by Anthology
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 remembere
d, 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.
* * *
Contents
THE PASSENGER
By Kenneth Harmon
The classic route to a man's heart is through his stomach --and she was just his dish.
The transport swung past Centaurus on the last leg of her long journey to Sol. There was no flash, no roar as she swept across the darkness of space. As silent as a ghost, as quiet as a puff of moonlight she moved, riding the gravitational fields that spread like tangled, invisible spider webs between the stars.
Within the ship there was also silence, but the air was stirred by a faint, persistent vibration from the field generators. This noiseless pulse stole into every corner of the ship, through long, empty passageways lined with closed stateroom doors, up spiraling stairways to the bridge and navigational decks, and down into vast and echoing holds, filled with strange cargo from distant worlds.
This vibration pulsed through Lenore's stateroom. As she relaxed on her couch, she bathed in it, letting it flow through her to tingle in her fingertips and whisper behind her closed eyelids.
"Home," it pulsed, "you're going home."
* * * * *
She repeated the word to herself, moving her lips softly but making no sound. "Home," she breathed, "back home to Earth." Back to the proud old planet that was always home, no matter how far you wandered under alien suns. Back to the shining cities clustered along blue seacoasts. Back to the golden grainlands of the central states and the high, blue grandeur of the western mountains. And back to the myriad tiny things that she remembered best, the little, friendly things ... a stretch of maple-shadowed streets heavy and still with the heat of a summer noon; a flurry of pigeons in the courthouse square; yellow dandelions in a green lawn, the whir of a lawnmower and the smell of the cut grass; ivy on old bricks and the rough feel of oak bark under her hands; water lilies and watermelons and crepe papery dances and picnics by the river in the summer dusk; and the library steps in the evening, with fireflies in the cool grass and the school chimes sounding the slow hours through the friendly dark.
She thought to herself, "It's been such a long time since you were home. There will be a whole new flock of pigeons now." She smiled at the recollection of the eager, awkward girl of twenty that she had been when she had finished school and had entered the Government Education Service. "Travel While Helping Others" had been the motto of the GES.
She had traveled, all right, a long, long way inside a rusty freighter without a single porthole, to a planet out on the rim of the Galaxy that was as barren and dreary as a cosmic slag heap. Five years on the rock pile, five years of knocking yourself out trying to explain history and Shakespeare and geometry to a bunch of grubby little miners' kids in a tin schoolhouse at the edge of a cluster of tin shacks that was supposed to be a town. Five years of trudging around with your nails worn and dirty and your hair chopped short, of wearing the latest thing in overalls. Five years of not talking with the young miners because they got in trouble with the foreman, and not talking with the crewmen from the ore freighters because they got in trouble with the first mate, and not talking with yourself because you got in trouble with the psychologist.
They took care of you in the Education Service; they guarded your diet and your virtue, your body and your mind. Everything but your happiness.
* * * * *
There was lots t
o do, of course. You could prepare lessons and read papers and cheap novels in the miners' library, or nail some more tin on your quarters to keep out the wind and the dust and the little animals. You could go walking to the edge of town and look at all the pretty gray stones and the trees, like squashed-down barrel cactus; watch the larger sun sink behind the horizon with its little companion star circling around it, diving out of sight to the right and popping up again on the left. And Saturday night--yippee!--three-year-old movies in the tin hangar. And, after five years, they come and say, "Here's Miss So-and-So, your relief, and here's your five thousand credits and wouldn't you like to sign up for another term?"
Ha!
So they give you your ticket back to Earth. You're on the transport at last, and who can blame you if you act just a little crazy and eat like a pig and take baths three times a day and lie around your stateroom and just dream about getting home and waking up in your own room in the morning and getting a good cup of real coffee at the corner fountain and kissing some handsome young fellow on the library steps when the Moon is full behind the bell tower?
"And will the young fellow like you?" she asked herself, knowing the answer even as she asked the question.
She whirled about in the middle of the stateroom, her robe swirling around her, and ended with a deep curtsy to the full-length mirror.
"Allow me to introduce myself," she murmured. "Lenore Smithson, formerly of the Government Education Service, just back from business out on the Rim. What? Why, of course you may have this dance. Your name? Mr. Fairheart! Of the billionaire Fairhearts?" She waltzed with herself a moment. Halting before the mirror again, she surveyed herself critically.
"Well," she said aloud, "the five years didn't completely ruin you, after all. Your nose still turns up and your cheeks still dimple when you smile. You have a nice tan and your hair's grown long again. Concentrated food hasn't hurt your figure, either." She turned this way and that before the mirror to observe herself.
Then suddenly she gave a little gasp of surprise and fright, for a cascade of laughter had flooded soundlessly inside her head.