.

"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 ev