someone else could.
someone was watching herrell mccray, with the clinical fascination of a biochemist observing the wigglings of paramecia in a new antibiotic—and with the prayerful emotions of a starving, shipwrecked, sailor, watching the inward bobbing drift of a wave-born cask that may contain food.
suppose you call him "hatcher" (and suppose you call it a "him.") hatcher was not exactly male, because his race had no true males; but it did have females and he was certainly not that. hatcher did not in any way look like a human being, but they had features in common.
if hatcher and mccray had somehow managed to strike up an acquaintance, they might have got along very well. hatcher, like mccray, was an adventurous soul, young, able, well-learned in the technical sciences of his culture. both enjoyed games—mccray baseball, poker and three-dimensional chess; hatcher a number of sports which defy human description. both held positions of some importance—considering their ages—in the affairs of their respective worlds.
physically they were nothing alike. hatcher was a three-foot, hard-shelled sphere of jelly. he had "arms" and "legs," but they were not organically attached to "himself." they were snakelike things which obeyed the orders of his brain as well as your mind can make your toes curl; but they did not touch him directly. indeed, they worked as well a yard or a quarter-mile away as they did when, rarely, they rested in the crevices they had been formed from in his "skin." at greater distances they worked less well, for reasons irrelevant to the law of inverse squares.
hatcher's principal task at this moment was to run the "probe team" which had mccray under observation, and he was more than a little excited. his members, disposed about the room where he had sent them on various errands, quivered and shook a little; yet they were the calmest limbs in the room; the members of the other team workers were in a state of violent commotion.
the probe team had had a shock.
"paranormal powers," muttered hatcher's second in command, and the others mumbled agreement. hatcher ordered silence, studying the specimen from earth.
after a long moment he turned his senses from the earthman. "incredible—but it's true enough," he said. "i'd better report. watch him," he added, but that was surely unnecessary. their job was to watch mccray, and they would do their job; and even more, not one of them could have looked away to save his life from the spectacle of a creature as odd and, from their point of view, hideously alien as herrell mccray.
hatcher hurried through the halls of the great buried structure in which he worked, toward the place where the supervising council of all probes would be in permanent session. they admitted him at once.
hatcher identified himself and gave a quick, concise report:
"the subject recovered consciousness a short time ago and began to inspect his enclosure. his method of doing so was to put his own members in physical contact with the various objects in the enclosure. after observing him do this for a time we concluded he might be unable to see and so we illuminated his field of vision for him.
"this appeared to work well for a time. he seemed relatively undisturbed. however, he then reverted to physical-contact, manipulating certain appurtenances of an artificial skin we had provided for him.
"he then began to vibrate the atmosphere by means of resonating organs in his breathing passage.
"simultaneously, the object he was holding, attached to the artificial skin, was discovered to be generating paranormal forces."
the supervising council rocked with excitement. "you're sure?" demanded one of the councilmen.
"yes, sir. the staff is preparing a technical description of the forces now, but i can say that they are electromagnetic vibrations modulating a carrier wave of very high speed, and in turn modulated by the vibrations of the atmosphere caused by the subject's own breathing."
"fantastic," breathed the councillor, in a tone of dawning hope. "how about communicating with him, hatcher? any progress?"
"well ... not much, sir. he suddenly panicked. we don't know why; but we thought we'd better pull back and let him recover for a while."
the council conferred among itself for a moment, hatcher waiting. it was not really a waste of time for him; with the organs he had left in the probe-team room, he was in fairly close touch with what was going on—knew that mccray was once again fumbling among the objects in the dark, knew that the team-members had tried illuminating the room for him briefly and again produced the rising panic.
still, hatcher fretted. he wanted to get back.
"stop fidgeting," commanded the council leader abruptly. "hatcher, you are to establish communication at once."
"but, sir...." hatcher swung closer, his thick skin quivering slightly; he would have gestured if he had brought members with him to gesture with. "we've done everything we dare. we've made the place homey for him—" actually, what he said was more like, 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."
