Proxy Planeteers

Edmond Hamilton

Doug Norris hesitated for an instant. He knew that another movement might well mean disaster.

Here deep in the cavernous interior of airless Mercury, catastrophe could strike suddenly. The rocks of the fissure he was following had a temperature of hundreds of degrees. And he could hear the deep rumble of shifting rock, close by.

But it was not these dangers of the infernal underworld that made him hesitate. It was that sixth sense of imminent peril that he had felt twice before while exploring the Mercurian depths. Each time, it had ended disastrously.

"Just nerves," Norris muttered to himself. "The uranium vein is clearly indicated. I've got to follow it."

As he again moved forward and followed that thin, black stratum in the fissure wall, his eyes constantly searched ahead.

Then a half-dozen little clouds of glowing gas flowed toward him from a branching fissure. Each was several feet in diameter, a faint-glowing mass of vapor with a brighter core.

Norris moved hastily to avoid them. But there was a sudden flash of light. Then everything went black before his eyes.

"It's happened to me again!" Doug Norris thought in sharp dismay.

Frantically he jiggled his controls, cut in emergency power switches, overloaded his tight control beam to the limit. It was no use. He still could not see or hear anything whatever.

Norris defeatedly took the heavy television helmet with its bulging eyepieces off his head. He stared at the control-board, then looked blankly out the window at the distant, sunlit stacks of New York Power Station.

"Another Proxy gone! Seven of them wrecked in the last two weeks!"

It hadn't just happened, of course. It had happened eight minutes ago. It took that long for the television beam from the Proxy to shuttle from Mercury to this control-station outside New York. And it took as long again for the Proxy control-beam to get back to it on Mercury.

Sometimes, a time-lag that long could get a Proxy into trouble before its operator on Earth was aware of it. But usually that was not a big factor of danger on a lifeless world like Mercury. The Proxies, built of the toughest refractory metals, could stand nearly anything but an earthquake, and keep on functioning.

"Each time, there's been no sign of falling rocks or anything like that," Norris told himself, mystified. "Each time, the Proxy has just blacked out with all its controls shot."

Then, as his mind searched for some factor common to all the disasters, a startled look came over Doug Norris' lean, earnest face.

"There were always some of those clouds of radon or whatever they are around, each time!" he thought. "I wonder if-" A red-hot thought brought him to his feet. "Holy cats! Maybe I've got the answer!"

He jumped away from the Proxy-board without a further glance at that bank of intricate controls, and hurried down a corridor.

Through the glass doors he passed, Norris could see the other operators at work. Each sat in front of his control-board, wearing his television helmet, flipping the switches with expert precision. Each was operating a mechanical Proxy somewhere on Mercury.

Norris and all these other operators had been trained together when Kincaid started the Proxy Project. They had been proud of their positions, until recently. It was a vitally important job, searching out the uranium so sorely needed for Earth's atomic power supply.

The uranium and allied metals of Earth had years ago been ransacked and used up. There was little on Venus or Mars. Mercury had much of the precious metal in its cavernous interior. But no man, no matter how ingenious his protection, could live long enough on the terrible, semi-molten Hot Side of Mercury to conduct mining operations.

That was why Kincaid had invented the Proxies. They were machines that could mine uranium where men couldn't go. Crewless ships guided by radar took the Proxies to the Base on Mercury's sunward side. From Base, each Proxy was guided by an Earth operator down into the hot fissures to find and mine the vital radioactive element. The scheme had worked well, until-

"Until we got into those deeper fissures with the Proxies," Doug Norris thought. "Seven wrecked since then! This must be the answer!"

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 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 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...