"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.