Martin Kincaid looked up sharply as Norris entered his office. A look of faint dismay came on Kincaid's square, patient face. He knew that a Proxy operator wouldn't leave his board in the middle of a shift, unless there was trouble.

"Go ahead and give me the bad news, Doug," he said wearily.

"Proxy M-Fifty just blacked out on me, down in Fissure Four," Norris admitted. "Just like the others. But I think I know why, now!" He continued excitedly: "Mart, seven Proxies blacking out in two weeks wasn't just accident. It was done deliberately!"

Kincaid stared. "You mean that Hurriman's bunch is somehow sabotaging our Project?"

Doug Norris interrupted with a denial. "Not that. Hurriman and his fellow politicians merely want to get their hands on the Proxy Project, not to destroy it."

"Then who did wreck our Proxies?" Kincaid demanded.

Norris answered excitedly. "I believe we've run into living creatures in those depths, and they're attacking us."

Kincaid grunted. "The temperature in those fissures is about four hundred degrees Centigrade, the same as Mercury's sunward side. Life can't exist in heat like that. I suggest you take a rest."

"I know all that," Norris said impatiently. "But suppose we've run into a new kind of life there—one based on radioactive matter? Biologists have speculated on it more than once. Theoretically, creatures of radioactive matter could exist, drawing their energies not from chemical metabolism as we do, but from the continuous process of radioactive disintegration."

"Theoretically, the sky is a big roof with holes in it that are stars," growled Kincaid. "It depends on whose theory you believe."

"Every time a Proxy has blacked out down there, there's been little clouds of heavy radioactive gas near," argued Doug Norris. "Each seems to have a denser core. Suppose that core is an unknown radium compound, evolved into some kind of neuronic structure that is able to receive and remember stimuli? A sort of queer, radioactive brain?

"If that's so, and biologists have said it's possible, the body of the creature consists of radon gas emanated from the radium core. You remember the half-life of radon exactly equals the rate of its emission from radium, so there'd be a constant equilibrium of the thing's gaseous body, analogous to our blood 

 Prev. P 3/16 next