 What is the image Hatcher’s team sees on the viewing consul?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1963. 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. 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. How to explain a set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? 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. Hatcher did not in any way look like a human being, but they had features in common. 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. Hatcher ordered silence, studying the specimen from Earth. 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. Hatcher identified himself and gave a quick, concise report: "The subject recovered consciousness a short time ago and began to inspect his 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. However, he then reverted to physical-contact, manipulating certain appurtenances of an artificial skin we had provided for him. Hatcher swung closer, his thick skin quivering slightly; he would have gestured if he had brought members with him to gesture with. 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. 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." The Central Masses team has just turned in a most alarming report." 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. Not even Hatcher had quite got over the revolting physical differences between the Earthman and his own people.
 A human female
 A human female  Hatcher’s specimen  The Jordell Bank  A human male