He almost dragged the stunned Kincaid into the deserted office, to the
control-boards of the Proxies at Base.
"Take over a Proxy and follow me," Norris ordered. "I've an idea that
if we go down in that fissure again, we can prove it."
"Prove what?" Kincaid asked, but mechanically obeyed and took over a
Proxy control.
Again, Norris and Kincaid guided their Proxies out of Base and across
the seared Mercury plain toward Fissure Four. Norris peered down into
the fissure as he advanced. Then as they glimpsed the wrecked Proxies
they had previously left there, they also glimpsed glowing little
clouds flowing rapidly toward them.
A Raddy lifted its glowing gaseous body to envelop the control-box of
Norris' Proxy. Again, as he stared into the thing's brilliant, pulsing
core, he felt his senses reel queerly. But this time, he knew beyond
any doubt what it was.
"Hypnosis!" he yelled to Kincaid. "Hypnosis operating through our
Proxies' eyes right back along the beam to our own eyes and brains!
I thought so!" His shout died away as his brain reeled under the
powerful hypnotic influence of the Raddy's pulsing, starlike core.
Hypnosis could operate by vision, everyone knew that. Nobody had
dreamed of hypnosis operating across space by means of a linking
television beam, but it was happening. For Doug Norris, resisting now
with new-found knowledge, just dimly sensed the powerful hypnotic order
the Raddy's pulsing brain was hurling into his own mind.
"You will not send your crude machines down here again to disturb our
philosophical reveries!" the Raddy's hypnotic thought was sternly
ordering him. "There is no further need. When we read from your minds
that it was need for uranium for your primitive power plants that
motivated your intrusions here, we gave your brains the post-hypnotic
knowledge to improve those power plants so you would not need to come
here again. So go, and do not return!"
Under that powerful hypnotic command, both Norris and Kincaid turned
their Proxies and fled back up the fissure.
Not until they had reached Base again, not until they had ripped off
the television helmets, did Doug Norris feel that powerful hypnotic
command relax.
"It's as I suspected!" he cried. "It was the Raddies who put that
knowledge in our minds! Who would know nuclear science better than
they?"
Kincaid stared, his jaw dropping. "Then, to stop our bothering them,
they did that by post-hypnotic command working back along our own
Proxy-beams?"
"Yes!" cried Doug Norris. "Ironic, isn't it? They worked back along our
own beams and made Proxies out of _us_!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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