Title: Little men of space
Author: Long, Frank Belknap
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Little men of space" ***


                          little men of space

                         By Frank Belknap Long


                 The children were very young--and the
              crisis they were called upon to face would
             have driven most adults into a straitjacket.

    _As befits a former protégé of the late great Howard Phillips
    Lovecraft, Mr. Long is a master of the horror story. More, he is
    well aware that the deepest terror may not always stem from the
    infinitely large. Sometimes the infinitely small can be even worse._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                  Fantastic Universe June-July 1953.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


The children were coming home. Elwood could see them from the cottage
doorway, shouting and rejoicing in the bright October sunlight. They
carried lunch baskets and--as they came tripping toward him across
the lawn--he was ready to believe that nothing in life could be quite
as enchanting as the simple wonder of childhood itself with its
light-hearted merriment and freedom from care.

He was ready to forget the laundry bills and the scuffed shoes, the
father-and-son problems, all the tormenting lesser difficulties which
could demolish parenthood as an exact science and turn it into a madcap
adventure without rhyme or reason.

Mary Anne was in the lead. She squealed with delight when she caught
sight of her father's entranced face, as if by some miracle he had
become all at once a gift-bestowing snowman quite as remarkable as the
hollow dolls, one within the other, which she had received from him as
a goodwill offering on her last birthday.

Eleven-year-old Melvin was more circumspect. In his son's eyes John
Elwood represented all the real values of life in so far as they could
be translated into model locomotives and bridge-building sets. But he
knew his father to be a man of dignity who could not be easily cajoled.
It was best to let his sister try first and when she failed....

For an instant as he stared Elwood found himself secretly envying his
son. At a quarter-past eleven Melvin had a firm grasp of elementary
physics. His feet were firmly planted on the ground and he wasn't
serious-minded enough yet to make the tragic mistakes that come with
adult unsureness.

Not the kind of mistakes which he, James Seaton Elwood, had made with
the moon rocket, for instance. Or the mistake which he was making now
by whimsically comparing the ages of his son and daughter to the moving
hands of a clock.

How absurd it was to think of Mary Anne as a quarter-past seven when
her budding feminine intuition made her as ageless as the Sphinx. All
children were ageless really and it was absurd to imagine that they
could be made to conform to any logical frame of reference, scientific
or otherwise.

Children were illogically imaginative, with a timelessness which gave
them an edge on adults when it came to solving problems that required a
fresh approach to reality. What was it Wordsworth had said? _Trailing
clouds of glory...._

"Daddy, Mr. Rayburn let us out early--so we could have a picnic. It
would have been fun if Melvin hadn't spoiled everything. He ate up all
of the peanut butter sandwiches himself."

"Tattle tale!"

"He got in a fight too. Freddy Mason didn't want to fight but Melvin
started it!"

"I _did_n't!"

"You _did_! You know you did!"

"That's a lie!"

Elwood lowered his eyes and saw that both of his children were now
as close to him as they could ever be. Mary Anne was tugging at his
sleeve, begging him to take her part, and Melvin was appealing to him
in man-to-man fashion, his contemptuous masculinity acting as a foil to
his sister's feminine wiles.

It was a grave crisis and Elwood recognized it as such. Ordinarily he
would have shunned a cut-and-dried solution but for once he had no
choice.

       *       *       *       *       *

When children fall out, when you are backed into a corner and your
authority totters, there is only one sure way to save yourself--_Occupy
their minds with something else_.

"You're spoiling the surprise, kiddies," Elwood said, striving to sound
embittered. "It's been a lonesome hard day for me but I kept telling
myself you'd soon be home to share my triumph. I suppose I shouldn't
say this--but your mother just doesn't understand me the way you do."

"What is it, daddy?" Mary Anne asked, a sudden warm solicitude in her
gaze.

"Yeah, Pop, tell us!" Melvin chimed in.

"The rocket is just about completed," Elwood said.

He felt Mary Anne's hand tighten on his sleeve and realised with
elation that she was a scientist's daughter to her fingertips. He was
gratified quite as much by the sudden hiss of Melvin's indrawn breath.

"Come along--I'll show you!" he said.

Elwood derived the most intense pleasure from showing groups of
visiting dignitaries--scientific big shots for the most part--through
his basement laboratory. But when the dignitaries happened to be his
own children his elation knew no bounds.

Down the basement stairs they trooped, Melvin to the right of him, Mary
Anne to the left. A door opened with a gentle click, a light came on
and Melvin let out a yell which resounded through the house.

"You've got the blast reflector set up. _Pop!_"

The rocket stood out, silver on black at its base, with a dull shine
where it tapered to catch and hold the light.

It was not large as rockets go. It was barely five feet in height, a
miracle of technical craftsmanship wrought by the unerring skill and
scientific knowhow of a very practical man with a family to support.
But it had been built with an eye to beauty as well and as the light
glimmered and danced on its sloping vanes it seemed as gracefully
poised for flight as some half-mythical bird cast in metal by a
long-vanished elfin race.

As gracefully poised and as shiningly beautiful....

It was Mary Anne who broke the spell. "Daddy, will it really go to the
moon?"

Elwood looked down at his daughter and patted her tousled red-gold
hair. "How many times must I tell you it isn't an experimental model?"
he chided. "It was designed for actual space flight."

"But daddy--"

"If you've any more silly notions you'd better get rid of them right
now. You may never get another chance. Yesterday Melvin and I discussed
the details as fellow-scientists. Suppose you tell her just how much
the Government is contributing, son."

"Forty thousand dollars!" Melvin said promptly, rolling the figure over
his tongue as though it had some mysterious magic of its own which
could elevate him to man's estate--if he repeated it often enough.

"A research grant," Elwood added as if thinking aloud for his own
benefit. "I had a tough time persuading them to let me do all the
construction work right here in my own laboratory. I've probably cut
more yards of official red tape than any odd duck since Archimedes."

He smiled a little ruefully. "In case you're interested--I've had to
pay through the nose for the technical assistance I've been getting.
Those owl-faced characters you've seen drifting in and out won't work
for peanuts."

"But all of the rockets in the stereo-cineramas are much bigger!" Mary
Anne protested. "Why is that, daddy?"

"We've just about seen the end of the huge outmoded, stratosphere
observation-type rockets," Elwood replied, including both children in
his glance. "In the future observation rockets will be much smaller and
there is little to be gained by attempting to send a large rocket to
the moon. The cost would be a thousand times as great."

"But daddy, how could such a little rocket ever get as far as the moon."

"Perhaps the worst mistake an individual or a society can make is to
confuse size with power," Elwood said. "There is a tiny bee which, in
proportion to its size, can travel faster than our cleverest flight
specialists in their jet planes."

"But daddy--"

"Don't look so incredulous, honeybunch. You remind me of your mother.
Melvin knows just how much progress we've made in atomic research since
Eniwetok. Tell her, son."

"The primitive hydrogen bomb tested at Eniwetok laid the groundwork for
the storage of vast amounts of nuclear power in blast compartments a
few inches square," Melvin said pridefully. "We can now power a very
small rocket designed for space flight with the equivalent of fifty
million tons of TNT."

"You left out one vital consideration, Melvin," Elwood said. "The
automatic-control factor."

"Pop's right," Melvin said, confronting his sister almost accusingly.
"The power won't be released all at once."

"It will be released in successive stages," Elwood corroborated.
"We hope eventually to regulate the stages--or steps, as they are
called--in such a way that other rockets, identical in design, will
build up velocities approaching the speed of light."

       *       *       *       *       *

Elwood picked up an odd-looking instrument from the work-bench against
which he had been leaning. As he fingered it idly he enjoyed his
daughter's stunned acceptance of his accomplishment, realising more
than ever what an important contribution he had made to man's eventual
conquest of the stars.

That conquest would come in good time. Even now enough atomic potential
had been stored in the rocket to carry it to Alpha Centauri--and back.
The blast mechanism had to have an overload to function at all. But
only a tiny fraction of the potential would be needed to make the moon
flight an accomplished fact.

The rocket wouldn't be traveling at anything like the speed of light.
But just as soon as a few more complicated technical details had been
worked out....

Elwood felt suddenly very tired. His back ached with stiffness and his
eyelids throbbed. Fortunately he knew the reason for his weariness and
refused to become alarmed. He had simply been driving himself too hard.
But with the rocket so near completion he couldn't afford to let even a
draft of cold wind blow upon him and increase his chances of becoming
really ill.

"If it's all right with you, kiddies," he said, "I'm going upstairs to
bed. I'm practically out on my feet."

"Aw, Pop, it isn't six o'clock yet!" Melvin protested.

Instantly Mary Anne came to his rescue. "Daddy, you're not getting
enough rest!" she said, her eyes darting to the rocket and then to her
brother in fierce reproach.

"I ought to turn in early when I can," Elwood said. "If your mother
wasn't at Aunt Martha's I'd have to sit up half the night convincing
her I've got enough practical sense left to shave and bathe myself and
take in the mail."

"Goodnight, daddy!" Mary Anne said.

"Goodnight, kids. Thanks for being patient and giving me a break."

"Pop, can I stay down here and look it over?"

"Sure, Melvin, stay as long as you like. I don't mind your puttering
around a bit with the tools so long as you don't touch the rocket."
Elwood's face grew suddenly strained. "Promise me you won't."

"He won't!" Mary Anne promised.

She waited for her father's footsteps to echo hollowly on the floor
above before she turned her ire full upon Melvin. "If I was a boy I'd
be more considerate of daddy than you are!" she exclaimed, accusingly.
"You don't care how tired he gets."

"You're not a boy," Melvin retorted. "You never could be. What's the
sense in fooling yourself?"

"You just repeat everything he tells you," Mary Anne flared. "You're
not so smart!"

"I'm smart enough to know that rocket could be sent further than the
moon--right now."

Mary Anne gasped. "You're crazy. Daddy knows what he's doing."

"Sure he does. If he sent it as far as it could go it would disappear
in space. He couldn't prove anything and he'd be in real trouble.
They'd say he got rid of it because it wouldn't work and kept the forty
thousand dollars for himself."

"The Earth-child is right!" a tiny voice said. "That rocket can and
must carry us to our home planet. It is our last remaining hope."

For an instant Melvin felt as if he had swallowed a goldfish. Something
flopped in his throat, coldly and horribly, and though the voice rang
clear in his ears it seemed to come from deep inside his head.

"He hears us!" the voice said. "Before he sees us we'd better train the
beam on him. All Earth-children are emotional but the males are the
hardest to control."

It was Mary Anne who screamed in protest. She stood as if frozen,
staring down with swiftly widening eyes at the three tiny men who had
come striding into the room through the wall. They had come in with a
blaze of light behind them, a shimmering of the wall itself that seemed
to go right through to the other side.

Mary Anne could have crushed them simply by raising her foot and
bringing it down dead center above them. But their eyes warned her to
be still.

_Do not scream again, Earth-child_, the eyes warned. _We are not as
ugly as we seem to you and your fright is very distasteful to us._

Horribly ugly they seemed to Mary Anne. They were no larger than the
white ivory pawns on the chessboard in her father's library but they
did not resemble pawns in the least. They were wrinkled and old-looking
and the cheapest doll she had would have cried with shame to be dressed
as they were.

She could have made out of an old handkerchief a better dress, with
more tucks and seams to it--and no Jack-in-the-Box could have popped up
to shiver and sway with such toothless, evil-eyed malice.

A child can escape from a monster of the toymaker's craft simply by
drawing a line between the real and the imaginary. But Mary Anne could
not escape from the little men facing her. There was no line to be
drawn and she knew it.

The little men were alive, and they were staring at her now as she had
never been stared at before. As if she were a stick of wood about to be
thrown into a blazing fire which had been kindled for Melvin as well.

Totally bald they were, with skins so shriveled that their small,
slitted eyes were buried in a maze of wrinkles. Most pitiful of all
was the fact that their skins were mottled brown and green--colors so
enchanting when associated with budding leaves or the russet-and-gold
splendors of an autumn landscape.

The little men were alive and they were warning her to be quiet. Just
to make sure that she would not move or attempt to scream again they
spoke to her again inside her head.

"We're going to use the beam on you too. But you won't be hurt if you
don't try to wake up your father."

She could hardly keep from screaming when she saw what they were doing
to her brother. The tallest of the three--they were not all of the same
height--was turning Melvin slowly about in a blaze of light.

He was the thinnest of the three too--so thin and tall that she
automatically found herself thinking of him as Tall-Thin. The light
came from a tiny glowing tube which Tall-Thin was clasping in hands as
small and brightly shining as the penpoints in her school stationery
set.

She knew by the way she felt that Melvin wanted to scream too--to
scream and struggle and fight back. But he couldn't even move his head
and shoulders. He was all stiffened up and he turned as she'd seen him
do in dreams when they'd been quarreling and she had wanted to punish
him for making faces at her--to punish him by skipping away across the
room and laughing because he couldn't follow her.

She was sorry now she'd ever dreamed of Melvin in that way even when
he was mean to her. She felt even sorrier when she heard her brother
shriek. It wasn't much of a shriek--just a thin little cry that came
out muffled.

Melvin had almost lost the power of speech and it was awful to watch
him trying to move his lips. He was completely turned now, staring down
at the little men, and his eyes were shrieking for him.

"Don't make them mad, Melvin!" Mary Anne pleaded. "They'll kill you."

Instantly Tall-Thin turned and trained his gaze on Mary Anne, his face
twitching with impatience. "Dealing with the immature is a nuisance,"
he complained and Mary Anne heard the words clearly even though she
knew they were not meant for her. Deep inside her head she could hear
Tall-Thin speaking to his companions.

As if sensing something disturbing in that the second-tallest of
the three spoke in reply--spoke for the first time. "They'll hear
everything we say. It would be so much more convenient if we could talk
to them without giving them the power to hear in return every word we
utter."

"That cannot be avoided, Rujit," replied Tall-Thin. "When we read their
minds we awaken extra-sensory faculties which would ordinarily remain
dormant in them."

"And rudimentary."

"And rudimentary." Tall-Thin agreed. "It's like stimulating a low-grade
energy circuit with a high-grade charge. The low-grade circuit will
remain supercharged for a brief period."

"Would it not be safer to kill them at once?"

"Unnecessary killing is always unpleasant," Tall-Thin said.

"We should be emotionally prepared for it," Rujit countered. "We would
not have survived and become great as a race if we had not conquered
all such squeamishness in ourselves. We must be prepared to nullify all
opposition by instant drastic action--the most drastic action available
to us at any given time."

Rujit paused for an instant to transfix Tall-Thin with an accusing
stare. Then he went on quickly, "In an emergency it is often very
difficult to decide instantly how necessary an action may be. To take
pleasure in killing unnecessarily is therefore a survival attribute of
a very high order."

"I would as soon kill the Earth-children as not." Tall-Thin said. "But
the slightest emotional unpleasantness militates against survival.
Every act we perform must be dictated by reason. Our moral grandeur as
a race is based on absolute logic--not on blind instinct. Even in an
emergency _we_ are wise enough to determine how necessary an action may
be. So your argument falls to pieces."

       *       *       *       *       *

Tall-Thin straightened, his parchment-dry face crinkling with rage.
"This isn't the first time you've questioned my wisdom and authority,
Rujit!" he said and his voice was like the hiss of a snake uncoiling in
the long grass of a jungle clearing.

Rujit stiffened as if invisible fangs had buried themselves in his
flesh. His cheeks could hardly have been called ruddy to begin with but
their pallor suddenly became extreme. He took a quick step backward, a
look of horror coming into his eyes.

"You _wouldn't_! No, _no_, Hilili!"

"The choice is no longer mine alone."

"But I was just thinking out loud!"

Tall-Thin clicked off the beam, leaving Melvin still standing
large-eyed and motionless against the wall. He raised the tube which
had projected the beam until it was pointing directly at Rujit.

"I'm going to step up the beam," he said.

"But why? _Why_, Hilili? For the love you bear me--"

"I bear you no love."

"But you are my biogenetic twin, Hilili. We have been closer than
ordinary brothers from birth."

"It does not matter. It does not concern me. Family relationships
militate against survival when reason falters in a single member of a
family group."

Tall-Thin's voice hardened. "We came to this planet for one purpose--to
colonize it for the good of all. We numbered thousands and now we are
reduced to a pitiful remnant--just ourselves. Thanks to the stupidity
of a few."

"I was never one of the stupid ones!" Rujit protested. "I advised our
immediate return. The unknown and hideous diseases which decimated
us like _migs_, the atmospheric gases which rotted our ships so
insidiously that we were not aware of the damage until they exploded
in flight--remember, I kept insisting that we could not survive such
hazards for long!"

"Your sound judgment in that respect was more than offset by your
wilful insistence we explore the entire planet," Tall-Thin countered.
"Our ships were so numerous that they were observed in flight and we
might have been destroyed completely when death and disaster struck.

"As might have been expected the very shape of our ships made them
conspicuous. Fiery disks they must have seemed to the Earth dwellers,
so terrifying that they would have eventually found a way to fathom the
mystery, and strike back. A perishing remnant of an advanced race has
never yet succeeded in killing two billion primitives armed with Class
C-type weapons."

"But how could I have known it then?"

"Ignorance is never an excuse!" Tall-Thin's voice was a merciless rasp.
"A well-organized logical mind does not make such mistakes. Now we are
facing utter disaster unless we can get back to our home planet and
warn _The Twenty_ that it would be sheer madness to attempt to colonize
this planet again without better disease-preventing safeguards and
atmosphere-resisting metals. Such safeguards can and must be worked
out."

Tall-Thin paused, watching Melvin as if apprehensive that the praise he
was about to bestow would be held against him to the detriment of his
vanity.

"Unfortunately only two of us can go in this rocket, which has
miraculously come into our possession. The primitive who constructed
it, this Earth-child's progenitor, must have an almost Class B-type
mind. Only two of us, understand?"

"But--"

"The survival of the wisest. I'm afraid I shall have to extinguish
you, Rujit."

The tube lit up again, so brightly that Tall-Thin's hand was blotted
out by the glare. Equally blotted out was Rujit's face but the rest
of him did not vanish immediately. One arm disappeared but not the
other--and there was a yawning dark gap between his knees and his waist.

It might not have seemed so horrible if Rujit had not shrieked first.
The shriek had an outward-inward quality, echoing both inside the heads
of the children and in the room as actual sound.

Even Tall-Thin seemed shaken by it, as if in a race that had outgrown
the need for physical speech there could be nothing more unnerving than
anguish so expressed.

Yet both the shriek and the almost instant blotting out of Rujit's face
were eclipsed in point of horror by the fading of the little man's
legs. They faded, kicking and protesting and spasmodically convulsed,
faded in a ruby red glow that lingered for an instant in the still air
like a slowly dissolving blood clot, then as slowly vanished.

It was at that moment Mary Anne ceased to think as a child. She dug her
knuckles into her mouth to keep from screaming but the undaunted way in
which her mind worked was a tribute to her forgetfulness of self. _If
he should do that to Melvin!_

Tall-Thin must have sensed the loathing in her mind, for he turned
with a grimace of rage and trained the beam full upon her, taking care
however to alter the tube's destructive potential with a quick twist of
his thumb.

"A primitive would have been sorely tempted to kill you, Earth-child,"
he said. "Fortunately for you we have a high and undeviating code of
ethics."

Back and forth over the children Tall-Thin played the beam, as if to
make sure there would be no further unpleasantness from that source.

Then he clicked off the tube again, and turned to his remaining
companion--a little man who apparently believed that silence and good
order were the foundation of all things.

In a more primitive society he would have been considered a stooge but
there appeared to be no such cultural concept in Tall-Thin's scale of
values. He spoke with the utmost respect, as if anyone who agreed with
him automatically became as exalted as himself.

"The primitive who constructed this rocket had a remarkable mind," he
said. "_We_ could not have constructed it for every culture, no matter
how primitive, has resources peculiar to itself."

"That is very true, Hilili!"

Mary Anne tried to turn her head to look at Melvin but her neck felt
as stiff as when she'd had the mumps and everyone had felt sorry for
her. She was sure that the little men did not feel in the least sorry
and all she could do was stare in helpless anger as they turned and
scrambled into the rocket.

Finally she did manage to turn her head, just far enough to see what
Melvin was doing.

Melvin wasn't moving at all. His head was lowered and he was thinking.
She knew that he was thinking by the look in his eyes. Melvin was
silently thinking and as she stared she ceased to be afraid.

She sat very still, waiting for Melvin to speak to her. Suddenly he
did, deep inside her head.

The little men had come from far, far away. They had come from a big
cloud of stars in the sky called the Great Nebula in Andromeda. Nearly
everything in the universe curved and they had come spinning along the
biggest curve of all in hundreds and hundreds of punched-out disks that
glowed in the dark like Roman candles.

The cow pasture Melvin and she played in was--she knew what it was but
she waited for Melvin to say it--rocket proving-ground. It was their
own secret playing place but daddy called it a rocket proving-ground.

Daddy wouldn't send the rocket to the moon from his laboratory in
the cellar. He'd take it out to the proving-ground and ask even the
President of the United States to watch it start out for the Moon.

The President would come because her daddy was a very important and
wonderful man. He didn't have much money but he'd be rich and famous
if the rocket reached the moon.

Most men as wonderful as her daddy were poor until they did something
to make people stand up and shout. The little men didn't want her
daddy to become rich so that he could send Melvin through college and
she could go to college too. The little men didn't want her to learn
domestic housekeeping and make the handsomest man in all the world
happy.

The little men wouldn't--couldn't--take the rocket out to the
proving-ground. It would start off blazing and go straight up through
the roof into the sky. It would blow the cellar apart and the cottage
would come tumbling down in ruins. Melvin would be killed and her
daddy....

She had never been so terrified in all her life and if Melvin hadn't
started thinking she would have burst out crying.

Melvin was thinking something now about the cottage. Water came in from
the sea. It did too--she remembered daddy complaining about it when
he went down to stoke the furnace. Water in the cellar and the ground
underneath all soft and soggy.

Salt-marsh seepage. Why, it was like quicksand down below the
solid strata. The words came quick and clear from Melvin thinking.
_Solid strata._ Even the solid strata wasn't all solid. There were
_porosities_ in it--like a sponge. If something very heavy went down
through the cellar floor it would go right on sinking.

_Auxiliary fuels_, came from Melvin thinking. _They're in the auxiliary
fuel-chamber now. Hot steam in the turbines, pushed right through
the heat exchanger. The atomic charge won't go of at all if the heat
exchanger works fast enough._

_They don't know as much about the rocket as Pop does_, came from
Melvin. _The atomic part is the big important part. They came at night
and studied that. But the heat exchanger--they didn't take the trouble
to study it. Now they're worried about it. Why should an atomic rocket
have auxiliary fuels?_

Daddy could have told them. You had to have auxiliary fuels in a rocket
if you were going to send it to the moon. The rocket's trajectory would
have to be modified by small readjustments that could only be made by
auxiliary fuels.

Melvin, think hard! Think hard and fast, and in the right way!

_They're stopping now to puzzle it out_, came from Melvin. _Their minds
work differently from ours. They fasten on the big important things
first. The small things they sometimes overlook. They can't help it.
Their minds are constructed that way._

_Mustn't let trivialities distract us._ That's what they were thinking.
That's what they were thinking, and they were going to make a mistake.

_They're going to move the wrong dial. I'm going to help them move
the wrong dial. I want them to move the wrong dial. They must move the
wrong dial...._

It began with a faint humming sound--nothing more. But something that
couldn't have come from Melvin at all showered Mary Anne's mind with
thoughts and emotions that were like a screaming inside her head.

A continuous terrified screaming that made her want to slap her hands
to her ears to shut out the sound.

The screaming stopped the instant the rocket began to vibrate. It
stopped as abruptly as a jet of steam issuing from a suddenly clogged
pipe.

The humming changed to a droning and the rocket vibrated so furiously
that Mary Anne grew dizzy just watching it. With the dizziness came a
terrible fear that the rocket would explode. It was like being bound to
a chair, helpless, and knowing you couldn't possibly escape. She saw
herself being blown up with the cottage, with Melvin screaming for her
to save him.

But nothing like that happened. The cottage shook a little. She was
hurled forward, then to her knees. But the blast of heat which fanned
her face was no worse than the blast from a furnace door swinging
quickly open and shut.

Straight down through the floor the rocket sank with its base glowing
white hot. There were a sizzling and a hissing and she could see
flames dancing through the steam which kept rising in clouds until
water gushed up in torrents and put the fire out.

She shut her eyes then and clenched her hands tight.

She sat very still, waiting for Melvin to come to her. She felt a great
and overwhelming need to lean on someone, to be consoled by a firm
masculine voice speaking out bold and clear.

The bursting strangeness was gone from inside her head. She could move
again. She refused to try but she knew that she could whenever she
wanted to. Her thoughts were her own now--not Melvin's or Tall-Thin's.

She started to cry, very softly, and she was still crying when Melvin
reached her side, helped her to her feet.

"Mary Anne, I could see them moving around inside the rocket. I could
even make them do what I wanted them to do. It happened as soon as
they turned that ray on me. I couldn't move but I knew what they were
thinking."

"So did I, Melvin," Mary Anne sobbed. "I knew what _you_ were thinking
too."

"Yeah. We seemed to be talking together there for a minute. But not the
way we're talking now."

Mary Anne nodded. "I knew what you were thinking and they knew what
we...." Mary Anne stopped. "_Melvin!_ You fooled them! Inside the ship
they didn't hear us talking together. If they had heard us they would
not have made a mistake and turned the wrong dial."

"Yeah, I know. I tried to throw up a mental block when we talked about
the auxiliary fuel-chamber and what would happen if the heat exchanger
worked fast enough. I guess it worked. The mental block, I mean...."

"You bet it worked, Melvin. You're wonderful, Melvin."

"You didn't think so when you told Pop about the sandwiches."

"I didn't mean to be a nasty, Melvin."

"All right--skip it. Funny thing--I could never read anybody's thoughts
before. It only lasted for a few minutes. I couldn't do it now."

"They must have done something to us, Melvin."

"I'll say they did. What's Pop going to think when he comes down here
tomorrow and sees the rocket gone?"

"I'm afraid he's going to be awfully mad, Melvin."

There is perhaps no more striking illustration of the prophetic faculty
at work in the world than when it appears full-blown in the occasional
understatements of children.

The next morning, Elwood didn't merely hurl the magazine at his son. He
pointed first to the article, tapping furiously with his forefinger at
Melvin's photograph while his breakfast grew cold at his elbow.

"Melvin, I warned you to keep your hands off that rocket. I warned you
not to touch it or jar it in any way. But you had to putter around
until you did something to the heat exchanger dial. It's conduct like
that which makes me realize how mistaken these journalist monkeys can
be. A genius! You're no more of a genius--"

"Pop, you've got to believe me!" Melvin protested. "The little men
are--"

"_Little men!_ My son is not only a genius"--Elwood stressed the word
with a biting sarcasm which was not lost on Melvin--"but a first-class
liar! Here, read this article again. It was published two months
ago--but I guess you didn't read it over often enough. It may shame
you into going into a corner and giving yourself a thorough mental
overhauling."

       *       *       *       *       *

Elwood tossed the magazine then--straight across the table at the
disturbed Melvin.

"If he's a liar so am I!" Mary Anne gasped in angry protest.

"For a dozen years now flying saucer rumors have been all over the
place," Elwood said, glaring at both of his children. "I suppose it's
only natural you should chatter occasionally about little men. All
children do. But to use such imaginary companions as an excuse for an
act of wanton destructiveness...."

Melvin picked up the magazine almost automatically. Solely to bolster
his sagging self-esteem--even the innocent and falsely accused can feel
guilty at times--he stared at his own photograph and the somewhat
baroque caption which surmounted it.

                       YOUNG SCIENTIFIC AMERICA

    Can genius be inherited? The distinguished accomplishments in
    nuclear physics and space-flight theory by the father of the boy
    who has won the most coveted annual award available to American
    youth for all-around scientific achievement strengthens the
    arguments of those who believe that the bright mysterious torch of
    genius can be passed on from father to son. But when interviewed
    the youthful winner of the Seabury Medal modestly disclaimed....

"If I saw a little man do you know what I'd do?" came in bitter
reproach from the original holder of Melvin's inherited torch.

And then, in rhetorical response, "I'd make it my fight--a fight forced
upon me against my will. I'd consult a good psychiatrist immediately."

"I throw myself on your mercy!" a tiny voice said. "I am unarmed, I am
alone--and I am the last of my kind remaining alive on your planet."

       *       *       *       *       *

Melvin stopped reading abruptly, flushing guiltily to the roots of his
hair. He had been wishing that his father _could_ see a little man and
now he was being punished for his thoughts in the cruelest possible way.

The winner of the Seabury Medal knew that insanity was rare in
childhood but to hear imaginary voices....

"Hilili thought he had extinguished me," the voice went on, "but by
exerting my will to the utmost I managed to waver back. I beg you to be
merciful!"

The voice became almost pathetic in its tragic pleading. "You need
no longer fear me for I will soon die. Injured and weakened as I am
the disease organisms so fatal to my race are certain to kill me very
quickly now."

Melvin looked up then--and so did Mary Anne.

The little man stood on a bright mahogany sideboard, gleaming with all
the primitive appurtenances of a Class C-type breakfast. A tray of
buttered toast, crisply brown, rose like the Great Pyramid of Cheops at
his back, and he was leaning for support against the coffee percolator
that mirrored his wan and tormented face in wavy and distorted lines.

It was easy to see that death was already beckoning to Rujit with a
solemn and pontificial bow.

"_Pop!_" Melvin gasped, leaping to his feet.

John Elwood did not answer his son. However much he may have wanted to
communicate there are few satisfactory avenues of communication that
remain open to a man lying flat on his stomach on the floor in a dead
faint.




*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Little men of space" ***

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