"Doug, maybe we shouldn't have tried it." "Look at those meters!" yelled Petersen, in a wild voice. The technician's eyes were protruding as he stared at the big bank of ammeters that registered the output of the great turbines. The needles were jumping across the dials with swiftly increasing amperage. "The pile is _working_!" yelled Petersen hoarsely. "That bismuth is actually producing atomic power!" Doug Norris suddenly felt cold sober, and a little sick. He sat down shakily, and put his head in his hands. Kincaid was staring blankly at the ammeters, while Petersen and Thorpe seemed to have gone crazy with excitement. When Petersen was untied, he grabbed Kincaid fiercely. "How did you do it?" he cried. "Just what did you do to the pile?" Kincaid stared at him blankly. "I don't know, now." "You don't know?" Petersen almost screeched. "Man, you've stumbled on what the scientists have been hunting all these years--the hookup to use common elements in an atomic pile! You must have had something figured out beforehand!" "We didn't!" Norris denied weakly. "We got a little plastered, and got this idea. We didn't know what we were doing." Suddenly, Doug Norris stiffened. Remembrance that brought him jumping unsteadily to his feet had come to him. "You couldn't have done a thing like this by sheer crazy accident!" Petersen was insisting. "You must have known how!" "By heaven, I believe now that we _did_ know what we were doing, in a queer sort of way!" Norris exclaimed shakily. He grabbed Kincaid's arm. "Mart, come with me! We're going back over to the Project!" 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?"