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.