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.