 Is Herrell as intelligent as Hatcher? Why or why not?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1963. His name was Herrell McCray and he was scared. Whatever it was, he had no business in it; for five minutes before he had been spaceborne, on the Long Jump from Earth to the thriving colonies circling Betelgeuse Nine. McCray was ship's navigator, plotting course corrections—not that there were any, ever; but the reason there were none was that the check-sightings were made every hour of the long flight. He had read off the azimuth angles from the computer sights, automatically locked on their beacon stars, and found them correct; then out of long habit confirmed the locking mechanism visually. He picked himself up, braced against something that smelled dangerously of halogen compounds, and scratched his shoulder, right through his space-tunic, against something that vibrated as he touched it. There simply was no way for him to get from a warm, bright navigator's cubicle on Starship Jodrell Bank to this damned, dark, dismal hole of a place where everything was out to hurt him and nothing explained what was going on. He tripped and fell against something that was soft, slimy and, like baker's dough, not at all resilient. A spacesuit, yes; he knew that he could construct a logical explanation for that with no trouble—maybe a subspace meteorite striking the Jodrell Bank , an explosion, himself knocked out, brought here in a suit ... well, it was an explanation with more holes than fabric, like a fisherman's net, but at least it was rational. How to explain a set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Or the old-fashioned child's rocking-chair, the chemistry set—or, most of all, the scrap of gaily printed fabric that, when he picked it up, turned out to be a girl's scanty bathing suit? Even the child's chair—why, he'd had one more or less like that himself, long before he was old enough to go to school. They were not metal or plaster or knotty pine; they were not papered, painted or overlaid with stucco. They seemed to be made of some sort of hard organic compound, perhaps a sort of plastic or processed cellulose. They were "neutral"—the color of aged driftwood or unbleached cloth. Item, a short time ago—subjectively it seemed to be minutes—he had been aboard the Jodrell Bank with nothing more on his mind than completing his check-sighting and meeting one of the female passengers for coffee.
 Yes, but their intelligences operate differently.
 No, Humans lack the organs that make Hatcher’s race smarter.  No, Hatcher’s race is far more intelligent.  Yes, but their intelligences operate differently.  Yes, but humans absorb intelligence through concepts while Hatcher’s race absorbs intelligence through light.