Part 2

Norris helped tie the two unconscious men with lengths of spare cable. Then he and Kincaid stood swaying a little as they owlishly inspected the controls of the mighty atomic piles.

Norris knew a good bit about those controls. He had been here many times, and Petersen and the other technicians had liked to talk. The trouble was, that right now his thoughts all seemed a little foggy.

"What we got to do," Kincaid said ponderously, "is change 'round the atomic pile setup so it'll handle bismuth instead of uranium. Right?"

"Right!" Norris approved enthusiastically. "That's going right to the heart of the problem, old pal!"

Kincaid seemed to blush in deprecation. "Oh, I jus' got an orderly mind. First thing now, is to shift the uranium lattices out of the piles."

He laid his hands on several of the levers, one after another. There was a low humming of machinery somewhere.

In the distant, towering structure, lattices loaded with uranium were being mechanically withdrawn to the pits beneath. But there was nothing happening here except on the panel of indicators.

Petersen came back to consciousness at that moment. Tied to a wall stanchion, he stiffened and his eyes bugged at them.

"What are you two doing?" he cried. "You're cutting off the power by pulling out those lattices!"

"Only temp'rarily," Norris assured him. "We'll shift empty lattices back in, and then load the bismuth into them."

Petersen uttered a howl of agony. "You maniacs will wreck the whole pile if you try a stunt like that! For heaven's sake, sober up and think what you're doing!"

"We're tryin' to think," Kincaid said sternly. "But how can we co'centrate, with you yelling at us?"

Petersen went from raging orders to agonized pleadings to tearful entreaty. The two ignored him completely.

"Le's see, now," Kincaid said, blinking. "We'll leave in the Number One uranium lattice after all. We'll need its neutrons to trigger the expanding series of graphite and bismuth lattices."

"We'll need _two_ uranium lattices," Doug Norris corrected thickly. "One to trigger the first action, the other to pr'vide neutrons for the continuous shuttle that'll run the bismuth's atomic number up from eighty-three to ninety-four, right up through neptunium to plutonium."

"You're right," Kincaid agreed, hiccuping slightly. "I forgot 'bout that second lattice for a minute. Mus' be because of all the noise in here."

* * * * *

Petersen was still producing that noise, indeed. He had become louder and more frantic as he saw them shifting out the uranium lattices and replacing them clumsily with empty lattice-frames.

"Ten thousand scientists have been working ever since Nineteen-forty-five to find a way to use common elements instead of uranium in a pile!" he choked. "They can't do it. But two drunken Proxy men are going to try it!"

Norris hardly heard that stream of agonized accusation and entreaty, as he helped Kincaid shift in the empty lattices. He was mildly sorry that Petersen felt so disturbed. There was no reason for it. He and Kincaid knew just what they were doing.

Or did they? For a moment, a dim doubt crossed Norris' foggy mind. After all, he and Kincaid weren't physicists. Then he dismissed that doubt. He was _sure_ of what they were doing, wasn't he?

Kincaid sat down unsteadily when they had the lattices changed.

"I feel a li'l shaky. 'S emotional reaction from great scientific achievement."

"Emotional reaction nothing--you're so plastered you're nearly out!" raged Petersen.

Kincaid dignifiedly ignored that. "Switch on the loader and shoot the ol' bismuth in there, Doug."

"Norris, _don't_ do it!" begged Petersen hoarsely. "It means wrecking the pile, and maybe blowing up the whole Station!"

Again, Doug Norris' dim doubt bothered him. But then again he dismissed it. Everything was so beautifully clear in his mind. It had to work.

He switched on the loader. The lead cylinder of bismuth slid away into the tube that would carry it to the pile, where it would be automatically loaded into the new empty lattices.

"You fools!" choked Petersen. "I hope they hang you both for this! When that pile starts up, and blows--"

The operation of the great atomic pile was automatic from this point on. Minutes later, a bell rang and indicators clicked on.

"First uranium lattice has triggered off," said Kincaid, and nodded, pleased. "Now we'll get power--lotsa power."

"You'll get nothing but maybe an atomic explosion, in ten seconds!" cried Petersen, his face deathly white.

Doug Norris suddenly felt his doubt rise again and this time it overwhelmed him! All his former foggy confidence seemed to have left him as they completed their operations.

He was suddenly aware of the mad and ghastly thing that he and Kincaid had done. Why in heaven's name had they done it? What crazy quirk in their minds had made them do it?

Kincaid too was suddenly looking pale and queer.

"Doug, maybe we shouldn't have tried it."

"Look at those meters!" yelled Petersen, in a wild voice.

The technician's eyes were protruding as he stared at the big bank of ammeters that registered the output of the great turbines. The needles were jumping across the dials with swiftly increasing amperage.

"The pile is _working_!" yelled Petersen hoarsely. "That bismuth is actually producing atomic power!"

Doug Norris suddenly felt cold sober, and a little sick. He sat down shakily, and put his head in his hands.

Kincaid was staring blankly at the ammeters, while Petersen and Thorpe seemed to have gone crazy with excitement. When Petersen was untied, he grabbed Kincaid fiercely.

"How did you do it?" he cried. "Just what did you do to the pile?"

Kincaid stared at him blankly. "I don't know, now."

"You don't know?" Petersen almost screeched. "Man, you've stumbled on what the scientists have been hunting all these years--the hookup to use common elements in an atomic pile! You must have had something figured out beforehand!"

"We didn't!" Norris denied weakly. "We got a little plastered, and got this idea. We didn't know what we were doing."

Suddenly, Doug Norris stiffened. Remembrance that brought him jumping unsteadily to his feet had come to him.

"You couldn't have done a thing like this by sheer crazy accident!" Petersen was insisting. "You must have known how!"

"By heaven, I believe now that we _did_ know what we were doing, in a queer sort of way!" Norris exclaimed shakily. He grabbed Kincaid's arm. "Mart, come with me! We're going back over to the Project!"

Petersen's dazed amazement was changing to exultation.

"Whatever you did, it's still working and looks like it'll work indefinitely! And we can study the hookup and learn how to duplicate it, even if we never completely understand it. You two maniacs are going to be famous!"

But Norris had already led the stupefied Kincaid out of the room.

* * * * *

All the way back to the Proxy Project, Kincaid kept dazedly repeating the same thing over and over.

"We must have been clear out of our heads to do a thing like that! 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 disturb our philosophical reveries!" the Raddy's hypnotic thought was sternly ordering him. "There is no further need. When we read from your minds that it was need for uranium for your primitive power plants that motivated your intrusions here, we gave your brains the post-hypnotic knowledge to improve those power plants so you would not need to come here again. So go, and do not return!"

Under that powerful hypnotic command, both Norris and Kincaid turned their Proxies and fled back up the fissure.

Not until they had reached Base again, not until they had ripped off the television helmets, did Doug Norris feel that powerful hypnotic command relax.

"It's as I suspected!" he cried. "It was the Raddies who put that knowledge in our minds! Who would know nuclear science better than they?"

Kincaid stared, his jaw dropping. "Then, to stop our bothering them, they did that by post-hypnotic command working back along our own Proxy-beams?"

"Yes!" cried Doug Norris. "Ironic, isn't it? They worked back along our own beams and made Proxies out of _us_!"