: Jim Harmon
Illustrator: Wallace Wood
Release Date: February 3, 2010 [EBook #31174]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PLANET WITH NO NIGHTMARE ***
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THE
PLANET
WITH
NO
NIGHTMARE
Illustrated by Wood
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 spaceship 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 space.
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 space, 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 hell 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 spaceship."
"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 spaceship. 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 cluster 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.
Ekstrohm lay in his bunk and listened to the sounds of the night on
Yancy-6 138. There was a keening of wind, and a cracking of the frozen
ground. Insects there were on the world, but they were frozen solid
during the night, only to revive and thaw in the morning sun.
The bunk he lay on was much more uncomfortable than the acceleration
couches on board. Yet he knew the others were sleeping more soundly, now
that they had renewed their contact with the matter that had birthed
them to send them riding high vacuum.
Ekstrohm was not asleep.
Now there could be an end to pretending.
He threw off the light blanket and swung his feet off the bunk, to the
floor. Ekstrohm stood up.
There was no longer any need to hide. But what was there to do? What had
changed for him?
He no longer had to lie in his bunk all night, his eyes closed,
pretending to sleep. In privacy he could walk around, leave the light
on, read.
It was small comfort for insomnia.
Ekstrohm never slept. Some doctors had informed him he was mistaken
about this. Actually, they said, he did sleep, but so shortly and
fitfully that he forgot. Others admitted he was absolutely correct--he
_never_ slept. His body processes only slowed down enough for him to
dispel fatigue poisons. Occasionally he fell into a waking, gritty-eyed
stupor; but he never slept.
Never at all.
Naturally, he couldn't let his shipmates know this. Insomnia would
ground him from the Exploration Service, on physiological if not
psychological grounds. He had to hide it.
* * * * *
Over the years, he had had buddies in space in whom he thought he could
confide. The buddies invariably took advantage of him. Since he couldn't
sleep anyway, he might as well stand their watches for them or write
their reports. Where the hell did he get off threatening to report any
laxness on their part to the captain? A man with insomnia had better
avoid bad dreams of that kind if he knew what was good for him.
Ekstrohm had to hide his secret.
In a camp, instead of shipboard, hiding the secret was easier. But the
secret itself was just as hard.
Ekstrohm picked up a lightweight no-back from the ship's library, a book
by Bloch, the famous twentieth-century expert on sex. He scanned a few
lines on the social repercussions of a celebrated nineteenth-century sex
murderer, but he couldn't seem to concentrate on the weighty,
pontifical, ponderous style.
On impulse, he flipped up the heat control on his coverall and slid back
the hatch of the bubble.
Ekstrohm walked through the alien grass and looked up at the unfamiliar
constellations, smelling the frozen sterility of the thin air.
Behind him, his mates stirred without waking.
II
Ekstrohm was startled in the morning by a banging on the hatch of his
bubble. It took him a few seconds to put his thoughts in order, and then
he got up from the bunk where he had been resting, sleeplessly.
The angry burnt-red face of Ryan greeted him. "Okay, Stormy, this isn't
the place for fun and games. What did you do with them?"
"Do with what?"
"The dead beasties. All the dead animals laying around the ship."
"What are you talking about, Ryan? What do you think I did with them?"
"I don't know. All I know is that they are gone."
"_Gone?_"
Ekstrohm shouldered his way outside and scanned the veldt.
There was no ring of animal corpses. Nothing. Nothing but wispy grass
whipping in the keen breeze.
"I'll be damned," Ekstrohm said.
"You are right now, buddy. ExPe doesn't like anybody mucking up primary
evidence."
"Where do you get off, Ryan?" Ekstrohm demanded. "Why pick me for your
patsy? This has got to be some kind of local phenomenon. Why accuse a
shipmate of being behind this?"
"Listen, Ekstrohm, I want to give you the benefit of every doubt. But
you aren't exactly the model of a surveyor, you know. You've been riding
on a pink ticket for six years, you know that."
"No," Ekstrohm said. "No, I didn't know that."
"You've been hiding things from me and Nogol every jump we've made with
you. Now comes this! It fits the pattern of secrecy and stealth you've
been involved in."
"What could I do with your lousy dead bodies? What would I want with
them?"
"All I know is that you were outside the bubbles last night, and you
were the only sentient being who came in or out of our alarm web. The
tapes show that. Now all the bodies are missing, like they got up and
walked away."
It was not a new experience to Ekstrohm. No. Suspicion wasn't new to him
at all.
"Ryan, there are other explanations for the disappearance of the bodies.
Look for them, will you? I give you my word I'm not trying to pull some
stupid kind of joke, or to deliberately foul up the expedition. Take my
word, can't you?"
Ryan shook his head. "I don't think I can. There's still such a thing as
mental illness. You may not be responsible."
Ekstrohm scowled.
"Don't try anything violent, Stormy. I outweigh you fifty pounds and I'm
fast for a big man."
"I wasn't planning on jumping you. Why do you have to jump me the first
time something goes wrong? You've only got a lot of formless
suspicions."
"Look, Ekstrohm, do you think I looked out the door and saw a lot of
dead animals missing and immediately decided you did it to bedevil me?
I've been up for hours--thinking--looking into this. You're the only
possibility that's left."
"Why?"
* * * * *
"The bodies are missing. What could it be? Scavengers? The web gives us
a complete census on everything inside it. The only animals inside the
ring are more wart-hogs and, despite their appearance, they aren't
carnivorous. Strictly grass-eaters. Besides, no animal, no insect, no
process of decay could _completely_ consume animals without a trace.
There are no bones, no hide, no nothing."
"You don't know the way bacteria works on this planet. Radiation is so
low, it may be particularly virulent."
"That's a possible explanation, although it runs counter to all the
evidence we've established so far. There's a much simpler explanation,
Ekstrohm. You. You hid the bodies for some reason. What other reason
could you have for prowling around out here at night?"
_I couldn't sleep._ The words were in his throat, but he didn't use
them. They weren't an explanation. They would open more questions than
they would answer.
"You're closing your eyes to the possibility of natural phenomenon,
laying this on me. You haven't adequate proof and you know it."
"Ekstrohm, when something's stolen, you always suspect a suspicious
character before you get around to the possibility that the stolen goods
melted into thin air."
"What," Ekstrohm said with deadly patience, "what do you think I could
have possibly done with your precious dead bodies?"
"You could have buried them. This is a big territory. We haven't been
able to search every square foot of it."
"Ryan, it was thirty or forty below zero last night. How the devil could
I dig holes in this ground to bury anything?"
"At forty below, how could your bacteria function to rot them away?"
Ekstrohm could see he was facing prejudice. There was no need to keep
talking, and no use in it. Still, some reflex made him continue to
frame reasonable answers.
"I don't know what bacteria on _this_ planet can do. Besides, that was
only _one_ example of a natural phenomenon."
"Look, Ekstrohm, you don't have anything to worry about if you're not
responsible. We're going to give you a fair test."
What kind of a test would it be? He wondered. And how fair?
Nogol came trotting up lightly.
"Ryan, I found some more wart-hogs and they keeled over as soon as they
saw me."
"So it _was_ xenophobia," Ekstrohm ventured.
"The important thing," Ryan said, with a sidelong glance at the
surveyor, "is that now we've got what it takes to see if Ekstrohm has
been deliberately sabotaging this expedition."
* * * * *
The body heat of the three men caused the air-conditioner of the tiny
bubble to labor.
"Okay," Ryan breathed. "We've got our eyes on you, Ekstrohm, and the
video circuits are wide open on the dead beasts. All we have to do is
wait."
"We'll have a long wait," Nogol ventured. "With Ekstrohm here, and the
corpses out there, nothing is going to happen."
That would be all the proof they needed, Ekstrohm knew. Negative
results would be positive proof to them. His pink ticket would turn pure
red and he would be grounded for life--_if_ he got off without a
rehabilitation sentence.
But if nothing happened, it wouldn't really prove anything. There was no
way to say that the conditions tonight were identical to the conditions
the previous night. What had swept away those bodies might be comparable
to a flash flood. Something that occurred once a year, or once in a
century.
And perhaps his presence outside _was_ required in some subtle
cause-and-effect relationship.
All this test would prove, if the bodies didn't disappear, was only that
conditions were not identical to conditions under which they did
disappear.
Ryan and Nogol were prepared to accept him, Ekstrohm, as the missing
element, the one ingredient needed to vanish the corpses. But it could
very well be something else.
Only Ekstrohm knew that it _had_ to be something else that caused the
disappearances.
_Or did it?_
He faced up to the question. How did he know he was sane? How could he
be sure that he hadn't stolen and hid the bodies for some murky reason
of his own? There was a large question as to how long a man could go
without sleep, dreams and oblivion, and remain sane.
Ekstrohm forced his mind to consider the possibility. Could he remember
every step he had taken the night before?
It seemed to him that he could remember walking past the creature lying
in the grass, then walking in a circle, and coming back to the base. It
seemed like that to him. But how could he know that it was true?
He couldn't.
* * * * *
There was no way he could prove, even to himself, that he had not
disposed of those alien remains and then come back to his bubble,
contented and happy at the thought of fooling those smug idiots who
could sleep at night.
"How much longer do we have to wait?" Nogol asked. "We've been here nine
hours. Half a day. The bodies are right where I left them outside. There
doesn't seem to be any more question."
Ekstrohm frowned. There was one question. He was sure there was one
question.... Oh, yes. The question was: How did he know he was sane?
He didn't know, of course. That was as good an answer as any. Might as
well accept it; might as well let them do what they wanted with him.
Maybe if he just gave up, gave in, maybe he could sleep then. Maybe he
could ...
Ekstrohm sat upright in his chair.
No. That wasn't the answer. He couldn't know that he was sane, but then
neither could anybody else. The point was, you had to go ahead living as
if you were sane. That was the only way of living.
"Cosmos," Ryan gasped. "Would you look at that!"
Ekstrohm followed the staring gaze of the two men.
On the video grid, one of the "dead" animals was slowly rising, getting
up, walking away.
"A natural phenomenon!" Ekstrohm said.
"Suspended animation!" Nogol ventured.
"Playing possum!" Ryan concluded.
Now came the time for apologies.
Ekstrohm had been through similar situations before, ever since he had
been found walking the corridors at college the night one of the girls
had been attacked. He didn't want to hear their apologies; they meant
nothing to him. It was not a matter of forgiving them. He knew the
situation had not changed.
They would suspect him just as quickly a second time.
"We're supposed to be an exploration team," Ekstrohm said quickly.
"Let's get down to business. Why do you suppose these alien creatures
fake death?"
[Illustration]
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. Hell, 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 spaceship
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 damned 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 space
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 passing 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.
The traction-scooter was going up a slope that had been eroded concave.
It was at the very top of the half-moon angle, upside down, standing
Ekstrohm on his head. Since he was not strapped into his seat, he fell.
As he fell he thought ruefully that he had contrived to have an accident
in the only way possible with a traction-scooter.
Ekstrohm's cranium collided with the ground, and he stopped thinking....
* * * * *
Ekstrohm blinked open his eyes, wondering. He saw light, then sky, then
pigs.
Live pigs.
But--the pigs shouldn't be alive. When he was this close they should be
dead.
Only they weren't.
Why ... why ...
He moved slightly and the nearest pig fell dead. The others went on with
their business, roaming the plain. Ekstrohm expected the dropping of the
pig to stampede the rest into dropping dead, but they didn't seem to
pay any attention to their fallen member.
I've been lying here for hours, he realized. I didn't move in on them.
The pigs moved in on me while I was lying still. If I keep still I can
get a close look at them in action.
So far, even with video, it had been difficult to get much of an idea of
the way these creatures lived--when they weren't dead.
Observe, observe, he told himself.
There might be some relationship between the flying whale and the pigs.
Could it be the whales were intelligent alien masters of these herds of
pigs?
Ekstrohm lay still and observed.
Item: the pigs ate the soft, mosslike grass.
Item: the pigs eliminated almost constantly.
Item: the pigs fought regularly.
Fought?
_Fought?_
Here was something, Ekstrohm realized.
Why did animals fight?
Rationalizations of nature-lovers aside, some fought because they had
plain mean nasty dispositions--like some people. That didn't fit the
pigs. They were indolent grazers. They hadn't the energy left over for
sheer-cussedness. There had to be a definite goal to their battles.
It wasn't food. That was abundant. The grassy veldt reached to all
horizons.
Sex. They had to be fighting for mates!
He became so excited he twitched a foot slightly. Two more pigs dropped
dead, but the others paid no heed.
He watched the lazily milling herd intently, at the same time keeping an
eye out for the flying whales. Back on Earth porpoises had been taught
to herd schools of fish and of whales. It was not impossible an
intelligent species of whale had learned to herd masses of land animals.
But Ekstrohm knew he needed proof. He had to have something to link the
pseudo-death of the wart-hogs to the inexplicable presence of the
whales. Perhaps, he thought, the "death" of the pigs was the whales' way
of putting them into cold storage--a method of making the meat seem
unattractive to other animals, on a world perhaps without carrion
scavengers....
Something was stirring among the pigs.
* * * * *
One under-sized beastie was pawing the dirt, a red eye set on the
fattest animal in sight. Then Shortie charged Fatso. But abruptly a
large raw-boned critter was in Shortie's path, barring him from Fatso.
Faced by Big Boy, Shortie trembled with rage and went into a terrible
temper tantrum, rolling on the ground, pawing it in frenzy, squealing in
maddened rage. Then Shortie was on his feet, desperate determination
showing in every line of his body. With heedless, desperate, foolhardy
courage he charged Big Boy.
Big Boy took the headlong charge in his side with only a trifling grunt.
Shortie bounced ten feet in the light gravity, and grimly wallowed to
his feet. He leveled an eye at Big Boy, and his legs were pumping in
frenzied fury again.
Big Boy shifted his kilos of weight casually and met Shortie head on.
The tremendous _ker-rack_ reverberated from the bluff behind Ekstrohm.
Shortie lay on the ground.
No, Ekstrohm thought, he isn't dead. His sides were pumping in and out.
But he was knocked cold.
Ekstrohm had to sympathize with him. He had never seen a more valiant
try against insurmountable odds.
Big Boy was ambling over towards Fatso, apparently to claim his prize.
Fatso apparently was the sow.
But Big Boy stalked on past Fatso. She squealed after him tentatively,
but he turned and blasted her back with a bellowing snort.
Ekstrohm watched the scene repeated with other actors several times
before he was sure.
The older males, the Big Boys, _never_ collected the favors of the harem
for themselves.
Instinctively, the pigs were practicing _birth control_. The older males
abstained, and forced the younger males to do the same.
On a world like this, Ekstrohm's first thought was of death.
He thought, these pigs must be like lemmings, deliberately trying to
destroy their own race, to commit geno-suicide.
But that didn't answer any of the other questions, about the
_pseudo_-death, the alien whales ...
And then Ekstrohm thought not of death but of _life_.
IV
The traction-scooter was where he had left it, hanging upside down on
the underside of the concave slope. It had stopped automatically when
his weight had left the seat. He reached up, toggled the OVERRIDE switch
and put it manually into reverse.
Once straightened out, he was on his way back to the base.
I feel good, he thought. I feel like I could lick my weight in
spacemen.
Only then did he realize why he felt so good.
What had happened had been so strange for him, he couldn't realize what
it had been until now.
While he had been knocked out, he had been asleep.
Asleep.
For the first time in years.
Sleep. He felt wonderful. He felt like he could lick all of his
problems....
Ekstrohm roared back into the base. The motor was silent on the
traction-scooter, of course, but the air he kicked up made its own
racket.
Ryan and Nogol came out to greet him sullenly.
"Listen," he told them, "I've got the answer to all of this."
"So have we," Ryan said ugly. "The first answer was the right one. We've
been scaring pigs to death and watching them, scaring and watching. We
learned nothing. You knew we wouldn't. You set us up for this. It's like
you said. You fed all of these beasts your stuff in advance, something
that acts when they get excited...."
It didn't make sense, but then it never had. You couldn't argue with
prejudice. He was "different." He didn't act like they did. He didn't
believe the same things. He was the outsider, therefore suspect. The
alien on an alien world.
Ekstrohm sighed. Man would always be the final alien, the creature man
would never understand, sympathize with or even tolerate.
There was no point in trying to argue further, Ekstrohm realized.
"You'll never understand, Ryan. You could have seen all the things I saw
if you'd bothered to look, but you were too anxious to blame me. But if
I can't make you understand, I can at least beat you into acceptance."
"Huh?" Ryan ventured.
"I said," Ekstrohm repeated, "that I'm going to beat some sense into
your thick skull."
Ryan grinned, rippled his massive shoulders and charged.
* * * * *
Ekstrohm remembered the lesson Shortie had taught him with Big Boy. He
didn't meet the captain's charge head on. He sidestepped and caught Ryan
behind the ear with his fist. The big man halted, puzzled. Ekstrohm sank
his fist into the thick, solid belly.
Slowly, Ryan's knees gave way and he sank towards the ground.
When his chin was at the right level of convenience, Ekstrohm put his
weight behind his right.
Ryan swayed dreamily backward.
But he threw himself forward and one ham of a fist connected high on
Ekstrohm's cheek. He was shaken to his toes, and the several hours' old
pain in the back of his head throbbed sickeningly. One more like that
would do for him.
Ekstrohm stood and drove in a lot of short punches to Ryan's body,
punches without much power behind them because he didn't have it. But he
knew better than to try a massive attack on a massive target.
When he couldn't lift his arms any more, Ekstrohm stopped punching. He
realized Ryan had fallen on his face a few seconds before.
Then he remembered, and whirled. He had left his back exposed to Nogol.
Nogol smiled. "I'm not drawing Hazard Pay."
After a while, Ekstrohm stopped panting and faced Nogol and the captain
who was now sitting, rubbing his jaw. "Okay," he said, "now you'll
listen or I'll beat your skulls in. I know what's behind all of this on
this planet."
"Yeah? What do you think it is, Stormy?" Ryan asked.
"First of all, I think there's a basic difference between this world and
any other the ExPe has investigated."
"Now what could that be?" Nogol wanted to know with a tiny smile.
"These worlds are _close_. The gravity is low. You wouldn't need much
more than a jet plane to get from one of these planetoids to another.
Some animals have developed with the power to travel from one of these
planetoids to another--like a squid jetting out water. They harnessed
some natural power system."
"What does that prove?" Ryan wanted to know.
"It proves that this world and others in this belt are _prepared_ for
interplanetary travel. It's probably a part of their basic evolutional
structure, unlike that of heavy, independent planets. This false 'dying'
is part of their preparation for interplanetary visitors."
"Why would these aliens want others to think that they were dead?" Ryan
asked.
"Correction, captain. They want visitors to believe that they _can_
die."
* * * * *
Ryan blinked. "Meaning that they _can't_ die?"
"That's right. I think everything on this planet has immortality,"
Ekstrohm said. "I'm not exactly sure how. Maybe it has to do with the
low radiation. Every individual cell has a 'memory' of the whole
creature. But as we age that 'memory' becomes faulty, our cells 'forget'
how to reproduce themselves exactly. Here, that cell 'memory' never
fades. Bodies renew themselves indefinitely."
"But why hide it?" Nogol asked.
"This planetoid can just support so many creatures. They practice birth
control among themselves," the surveyor said. "The natives naturally
want to discourage colonization."
Ryan whistled. "Once we report this, every rich and powerful man in the
Federation will want to come here to live. There's not enough space to
go around. There will be wars over this little hunk of rock."
Nogol's hard, dark eyes were staring into space. "There's only one
sensible thing to do. We'll keep the world to ourselves."
"I don't like that kind of talk," Ryan growled.
"Ryan, this little ball of dirt isn't going to do the Federation as a
whole any good. But it can be of value to us. We can make ourselves
comfortable here. Later on, we can bring in some women. Any women we
want. Who wouldn't want to come here?"
Ryan began to argue, but Ekstrohm could see he was hooked. The man who
risked his life, the man who sought something new and different, the
explorer, was basically an unstable type removed from the mainstream of
civilization. Nothing was liable to change that.
By nightfall, Ryan and Ekstrohm had agreed.
"We'll have to keep a constant watch," Ryan was saying. "We'll have to
watch out for ExPe scouts looking for us. Or, after a few generations,
another ship may come to complete the mapping."
Nogol smiled. "We'll have to keep an eye on each other too, you know.
One of us may get to wanting more room for more women. Or to have
children, a normal biological urge. Death by violence isn't ruled out
here."
"I don't like that kind of talk," Ryan blustered.
Nogol smiled.
Ekstrohm thought of the others, of the sleepless, watchful nights ahead
of them. That was probably his trouble, all of his life. He didn't trust
people; he had to stay awake and keep an eye on everybody. Well, he
would be one ahead here.
Of course, it was wrong not to trust anybody, but Ekstrohm knew habit
patterns were hard to break.
Sleep is a habit.
* * * * *
Ryan and Nogol were jarred awake in the night by the spaceship blasting
off without them. They ran out and shook their tiny fists in fury at the
rising flame.
Operating a spaceship alone was no cinch but it could be done. Ekstrohm
would get back to the nearest Federation base and report the planetoid
without death. He didn't have absolute confidence in any government, no.
But he suspected the Federation could do more with the world than two
men like Ryan and Nogol.
Ekstrohm took his fingers off the punchboard and lay back on his couch.
He yawned.
Ryan and Nogol were slow, but in time they might have learned to do
without sleep, and to guard their treasure night and day.
Fortunately, Ekstrohm knew from long experience what the two others
didn't.
An eternity without sleep isn't worth the price.
--END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from _If: Worlds of Science Fiction_ July
1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Planet with No Nightmare, by Jim Harmon
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