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 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!"