Part 2

Jerry's head spun pleasantly as he tried vainly to solve the confusion. Men of science, he realized, would spend decades trying to figure out which species were responsible for which. It made the ancient chicken-or-egg question beneath consideration. And a lot of diehard evolutionists were going to be bedded down with severe migraines when his report went into circulation....

A dazzle of silent lightning, and Contact was over.

* * * * *

"Ready with that first tape again," Bob Ryder said as Jerry removed the Contact helmet and brushed his snow-white hair back from his tanned, youthful face. "Or do you want a breather first?"

Jerry shook his head. "I won't need to re-Contact that other species, Ensign. I got its life-relationships from the second Contact."

"Really, sir?" said Bob. "That's pretty unusual, isn't it?"

"The whole damned planet's unusual," said Jerry, rising from his supine position and stretching luxuriously in the warm jungle air. "You'll see what I mean when you process the second tape."

Bob decided that Jerry--running pretty true to form for a Space Zoologist--wasn't in a particularly talkative mood, so he had to satisfy himself with waiting for the transcription of the Contact to get the details.

Later that day, an hour after takeoff, with Viridian already vanished behind them as the great ship plowed through hyper-space toward Earth and home, Bob finished reading the report. Then he went down the passageway to the ward room for coffee. Jerry was seated there already. Bob, quickly filling a mug from the polished percolator, slid into a seat across the table from his superior and asked the question that had been bugging him since seeing the report.

"Sir--on that second Contact. Has it occurred to you that you'd relinquished control to the host _before_ you saw that other creature move out and start swatting the gourd-thing?"

"You mean was I taking a chance on being destroyed in the host if the creature I was Contacting gave in to the urge to do the swatting?"

"Yes, sir," said Bob. "I mean, I know you can take control any time, if things get dangerous. But wasn't that cutting it kind of thin?"

Jerry shook his head and sipped his coffee. "Wrong urge, Ensign. You'll note I recognized it as the _goofy_ urge, the impulse to die followed instantly by a violent surge of self-preservation. It wasn't the death-wish at all. Myself and the creatures who remained safely at the tunnel-mouths had a milder form of what was affecting the creature that _did_ start swatting the gourd."

"Then what was the difference, sir? Why did that one particular creature get the full self-destruction urge and no other?"

Jerry wrinkled his face in thought. "I wish I didn't suspect the answer to that, Ensign. The only thing I hope it _isn't_ is the thing I have the strongest inkling it _is_: Rotation. Something in their biology has set them up in a certain order for destruction. And that rite I saw performed was so un-animal, so formalized--"

Bob's eyes widened as he caught the inference. "You think they have an inbuilt protocol? That if one particular creature missed its cue, somehow, the designated subsequent creature would simply wait forever, never jumping its turn?"

"That's what I mean," nodded Jerry. "I hope I'm wrong."

"But the right creature made it," said Bob, blinking. "We can't have upset the ecology, can we?"

"Things develop fast on Viridian," mused Jerry. "If I figure the time-relationship between their egg-hatching rate and growth rate, those trees must mature in growth in about a month. And we managed to shrivel a half dozen vines with our rocket fires when we landed, and probably that many again when we blasted off...."

"We dropped CO_{2} bombs after we cleared the trees," offered the tech, uneasily. "The fire was out in seconds."

"That wouldn't help an already-shriveled vine, though, now would it!" sighed Jerry. "And if my hunch about protocol is correct--"

"The life-cycle would interrupt?" gasped the tech.

"We'll see," said Jerry. "It'll take us a month to get back, and there'll be another six months before the first wave of engineers is sent to begin the homesteads and industry sites. We'll see, Ensign."

* * * * *

It took two months for the engineers to go out and return.

They hadn't landed. A few orbits about the planet had shown them nothing but a vast dead ball of dust and rotted vegetation, totally unfit for human habitation. They brought back photographs taken of the dead planet that no longer deserved the name it had rated in life.

But Jerry Norcriss, Space Zoologist, made it a special point to avoid looking at any of them.