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take on the second alien long as it's already set up. I may just have hit the first one in an off-period. The delay in re-Contact may be just what I need to catch it in action."

Settling the helmet snugly on his head once more, he leaned back onto the couch and waited. He heard the tech's feet clanking along the metal plates inside the ship, then the soft clang of an opening door in the power room, and—

Whiteness, writhing electric whiteness and cold silence. And he was in Contact.

Darkness, and musky warmth.

Then a slot of light appeared, a thin fuzzy line of yellow striped with spiky green. Jerry had time, in the brief flicker, to observe thick bearlike forelimbs holding up a squarish trapdoor fastened with cross-twigs for support. Then the powerful forepaws let the door drop back into place, and it was dark again.

He hadn't liked those forepaws. Though thick as and pawed like a bear's, they were devoid of hair. They had skin thin as a caterpillar's, a mottled pink with sick-looking areas of deathly white.

Skin like that would be a push-over to actinic rays for any long exposure. Probably the thing lived underground here, almost permanently. His eyes had detected a rude assortment of thick wooden limbs curving in and out at regular intervals in the vertical wall of soil that was the end of this tunnel, just below the trapdoor. Tree roots. But formed, by some odd natural quirk, into a utile ladder.

But why had the thing peered out, then dropped the door to wait? Did every species on this planet hang around expectantly and nothing else? And what was the waiting for?

Then he felt the urge within the creature, the urge to scurry up that ladder into the light. But there was, simultaneously, a counter-urge in the thing, telling it to please wait a little longer....

Jerry recognized the urge by quick anthropomorphosis. It was the goofy urge. The crazy urge. Like one gets on the brinks of awesome heights, or on subway platforms as the train roars in: The impulsive urge to self-destruction, so swiftly frightening and so swiftly suppressed....

Yet, it had lifted and dropped that lid too briefly to have seen anything outside. Could it be listening for something? Carefully, he relinquished his control of the beast, fraction by fraction, to see what it would do.

It rose on tiptoe at once, and again lifted that earthen door.

It squinted at the profusion of green-yellow sunlight that stung its eyes. Then it rose on powerful hind limbs and clambered just high enough on that "ladder" to see over the grassy rim of the trapdoor-hole. Jerry then heard the soft shuffling sound that had re-alerted it, and saw the source.

Out on the matted brown jungle flooring, beneath the towering trees, another of the bear-things was moving forward from an open turf-door, emitting low, whimpering snorts as it inched along through the dappling yellow sunlight.

Obviously it was following that manic-destruction impulse that he just felt and managed to suppress. It must have been almost a hundred degrees out there. And the damned thing was shivering.

Here and there, Jerry noticed suddenly, other half-opened trapdoors were framing other bear-things' heads. The air was taut with electric tension, the tension of a slow trigger-squeeze that moves millimeter by millimeter toward the instant explosion....

The soft shuffling sounds of the animal's movement jogged Jerry's memory then, and he knew it for the sound he had heard when enhosted in the grasshopper-thing. Was a bear-thing what they'd been waiting in the trees so silently for? And what would be the culmination of that vigil?

Then the bear-thing he was in Contact with hitched itself up another root-rung. Jerry saw the thing toward which the quaking creature was headed, in a hunched crawl, its whimpers more anguished by the moment.

Pendant in the green gloaming, about four feet above the spongy brown jungle floor, hung a thick yellow-gray gourd at the tip of a long vine. Its sides glittered stickily with condensed moisture that mingled with the effluvium of the gourd itself. The odor was both noisome and compelling, powerful as a bushel of rotting roses. It sickened as it lured, teased the nostrils as it cloyed within the lungs.

To this dangling obscenity the bear-thing moved. Its eyes were no longer afraid, but glazed and dulled by the strength of that musky lure. Its movements were fluid and trancelike.

It arose on sturdy hind limbs and struck at the gourd with a gentle paw, sending it jouncing to one side on its long green vine. As it bobbed back, the creature struck it off in the opposite direction with a sharper blow.

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

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