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 CO2 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 

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