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_.