by Anthology
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?"
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 h
is 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.