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 dazzled by the brilliance of the Raddy that enveloped his Proxy's control-box. It was like looking into a star to look into the glowing, pulsing core of the thing.
His senses reeled queerly as he stared, hypnotized by the swirling bright gas and the starlike, throbbing core. He sensed dimly that that core was a kind of life possible on no terrestrial planet, a crystalized gaseous neurone structure that used its own radon emanations as a body.
He felt his senses staggering, darkening. It was as though he were hypnotized by the brilliance of that pulsing core of light, as though it were probing excruciatingly into his brain.
Then Doug Norris came out of his queer daze to find himself sitting there with his helmet dead. He could see nothing. His movements of the Proxy controls yielded no response.
"Blacked out, both our Proxies!" Kincaid exclaimed, dazedly taking off his own helmet. "And we got some kind of kick-back shock."
Norris, still badly shaken, nodded unsteadily. "There must have been a kick-back along the control beam when they blew the control-boxes. The circuit breakers may have been slow." He added quickly, "But you know now I was right! Those Raddies are living things, that instinctively attack our Proxies!"