down much. The Base was just a flat area here beside the low rock hills. A crewless ship lay to one side, its hatches open. Near it were the supply-dumps of Proxy parts, the repair shops, the power plant.

"We'll get a couple of oxygen tanks from the supply dump and use them for your gas hose weapons," Kincaid was saying.

The Proxies they were guiding did not look like men. They looked like what they were—machines devised for special purposes. They were like baby tanks, mounted on caterpillar drives, each with two big jointed arms ending in claws, and a control-box with iconoscope eyes. They clamped on the high-pressure oxygen tanks, clutched the nozzles of the attached hoses, and rolled out of Base across the seared plain toward the black rock hills. In a few minutes, they entered the narrow cleft of Fissure Four.

Norris knew the way down here. He led, switching on his searchlight even though he didn't really need it. The Proxy's iconoscope eyes could see by the infra-red radiation from the superheated rock walls.

They finally reached the spot deep down in the fissure where his disabled former Proxy still stood. Doug Norris reached his jointed arms and quickly unclamped the shield of its control-box.

"Look there, Mart! The whole control's shot! They do it by overloading the tubes with their own Beta emanations, all right."

Kincaid's Proxy had elbowed close, its big iconoscope eyes peering closely. Here in the office, Kincaid uttered a grunt.

"That still doesn't prove the gas that did it was living. Instead of your hypothetical Raddies, it could be—"

"Look there!" yelled Doug Norris suddenly. "There they come again!"

Three of the glowing gaseous things were flowing toward them along the fissure. They poised for a moment in a lifelike way, and then swept forward.

"Your gas hose!" yelled Norris to the man beside him. "Don't let them get near you!"

The Raddies were advancing in a deliberate way. In spite of the time-lag, Norris tried to raise his gas hose and trigger it. There wasn't time. The eight-minute lag between his action and the result out there on Mercury was fatally long. The glowing Raddies were flowing up around the Proxies.

Doug Norris was momentarily 

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