The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Planet with No Nightmare, by Jim Harmon

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Title: The Planet with No Nightmare

Author: Jim Harmon

Illustrator: Wallace Wood

Release Date: February 3, 2010 [EBook #31174]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PLANET WITH NO NIGHTMARE ***

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THE
PLANET
WITH
NO
NIGHTMARE

Illustrated by Wood

BY JIM HARMON

The creatures on the little planet were real bafflers. The first
puzzler about them was that they died so easily. The second was that
they didn't die at all.

I

Tension eased away as the spaceship settled down on its metallic
haunches and they savored a safe planetfall.

Ekstrohm fingered loose the cinches of his deceleration couch. He
sighed. An exploration camp would mean things would be simpler for him.
He could hide his problem from the others more easily. Trying to keep
secret what he did alone at night was very difficult under the close
conditions on board a ship in space.

Ryan hefted his bulk up and supported it on one elbow. He rubbed his
eyes sleepily with one huge paw. "Ekstrohm, Nogol, you guys okay?"

"Nothing wrong with me that couldn't be cured," Nogol said. He didn't
say what would cure him; he had been explaining all during the trip what
he needed to make him feel like himself. His small black eyes darted
inside the olive oval of his face.

"Ekstrohm?" Ryan insisted.

"Okay."

"Well, let's take a ground-level look at the country around here."

The facsiport rolled open on the landscape. A range of bluffs hugged the
horizon, the color of decaying moss. Above them, the sky was the black
of space, or the almost equal black of the winter sky above Minneapolis,
seen against neon-lit snow. That cold, empty sky was full of fire and
light. It seemed almost a magnification of the Galaxy itself, of the
Milky Way, blown up by some master photographer.

This fiery swath was actually only a belt of minor planets, almost like
the asteroid belt in the original Solar System. These planet