But how is it that we were able to do it right?"

"Haven't you suspected the answer to that yet?" cried Doug Norris. "Don't you see why, as soon as our conscious minds were relaxed by a few drinks, we automatically went and performed an operation totally beyond present-day nuclear science? What happened to us just before we had those drinks? What happened when our Proxies met those Raddies down in the fissure?"

"The Raddies?" Kincaid repeated stupidly. "What could those brutes have to do with this?"

"We thought they were only brutes, a low form of queer radioactive life," Norris said. "But what if their weird minds are intelligent, supremely intelligent? An intelligence that doesn't operate for purposes or in ways like ours, but that's as high or higher than ours?"

He almost dragged the stunned Kincaid into the deserted office, to the control-boards of the Proxies at Base.

"Take over a Proxy and follow me," Norris ordered. "I've an idea that if we go down in that fissure again, we can prove it."

"Prove what?" Kincaid asked, but mechanically obeyed and took over a Proxy control.

Again, Norris and Kincaid guided their Proxies out of Base and across the seared Mercury plain toward Fissure Four. Norris peered down into the fissure as he advanced. Then as they glimpsed the wrecked Proxies they had previously left there, they also glimpsed glowing little clouds flowing rapidly toward them.

A Raddy lifted its glowing gaseous body to envelop the control-box of Norris' Proxy. Again, as he stared into the thing's brilliant, pulsing core, he felt his senses reel queerly. But this time, he knew beyond any doubt what it was.

"Hypnosis!" he yelled to Kincaid. "Hypnosis operating through our Proxies' eyes right back along the beam to our own eyes and brains! I thought so!" His shout died away as his brain reeled under the powerful hypnotic influence of the Raddy's pulsing, starlike core.

Hypnosis could operate by vision, everyone knew that. Nobody had dreamed of hypnosis operating across space by means of a linking television beam, but it was happening. For Doug Norris, resisting now with new-found knowledge, just dimly sensed the powerful hypnotic order the Raddy's pulsing brain was hurling into his own mind.

"You will not send your crude machines down here again to 

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