 Why is the supervising council worried about the Old Ones?
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. How to explain a set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? They were not metal or plaster or knotty pine; they were not papered, painted or overlaid with stucco. They might be ventilators, he thought; but if so the air they brought in was worse than what he already had. 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. 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." 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. "Paranormal powers," muttered Hatcher's second in command, and the others mumbled agreement. 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."
 The Old Ones have captured one of their probers.
 The Old Ones have captured one of their probers.  The Old Ones are not happy with the kind of science Hatcher is conducting.  The Old Ones need Hatcher’s data on the human specimen.  The Old Ones must be given a human tribute soon.