we’ve warmed the biophysical nuances of his enclosure—“and tried to guess his needs; and we’re frightening him half to death. We can’t go faster. This creature is in no way similar to us, you know. He relies on paranormal forces—heat, light, kinetic energy—for his life. His chemistry is not ours, his processes of thought are not ours, his entire organism is closer to the inanimate rocks of a sea-bottom than to ourselves.”
“Understood, Hatcher. In your first report you stated these creatures were intelligent.”
“Yes, sir. But not in our way.”
“But in a way, and you must learn that way. I know.” One lobster-claw shaped member drifted close to the councillor’s body and raised itself in an admonitory gesture. “You want time. But we don’t have time, Hatcher. Yours is not the only probe team working. The Central Masses team has just turned in a most alarming report.”
“Have they secured a subject?” Hatcher demanded jealously.
The councillor paused. “Worse than that, Hatcher. I am afraid their subjects have secured one of them. One of them is missing.”
There was a moment’s silence. Frozen, Hatcher could only wait. The council room was like a tableau in a museum until the councillor spoke again, each council member poised over his locus-point, his members drifting about him.
Finally the councillor said, “I speak for all of us, I think. If the Old Ones have seized one of our probers our time margin is considerably narrowed. Indeed, we may not have any time at all. You must do everything you can to establish communication with your subject.”
“But the danger to the specimen—” Hatcher protested automatically.
“—is no greater,” said the councillor, “than the danger to every one of us if we do not find allies now.”
Hatcher returned to his laboratory gloomily.
It was just like the council to put the screws on; they had a reputation for demanding results at any cost—even at the cost of destroying the only thing you had that would make results possible.
Hatcher did not like the idea of endangering the Earthman. It cannot be said that he was emotionally involved; it was not pity or sympathy that caused him to regret the dangers in moving too fast toward communication. Not even Hatcher had quite got over the revolting physical differences between the Earthman and his own people. But Hatcher did not want him destroyed. It had been difficult enough getting him here.
Hatcher checked through the members that he had left with the rest of his team and discovered that there were no immediate emergencies, so he took time to eat. In Hatcher’s race this was accomplished in ways not entirely pleasant to Earthmen. A slit in the lower hemisphere of his body opened, like a purse, emitting a thin, pussy, fetid fluid which Hatcher caught and poured into a disposal trough at the side of the eating room. He then stuffed the slit with pulpy vegetation the texture of kelp; it closed, and his body was supplied with nourishment for another day.
He returned quickly to the room.
His second in command was busy, but one of the other team workers reported—nothing new—and asked about Hatcher’s appearance before the council. Hatcher passed the question off. He considered telling his staff about the disappearance of the Central Masses team member, but decided against it. He had not been told it was secret. On the other hand, he had not been told it was not. Something of this importance was not lightly to be gossiped about. For endless generations the threat of the Old Ones had hung over his race, those queer, almost mythical beings from the Central Masses of the galaxy. One brush with them, in ages past, had almost destroyed Hatcher’s people. Only by running and hiding, bearing one of their planets with them and abandoning it—with its population—as a decoy, had they arrived at all.
Now they had detected mapping parties of the Old Ones dangerously near the spiral arm of the galaxy in which their planet was located, they had begun the Probe Teams to find some way of combating them, or of fleeing again.
But it seemed that the Probe Teams themselves might be betraying their existence to their enemies—
“Hatcher!”
The call was urgent; he hurried to see what it was about. It was his second in command, very excited. “What is it?” Hatcher demanded.
“Wait. …”
Hatcher was patient; he knew his assistant well. Obviously something was about to happen. He took the moment to call his members back to him for feeding; they dodged back to their niches on his skin, fitted themselves into their vestigial slots, poured back their wastes into his own circulation and ingested what they needed from the meal he had just taken. … “Now!” cried the assistant. “Look!”
At what passed among Hatcher’s people for a viewing console an image was forming. Actually it was the assistant himself who formed it, not a cathode trace or projected shadow; but it showed what it was meant to show.
Hatcher was startled. “Another one! And—is it a different species? Or merely a different sex?”
“Study the probe for yourself,” the assistant invited.
Hatcher studied him frostily; his patience was not, after all, endless. “No matter,” he said at last. “Bring the other one in.”
And then, in a completely different mood, “We may need him badly. We may be in the process of killing our first one now.”
“Killing him, Hatcher?”
Hatcher rose and shook himself, his mindless members floating away like puppies dislodged from suck. “Council’s orders,” he said. “We’ve got to go into Stage Two of the project at once.”
III
Before Stage Two began, or before Herrell McCray realized it had begun, he had an inspiration.
The dark was absolute, but he remembered where the spacesuit had been and groped his way to it and, yes, it had what all spacesuits had to have. It had a light. He found the toggle that turned it on
