circulation. Given Mercury's conditions, it's no more impossible than a jellyfish or a man here on Earth!"

Kincaid looked skeptical.

"And you think these hypothetical living Raddies of yours are attacking our Proxies? Why would they?"

"If they have cognition and correlation faculties they might be irritated by the tube emanations from the control-boxes of our Proxies," Norris suggested. "They get into those control-boxes and wreck the tube circuits by overloading the electron flow with their own Beta radiation!"

"It's all pretty far-fetched," muttered his superior. "Radioactive life! But all those Proxies blowing can't be just chance." He paused, then added gloomily, "But I can just see myself telling a World Council committee that your hypothetical living Raddies are what keep us from delivering uranium! Hurriman would like that. It would convince the Council that I'm as incompetent as he claims."

"He'll convince the Council of that anyway unless we deliver uranium from Mercury quickly," retorted Norris. "And we'll never do it till we get these Raddies licked. They're basically just complex clouds of radioactive gas. A Proxy armed with a high-pressure gas hose should be able to blow them to rags. Can't we try it, Mart?"

Kincaid sighed, and stood up.

"I was a practical man once," he said wearily, "and would have booted you out of here if you'd suggested such stuff. But I'm a drowning man right now, so I'll buy your straw. We'll send down a couple of Proxies armed with gas hoses and see how they make out."

Doug Norris eagerly went with his superior into the adjoining room where the operators of the Base Proxies were on duty.

"Norris and I will take over two Proxies at base," Kincaid told the sub-chief there.

Two operators took off their helmets and got out of their chairs. Norris took the place of one, donning the television helmet.

The control and television beams were on. The compact kinescope tubes in his helmet gave him a clear vision of the Base on Mercury, as seen through his Proxy's iconoscope "eyes".

There were no buildings, for Proxies didn't need shelter. The seared black rocks stretched under a brazen sky, beneath a stupendous Sun whose blaze even the iconoscope filters couldn't cut 

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