A Matter of Protocol, Jack Sharkey [the little red hen ebook txt] 📗

By JACK SHARKEY

Illustrated by SCHELLING

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Magazine August 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

First Contact was always dangerous—but
usually only to the man involved!

From space, the planet Viridian resembled a great green moss-covered tennis ball. When the spaceship had arrowed even closer to the lush jungle that was the surface of the 7000-mile sphere, there was still no visible break in the green cloak of the planet. Even when they dipped almost below their margin of safety—spaceships were poorly built for extended flight within the atmosphere—it took nearly a complete circuit of the planet before a triangle of emptiness was spotted. It was in the midst of the tangled canopy of treetops, themselves interwoven inextricably with coarse-leaved ropy vines that sprawled and coiled about the upthrust branches like underfed anacondas.

Into the center of this triangle the ship was lowered on sputtering blue pillars of crackling energy, to come to rest on the soft loamy earth.

A bare instant after setdown, crewmen exploded from the airlock and dashed into the jungle shadows with high-pressure tanks of gushing spume. Their job was to coat, cool and throttle the hungry fires trickling in bright orange fingers through the heat-blackened grasses. Higher in the trees, a few vines smoldered fitfully where the fires had brushed them, then hissed into smoky wet ash as their own glutinous sap smothered the urgent embers. But the fire was going out.

"Under control, sir," reported a returning crewman.

Lieutenant Jerry Norcriss emerged into the green gloaming that cloaked the base of the ship with a net of harlequin diamonds. Jerry nodded abstractedly as other crewmen laid a lightweight form-fitting couch alongside the tailfins near the airlock. On this couch Jerry reclined. Remaining crew members turned their fire-fighting gear over to companions and stood guard in a rough semi-circle with loaded rifles, their backs to the figure on the couch, facing the jungle and whatever predatory dangers it might hold.

Ensign Bob Ryder, the technician who had the much softer job of simply controlling and coordinating any information relayed by Jerry, leaned out through the open circle in the hull.

"All set, sir," said the tech. Jerry nodded and settled a heavily wired helmet onto his head, while Bob made a hookup between the helmet and the power outlet that was concealed under a flap of metal on the tailfin.

Helmet secured, Jerry lay back upon the couch and closed his eyes. "Any time you're ready, Ensign."

Bob hurried back inside, found the panel he sought among the jumble of high-powered machinery there, and placed a spool of microtape on a spindle inside it.

He shut the panel and thumbed the button that started an impulse radiating from the tape into the jungle.

The impulse had been detected and taped by a roborocket which had circled the planet for months before their arrival. It was one of the two Viridian species whose types were as yet uncatalogued by the Space Corps, in its vast files of alien life. Jerry's job, as a Space Zoologist, was to complete those files, planet by planet throughout the spreading wave of slowly colonized universe.

Bob made sure the tape was functioning. Then he clicked the switch that would stimulate the Contact center in Jerry's brain and release his mind into that of the taped alien for an immutable forty minutes.

Outside the ship, recumbent in the warm green-gold shadows, Jerry's consciousness was dwarfed for an instant by a white lightning-flash of energy. And then his body went limp as his mind sprang with thought-speed into Contact....

Jerry opened his eyes to a dizzying view of the dull brown jungle floor. He blinked a moment, then looked toward his feet. He saw two sets of thin knobby Vs, extending forward and partly around the tiny limb he stood upon, their chitinous surface shiny with the wetness of the jungle air.

Slowly working his jaws, he heard the extremely gentle "click" as they came together. The endoskeleton must exist all over his host's body.

After making certain it would not disturb his balance on the limb, he attempted bringing whatever on the alien passed for hands before his face.

Sometimes aliens had no hands, nor any comparable organisms. Then Jerry would have to soft-pedal the mental nagging of being "amputated," an unavoidable carryover from his subconscious "wrong-feeling" about armlessness.

But this time the effort moved up multi-jointed limbs, spindly as a cat's whiskers, terminating in a perpetually coiling soft prehensile tip. He tried feeling along his torso to determine its size and shape. But the wormlike tips were tactilely insensitive.

Hoping to deduce his shape from his shadow, he inched sideways along the limb on those inadequate-looking two-pronged feet toward a blob of yellow sunlight nearer the trunk.

The silhouette on the branch showed him a stubby cigar-shaped torso.

"I seem to be a semi-tentacled no-hop grasshopper," he mused to himself, vainly trying to turn his head on his neck. "Head, thorax and abdomen all one piece."

He tried flexing what would be, in a man, the region of the shoulderblades. He was rewarded by the appearance of long, narrow wings—two sets of them, like a dragonfly's—from beneath two flaps of chitin on his back.

He tried an experimental flapping. The pair of wings—white and stiff like starched tissue paper, not veinous as in Earth-insects—dissolved in a buzzing blur of motion. The limb fell away from under his tiny V-shaped feet. And then he was up above the blinding green blanket of jungle treetops, his shadow pacing his forward movement along the close-packed quilt of wide leaves below.

"I'd better be careful," thought Jerry. "There may be avian life here that considers my species the piéce de resistance of the pteroid set...."

Slowing his rapid wingbeat, he let himself drop down toward the nearest mattress-sized leaf. He folded his out-thrust feet in mid-air and dropped the last few inches to a cushiony rest.

A slight shimmer of dizziness gripped his mind.

Perhaps the "skull" of this creature was ill-equipped to ward off the hot rays of the tropic sunlight. Lest his brain be fried in its own casing, Jerry scuttled along the velvet top of the leaf, and ducked quickly beneath its nearest overlapping companion. The wave of vertigo passed quickly, there in the deep shadow. Under the canopy of leaves Jerry crawled back to a limb near the top of the tree.

A few feet from where he stood, something moved.

Jerry turned that way. Another creature of the same species was balancing lightly on a green limb of wire-thickness, its gaze fixed steadily toward the jungle flooring, as Jerry's own had been on entering the alien body.

Watching out for predators? Or for victims?

He could, he knew, pull his consciousness back enough to let the creature's own consciousness carry it through its daily cycle of eating, avoiding destruction, and the manifold businesses of being an ambient creature. But he decided to keep control. It would be easier to figure out his host's ecological status in the planet's natural life-balance by observing the other one for awhile.

Jerry always felt more comfortable when he was in full control. You never knew when an alien might stupidly stumble into a fatality that any intelligent mind could easily have avoided.

Idly, as he watched his fellow creature down near the inner part of the branch, he wondered how much more time he would be in Contact. Subjectively he'd seemed to be enhosted for about ten minutes. But one of the drawbacks of Contact was the subjugation of personal time-sense to that of the host. Depending on the species he enhosted, the forty-minute Contact period could be an eternity, or the blink of an eye....

Nothing further seemed to be occurring. Jerry reluctantly withdrew some of his control from the insect-mind to see what would happen.

Immediately it inched forward until it was in the same position it had been in when Jerry made Contact: V-shaped feet forward and slightly around the narrow branch, eyes fixed upon the brownish jungle floor, body motionless with folded wings. For awhile, Jerry tried "listening" to its mind, but received no readable thoughts. Only a sense of imminence.... Of patience.... Of waiting....

It didn't take long for Jerry to grow bored with this near-mindless outlook. He reassumed full control. Guiding the fragile feet carefully along the branch, he made his way to his fellow watcher, and tried out the creature's communication system. His mind strove to activate something on the order of a larynx; the insect's nervous system received this impulse, changed in inter-species translation, as a broad request for getting a message to its fellow. Its body responded by lifting the multi-jointed "arms" forward. It clapped the hard inner surfaces of the "wrists" together so fast that they blurred into invisibility as the wings had done.

A thin, ratchetty sound came forth from that hardshell contact. The other insect looked up in annoyance, then returned its gaze to the ground again.

Aural conversation thus obviated, Jerry tried for physical attention-getting. He reached out a vermiform forelimb-tip and tugged urgently at the other insect's nearest hind leg. An angry movement gave out the unmistakable pantomimic message: "For pete's sake, get off my back! I'm busy!" The other insect spread its thin double wings and went buzzing off a few trees away, then settled on a limb there and took up its earthward vigil once more.

"Well, they're not gregarious, that's for sure," said Jerry to himself. "I wish I knew what the hell we were waiting for!"

He decided he was sick of ground-watching, and turned his attention to his immediate vicinity. His gaze wandered along all the twists, juts and thrusts of branch and vine beneath the sun-blocking leaves.

And all at once he realized he was staring at another of his kind. So still had its dull green-brown body been that he'd taken it for a ripple of bark along a branch.

Carefully, he looked further on. Beyond the small still figure he soon located another like it, and then another. Within a short space of time, he had found three dozen of the insects sitting silently around him in a spherical area barely ten feet in diameter.

Oddly disconcerted, he once more spread his stiff white wings and fluttered away through the treetops, careful to avoid coming out in direct sunlight this time.

He flew until a resurgence of giddiness told him he was over-straining the creature's stamina. He dropped onto a limb and looked about once more. Within a very short time, he had spotted dozens more of the grasshopper-things. All were the same, sitting in camouflaged silence, steadily eyeing the ground.

"Damn," thought Jerry. "They don't seem interested in eating, mating or fighting. All they want to do is sit—sit and wait. But what are they waiting for?"

There was, of course, the possibility that he'd caught them in an off-period. If the species were nocturnal, then he wouldn't get any action from them till after sunset. That, he realized gloomily, meant a re-Contact later on. One way or another, he would have to determine the functions, capabilities and menace—if any—of the species with regard to the influx of colonists, who would come to Viridian only if his report pronounced it safe.

Once again, he let the insect's mind take over. Again that over-powering feeling of imminence....

He was irritated. It couldn't just be looking forward to nightfall! There were too many things tied in with the imminence feeling: the necessity for quiet, for motionlessness, for careful watching.

The more he thought on it, the more he had the distinct intuition that it would sit and stare at the soft, mulch-covered jungle floor, be it bright daylight or blackest gloom, waiting, and waiting, and waiting....

Then, suddenly, the slight feel of imminence became almost unbearable apprehension.

The change in intensity was due to a soft, cautious shuffling sound from down in the green-gold twilight. Something was coming through the jungle. Something that moved on careful feet along the springy, moist brown surface below the trees.

Far below, a shadow detached itself slowly from the deeper shadows of the trees, and a form began to emerge into the wan filtered sunlight. It—

An all-encompassing lance of silent white lightning. Contact was over....

Jerry sat up on the couch, angry. He pulled the helmet off his head as Bob Ryder leaned out the airlock once more. "How'd it go, sir?"

"Lousy. I'll have to re-establish. Didn't have time to Learn it sufficiently." A slight expression of disappointment on the tech's face made him add, "Don't tell me you have the other tape in place already?"

"Sorry," Bob said. "You usually do a complete Learning in one Contact."

"Oh—" Jerry shrugged and reached for the helmet again. "Never mind, I'll