"I'm telling you," his father explained, "that I can try several billion ways to unscramble this supposed signal. Even if it can be done, only one of them will be right. It's going to take time."
"But, Dad, please try!"
Tommy was filled with infinite excitement. Which, of course, was not only necessary if the comic books were to be made to come true, but was wholly normal small boy.
Here was an interstellar signal! He had heard it! Tune the set right and he would see—maybe something like the giraffe-men who almost killed Captain McGee on the Planet of Sand! Or the frog men the Star Rover had to fight when a crippled space liner was forced to descend on the watery planet Alith!
"I've got to figure out a way to unscramble it, Tommy," his father said. "I've got to calculate the settings that are most likely to show some change on the screen. It's rather like breaking a code. It will take a couple of weeks to compute a series of settings to try one after the other."
Tommy was unconvinced. He argued. Space Captain McGee's friend Doc Blandy would simply have whipped out his trusty slide rule and made the computations in seconds. He would push the slide back and forth, set the television controls according to his computations, and say, "On the beam, McGee!" And Space Captain McGee would gaze into the television-screen and see the worm monsters of Blathok about to chloroform Jenny—Captain McGee's girl friend—to transfer the brain of a worm-monster into her skull. Her body would thereafter house an inveterate enemy to the human race, with specific plans for annihilating it.
Tommy argued. Impassionedly. In the end his father had to resort to authority to stop his arguing. And then Tommy was tempted to revert to his former disillusionment about scientists.
But continued belief offered high reward in excitement. So he believed. Still it was a rebellious small boy who accompanied his father and Professor Wardle home. Even the expected ice-cream cone did not console him. He consumed it in an avid gloom. His father tried to comfort him.
"After all, we're not sure," he told Tommy. "It might not be a signal at all. Or it might be a signal of a type that would seem simple enough to the creature who sent it, but hopelessly complicated to us. They might be so much farther advanced in science. In any case, it's not a thing to be solved off-hand."
"But you're going to try, aren't you, Dad?" asked Tommy desperately. "You said it wouldn't do any harm! You said we could lick them! They couldn't harm Earth!"
"I'll try," his father assured him. "It's simply useless to go it blind. That's all. I'll have my calculations done in a couple of weeks, and you can watch while I try the whole business. All right?"
Tommy gulped. He was unable to speak for disappointment. When one is ten years old, odds of billions to one are negligible, but two weeks of waiting is eternity. It is exactly the same as never. And this, too, was not only in the necessary pattern of things if the comic books were to come true, but it was perfectly natural small boy.
THAT night Tommy went rebelliously to bed the third time he was told. He had hung around his father and Professor Wardle, listening hungrily to every incomprehensible word they said. He was keyed up to enormous excitement.
He slept only fitfully. The comics had been a make-believe world in which he believed only with a book in his hand. Now they promised to become real, and he was filled with a monstrous hunger for the adventure they promised.
He woke at dawn and his lurid, fitful dreams had made him ripe for desperate and daring deeds. He slipped into his shorts and sandals and went downstairs. He gulped a huge glass of milk and stuffed down an ample slice of cake.
Then he came to a grand and desperate resolution. He slipped out the back door and trudged across the dew-wet campus to his father's laboratory.
He wormed unseen into the small building. His heart beat fast. He was scared, but he was Space Captain McGee and the Star Rover all rolled into one—in his own mind—and definitely he was ten-year-old Tommy Driscoll. He remembered, of course, how his father bad turned on the short-wave set and the television screen. No small boy could forget those items!
He sat down before the controls and threw the two switches with a grandly negligent gesture that Captain McGee himself could not have bettered. And then he started, blindly but with infinite confidence, to unscramble the Jansky Radiation.
He was one-half making believe, and one-half deadly earnest, and all absolute faith. Naturally. The odds against any one setting of the controls being the right one to unscramble the Jansky radiation were several billion to one. But the heroes of comic books always win against odds like that.
So did Tommy Driscoll. The comic books were fated to come true.
The faintly glowing television-screen quite impossibly flickered as he turned the controls. His heart pounded. He worked on, his eyes shining and his head far above the clouds out in interstellar space with Captain McGee and the Star Rover.
Presently, quite impossibly, the screen became a steadily pulsating rectangle which at its brightest was very bright indeed. He found a maximum brightness on which he could not improve. He worked other controls at random.
One made odd streaks appear on the screen. At the peak of streakiness, Tommy's heart was thumping in his throat. He, Tommy Driscoll, was about to make contact with the people of another planet, circling another, distant sun!
Another knob suddenly gathered together the streakings and the pulsations. They made the vaguest of patterns, and then the fuzziest of images. His hand shaking uncontrollably, Tommy Driscoll continued to turn that knob with the slowest possible movements.
He had a flash of clearness, and his heart leaped. Then everything was fuzzy again. He turned the knob back, his breath coming in excited pantings.
And then, in total defiance of the laws of Chance, but in strict obedience to Fate and Destiny, there was abruptly a perfectly clear picture on the screen. It was not a picture of any place on Earth, but of somewhere else—a place so alien in every respect that Tommy would never be able to describe it. And there was a Thing looking out of the screen at Tommy Driscoll!
His heart did multiple flip-flops and he shook all over. But it shocked him much less than it would have shocked an adult, because he was wholly familiar with such apparitions from the comic books.
This Thing looked rather like the people on the planet Zmyg, who had tried to wall up Captain McGee in a glass pyramid so he would roast to death when their purple sun rose above the horizon. But also It looked rather like Mr. Schneider, who mowed the lawns on Faculty Row. And It grinned at Tommy.
"Hello!" he said in a clear treble, which shook uncontrollably with his excitement. "I'm Tommy Driscoll of Earth. We're friendly if you're friendly. We're tough if you're tough. How about it?"
That was an exact quotation from the comic book in which Captain McGee had made contact with the people of the System of the Twenty Suns—and later had to fight against swarms of space-ships which wanted to capture his star maps so they could find Earth and attack it treacherously, without warning. The Thing answered Tommy.
IT DIDN'T use words, of course. But in the comic books mind-to-mind communication of alien peoples is common enough. Captain McGee had done it more than once, and the Star Rover frequently, wandering more widely than McGee, as he did.
Tommy knew what the Thing was saying, and his piping small-boy voice answered in his father's laboratory, and he knew that the Thing understood him, too. The comic books were specifically coming true.
The Thing spoke respectfully and cordially, though of course it did not really speak at all. Its people wanted to be friends with Earth. Of course! They had been watching Earth with radar for centuries, so It told Tommy jovially. They knew that sooner or later Earthmen would roam the stars and benevolently rule all the planets of all the suns of the Galaxy in which Earth is placed. Because, of course, Earth has uranium and other heavy metals supplying atomic energy, while other planets are not so fortunate.