"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.