The Planet with No Nightmare Part 5

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 s.p.a.cemen.

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 ma.s.sive 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 ma.s.sive attack on a ma.s.sive 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 remembered, 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 s.p.a.ce to go around. There will be wars over this little hunk of rock."

Nogol's hard, dark eyes were staring into s.p.a.ce. "There's only one sensible thing to do. We'll keep the world to ourselves."