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.