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.