The Planet with No Nightmare, Page 2

never slept.

  Never at all.

  Naturally, he couldn't let his shipmates know this. Insomnia wouldground him from the Exploration Service, on physiological if notpsychological grounds. He had to hide it.

  * * * * *

  Over the years, he had had buddies in space in whom he thought he couldconfide. The buddies invariably took advantage of him. Since he couldn'tsleep anyway, he might as well stand their watches for them or writetheir reports. Where the hell did he get off threatening to report anylaxness on their part to the captain? A man with insomnia had betteravoid 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 thesecret itself was just as hard.

  Ekstrohm picked up a lightweight no-back from the ship's library, a bookby Bloch, the famous twentieth-century expert on sex. He scanned a fewlines on the social repercussions of a celebrated nineteenth-century sexmurderer, 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 backthe hatch of the bubble.

  Ekstrohm walked through the alien grass and looked up at the unfamiliarconstellations, 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 hisbubble. It took him a few seconds to put his thoughts in order, and thenhe got up from the bunk where he had been resting, sleeplessly.

  The angry burnt-red face of Ryan greeted him. "Okay, Stormy, this isn'tthe 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 grasswhipping in the keen breeze.

  "I'll be damned," Ekstrohm said.

  "You are right now, buddy. ExPe doesn't like anybody mucking up primaryevidence."

  "Where do you get off, Ryan?" Ekstrohm demanded. "Why pick me for yourpatsy? This has got to be some kind of local phenomenon. Why accuse ashipmate of being behind this?"

  "Listen, Ekstrohm, I want to give you the benefit of every doubt. Butyou aren't exactly the model of a surveyor, you know. You've been ridingon 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 withyou. Now comes this! It fits the pattern of secrecy and stealth you'vebeen involved in."

  "What could I do with your lousy dead bodies? What would I want withthem?"

  "All I know is that you were outside the bubbles last night, and youwere the only sentient being who came in or out of our alarm web. Thetapes show that. Now all the bodies are missing, like they got up andwalked away."

  It was not a new experience to Ekstrohm. No. Suspicion wasn't new to himat 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 somestupid kind of joke, or to deliberately foul up the expedition. Take myword, can't you?"

  Ryan shook his head. "I don't think I can. There's still such a thing asmental illness. You may not be responsible."

  Ekstrohm scowled.

  "Don't try anything violent, Stormy. I outweigh you fifty pounds and I'mfast for a big man."

  "I wasn't planning on jumping you. Why do you have to jump me the firsttime something goes wrong? You've only got a lot of formlesssuspicions."

  "Look, Ekstrohm, do you think I looked out the door and saw a lot ofdead animals missing and immediately decided you did it to bedevil me?I've been up for hours--thinking--looking into this. You're the onlypossibility that's left."

  "Why?"

  * * * * *

  "The bodies are missing. What could it be? Scavengers? The web gives usa complete census on everything inside it. The only animals inside thering are more wart-hogs and, despite their appearance, they aren'tcarnivorous. Strictly grass-eaters. Besides, no animal, no insect, noprocess 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 solow, it may be particularly virulent."

  "That's a possible explanation, although it runs counter to all theevidence we've established so far. There's a much simpler explanation,Ekstrohm. You. You hid the bodies for some reason. What other reasoncould you have for prowling around out here at night?"

  _I couldn't sleep._ The words were in his throat, but he didn't usethem. They weren't an explanation. They would open more questions thanthey 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 suspiciouscharacter before you get around to the possibility that the stolen goodsmelted into thin air."

  "What," Ekstrohm said with deadly patience, "what do you think I couldhave possibly done with your precious dead bodies?"

  "You could have buried them. This is a big territory. We haven't beenable to search every square foot of it."

  "Ryan, it was thirty or forty below zero last night. How the devil couldI 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 keeptalking, and no use in it. Still, some reflex made him continue toframe reasonable answers.

  "I don't know what bacteria on _this_ planet can do. Besides, that wasonly _one_ example of a natural phenomenon."

  "Look, Ekstrohm, you don't have anything to worry about if you're notresponsible. 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 theysaw me."

  "So it _was_ xenophobia," Ekstrohm ventured.

  "The important thing," Ryan said, with a sidelong glance at thesurveyor, "is that now we've got what it takes to see if Ekstrohm hasbeen deliberately sabotaging this expedition."

  * * * * *

  The body heat of the three men caused the air-conditioner of the tinybubble to labor.

  "Okay," Ryan breathed. "We've got our eyes on you, Ekstrohm, and thevideo circuits are wide open on the dead beasts. All we have to do iswait."

  "We'll have a long wait," Nogol ventured. "With Ekstrohm here, and thecorpses out there, nothing is going to happen."

  That would be all the proof they needed, Ekstrohm knew. Negativeresults would be positive proof to them. His pink ticket would turn purered and he would be grounded for life--_if_ he got off without arehabilitation sentence.

  But if nothing happened, it wouldn't really prove anything. There was noway to say that the conditions tonight were identical to the conditionsthe previous night. What had swept away those bodies might be comparableto a flash flood. Something that occurred once a year, or once in acentury.

  And perhaps his presence outside _was_ required in some subtlecause-and-effect relationship.

  All this test would prove, if the bodies didn't disappear, was only thatconditions were not identical to conditions under which they diddisappear.

  Ryan and Nogol were prepared to accept him, Ekstrohm, as the missingelement, the one ingredient needed to vanish the corpses. But it couldvery well be something else.

  Only Ekstrohm knew tha
t it _had_ to be something else that caused thedisappearances.

  _Or did it?_

  He faced up to the question. How did he know he was sane? How could hebe sure that he hadn't stolen and hid the bodies for some murky reasonof his own? There was a large question as to how long a man could gowithout sleep, dreams and oblivion, and remain sane.

  Ekstrohm forced his mind to consider the possibility. Could he rememberevery step he had taken the night before?

  It seemed to him that he could remember walking past the creature lyingin the grass, then walking in a circle, and coming back to the base. Itseemed like that to him. But how could he know that it was true?

  He