PROXY PLANETEERS By EDMOND HAMILTON [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Startling Stories, July 1947. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] 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.