Jack Sharkey opens 'A Matter of Protocol' with a vivid planetary descent: Viridian is described as 'a great green moss-covered tennis ball,' its surface a 'tangled canopy of treetops' woven with vines 'like underfed anacondas.' The prose is brisk and sensory, emphasizing the crew's immediate fire-fighting action after landing. Lieutenant Jerry Norcriss, the Space Zoologist protagonist, reclines on a couch while a technician feeds a telepathic 'Contact' tape into the jungle. This setup—a mind-linking device that transmits alien consciousness—is the story's central conceit, allowing Norcriss to experience Viridian's ecology from within.

Diction and the Voice of a Space Zoologist

Sharkey crafts Norcriss's internal monologue with a colloquial, slightly irreverent tone that grounds the speculative science. When he witnesses a bear-thing being devoured by its own offspring, he exclaims, 'I'll be a monkey's uncle!'—a phrase the narrator notes is 'nearly a concise parody of the Space Zoologists' final oath of duty.' This self-aware humor signals a character who is both professional and prone to understatement. His later mental struggle to untangle the symbiotic cycle—'insect plus bear equals tree, tree plus bear equals insect, and insect plus tree equals bear'—is rendered in plain, almost exasperated language: 'Damn, but not in the insect-flesh. The thing won't round off.' The diction avoids technical jargon, keeping the reader inside a mind that is intelligent but not pedantic.

Structure: The Contact as Narrative Device

The story's structure hinges on the Contact process: Norcriss dons a helmet, closes his eyes, and receives alien impressions via microtape. This allows Sharkey to deliver exposition as direct experience rather than dialogue or description. The narrative shifts from external action (the landing, fire-fighting) to internal perception (the alien life cycle) without breaking pace. After Contact, Norcriss rises and stretches, his hair turned 'snow-white'—a physical cost of the procedure that is mentioned but not dwelled upon. The technician, Bob Ryder, is left to wait for tape transcription, a framing device that keeps the focus on Norcriss's subjective account. This structure prioritizes the protagonist's moment-to-moment discovery over plot mechanics.

Recurring Details: The Symbiotic Cycle

Sharkey builds the alien ecology through a chain of transformations: vine-gourds produce insects, insects lay eggs in bear-things and die, bear-things eat the dead insects and later are eaten by their own young, whose droppings become trees. The trees then drip ichor that fertilizes eggs in dead bear-things, and bear-things swat tree-pods to release new insects. Norcriss's attempt to diagram this—'insect-plus-ichor produced small animals... Dead-insect-plus-bear produced tree'—becomes a recursive puzzle. The detail of 'miniature bear-things' with 'eager mouse-squeaks of hunger' devouring their parent is starkly physical. Sharkey avoids sentimentalizing the cycle; it is presented as a neutral, mind-bending biological fact that leaves Norcriss's 'head spinning pleasantly.'

Setting and Sensory Texture

The Viridian jungle is rendered in tactile and visual terms: 'green gloaming,' 'harlequin diamonds' of light, 'coarse-leaved ropy vines' that 'sprawled and coiled.' The landing site is a 'triangle of emptiness' in the canopy, and the ship descends on 'sputtering blue pillars of crackling energy.' After landing, crewmen spray 'high-pressure tanks of gushing spume' to douse fires, and vines smolder 'into smoky wet ash' from their own sap. This sensory density—the hiss of fire, the texture of loam, the 'vast silence' after the bear-thing's consumption—creates an immersive environment. Sharkey uses the setting to reinforce the strangeness: the planet is a closed system where every element participates in a relentless, non-human logic.

Readers should attend to how Sharkey balances technical exposition with character voice. Norcriss's mental wrestling with the symbiotic cycle is the story's intellectual core, but his wry asides and the physical details of Contact (the white hair, the couch, the helmet) keep the science from becoming abstract. The story rewards attention to its recursive structure and the way it embeds worldbuilding in a single, sustained point of view.