A Matter of Protocol by Jack Sharkey (the little red hen read aloud .txt) 📕

Jerry watched in fascination. The gourd swung faster; the mottled pink-white alien creature swayed and wove its forelimbs and thick body in a ritual dance matching the tempo of the arcing gourd.

Then Jerry noted that the vine was unlike earth-vines which parasitically employ treetops as their unwilling trellises. It is a limp extension of the tip of a tree branch itself. So were all the other vines in that green matting overhead.

A ripping sound yanked his gaze back to the dazed creature and the gourd again.

A ragged tear had riven the side of the gourd. Tiny coils of green were dribbling out in batches, like watchsprings spilled from a paper bag. They struck with a bounce and wriggle on the resilient brown mulch. And then, as they straightened themselves, Jerry knew them for what they were: Miniature versions of the grasshopper-things, shaped precisely like the adults, but only a third as large.

The bear-thing's movements had gone from graceful fluidity to frenzy now. A loud whistle of fright escaped it as the last of the twitching green things flopped from its vegetable cocoon, whirred white wings to dry them and flew off.

And the lumbering creature had reason for its fright.

The instant the last coil of wiggly green life was a vanishing blur in the green shadows, a cloud of darker green descended upon the pink form of the beast from the trees.

The grasshopper-things were waiting no longer. Thousands swarmed on the writhing form, until the bear-thing was a lumpy green parody of itself.

As quickly as the cloud had plunged and clustered, it fell away. The earth was teeming with the flip-flopping forms of dying insects, white wings going dark brown and curling like cellophane in open flame. The bear-thing itself was no longer recognizable, its flesh a myriad egg-like white lumps. It swayed in agony for a moment, then toppled.

Instantly the other creatures—his host with them—were racing forward to the site of the encounter. Jerry felt his host's long gummy tongue flick out and snare one—just one—of the dead adult insects. It was ingested whole by a deft backflip of tongue to gullet. As his host turned tail and scurried for the tunnel once more, Jerry swiftly took control again, and halted it to observe any further developments.

Each of the other things, after a one-insect gulp, was just vanishing back underground. The turf-tops were dropping neatly into almost undetectable place hiding the tunnels. The sunlight nipped at his pale flesh, but Jerry held off from a return to the underground sanctuary, still watching that lump-covered corpse on the earth. Then....

The vine, its burden gone, began to drip a thick ichor from its ragged end upon the dead animal beneath it.

And as the ichor touched upon a white lump, the lump would swell, wriggle, and change color. Jerry watched with awe as the color became a mottled pink, and the surface of the lumps cracked and shriveled away, and tiny forms plopped out onto the ground: miniature bear-things, tiny throats emitting eager mouse-squeaks of hunger.

They rushed upon the body in which they'd been so violently incubated and swiftly, systematically devoured it, blood, bone and sinew.

And when not even a memory of the dead beast was left upon the soil, the tiny pink-white things began to burrow downward into the ground. Soon there was nothing left in the area but a dried fragment of vine, a few loose mounds of soil and a vast silence.

"I'll be a monkey's uncle!" said Jerry ... forgetting in his excitement that this phrase was nearly a concise parody of the Space Zoologists' final oath of duty, and kiddingly used as such by the older members of the group.

The whole damned planet was symbiotic! After witnessing those alien life-death rites, it didn't take him long to figure out the screwball connections between the species. Insects, once born of vine-gourds and fully grown, then propagated their species by a strange means: laying bear-eggs in a bear-thing and dying. And dying, eaten by the surviving bears, they turned to seeds which—left in the tunnels by the bear-things as droppings—in turn took root and became trees.

And the trees, under the onslaught of another bear-thing on a dangling pod, would produce new insects, then drip its ichor to fertilize the eggs in the newly dead bear-thing....

Jerry found his mind tangling as he attempted a better pinpointing of the plant-animal-insect relationship. A dead adult insect, plus a trip through a bear-thing's alimentary canal, produced a tree. A tree-pod, with the swatting stimulus of a bear-thing's paws, gave birth to new insects. And insect eggs in animal flesh, stimulated by the tree-ichor, gestated swiftly into young animals....

That meant, simply, that insect plus bear equals tree, tree plus bear equals insect, and insect plus tree equals bear. With three systems, each relied on the non-inclusive member for the breeding-ground. Insect-plus-ichor produced small animals in the animal flesh. Dead-insect-plus-bear produced tree in the tree-flesh (if one considered dead tree leaves and bark and such as the makeup of the soil.) Bear-swats-plus-tree produced insects.... "Damn," said Jerry to himself, "but not in the insect-flesh. The thing won't round off...."

He tried again, thinking hard. In effect, the trees were parents to the insects, insects parents to the bears, and bears parents to the trees.... Though in another sense, bear-flesh gave birth to new bears, digested insects gave birth (through the tree-medium) to new insects, and trees (through the insect-medium) gave birth to new trees....

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