Tommy's eyes glowed. But he was extraordinarily composed, in the heroic calm of children in exciting make-believe.
"Oh, sure!" said Tommy largely, to the Thing of outer space. "We're going to have a Space Patrol that will make all the people on all the planets behave. I'm going to be a captain in it. Maybe we'll come and visit you first of all. How far away are you?"
The Thing could not tell Tommy in mind-to-mind converse. The thought it had could not be translated into words by Tommy Driscoll's brain. But the distance was very great, and It explained quickly that they were able to talk over so vast a chasm as if face to face because of–
Again Tommy's brain was not able to translate the mental impressions he received. He could recognize the meanings the Thing wanted to convey, if the meanings were stored away in his memory. But naturally, complex technical concepts were simply not in his vocabulary. The Thing seemed satisfied to fail.
"Have you got space-ships and ray-guns and gravity nullifiers and mysterious rays?" asked Tommy eagerly. "Our scientists haven't even made ray guns yet!"
The Thing said that of course Its race had such things. It added encouragingly that men would have them soon, of course. With heavy elements—even copper and iron—it would be easy.
Then an overtone came into the thoughts that crowded into Tommy's brain from somewhere beyond the stars. Tommy did not notice the overtone at first. It was a feeling of eagerness and triumph and of a sneering superiority.
Tommy got just a momentary impression of Its thought of a Space Patrol subjugating all the Galaxy to Earth. And the barest, instantaneous flash of hatred because of that thought. But he was too much excited to notice. He was absorbed in his question about ray guns.
It said that they were simple. In fact, It would tell him how to make one. And It began, simply, to explain—a bit of copper wire, twisted just so, and a bit of carbon and a morsel of iron.
It urged Tommy to make one immediately. It would guide his hands. The adjustment. of the iron and carbon was delicate.
Tommy was a small boy, and he sturdily controlled his own hands. In the end the Thing simply told him what to do. He made the contrivance It suggested, putting the wire and iron and carbon together on a bit of board, having salvaged them from his father's supplies.
The result did not look too impressive, to be sure. It did not even look like a ray pistol, and that may account for what ultimately happened. Because when it was finished and Tommy regarded it with a faint and illogical disappointment because it didn't look like Captain McGee's ray pistol, he suddenly felt the eager triumph in the Thing which had instructed him.
He glanced at the screen, and the Thing was looking out of it with a ravening, unguarded hatred in Its expression. To Tommy it abruptly looked like the leader of those Mercurians who had wanted to wipe out the human race so they could emigrate to Earth. And suddenly he realized that It hated him and all of humanity with a terrible, burning fury.
"Say!" said Tommy Driscoll, his small-boy's hands clenching and his brows contracting in the best possible imitation of Space Captain McGee. "This don't look so good!" His voice wabbled suddenly, and he swallowed. "I'm going to ask my father about this!"
THE THING argued. Plausibly. Flatteringly. But Tommy felt corrosive hatred behind the ingratiating thoughts. Somehow It reminded him of the Dictator of Pluto in one of the comic books he had read only the day before. It asked almost sneeringly if he was afraid.
"Scared, no!" said Tommy in his clear treble, but with the portentious grimness of McGee. "I'm just cagey! I'll have my father look this over to see if it's what you say it is!"
Then the Thing raged. Into Tommy's brain there came such menaces, such threats, that his mind reeled. There was authority there, too, and at ten years one is accustomed to obey authority.
But there was sudden deep suspicion in Tommy's mind, too, and he was fortified by all his knowledge of how the Star Rover and Captain McGee behaved when defying worm monsters and giraffe-men and immaterial entities and other non-human races.
As the Thing raged at him, trying to overwhelm his will with iterated and reiterated commands and threats and sneers and mockery and derision and everything else which should have made Tommy try out his gadget —as the Thing raged at him, Tommy fought sturdily, but under a strain which manifested itself as terror, and then panic, and then as hysterical defiance.
Which, of course, was essential if the comic books were ordained by Fate and Destiny to come true.
Tommy was white and shaking and terrified when he got home. His family was at breakfast. He went into the dining room on leaden feet and with a whipped, scared look on his chalky-white face. It was nine o'clock. Tommy had slipped away at sunrise. Now he returned, carrying a seemingly crude and seemingly purposeless object in his hand. It was made of copper wire with a bit of carbon and a morsel of iron.
"Where've you been?" demanded his father sternly. He didn't call Tommy "Captain," which meant that Tommy was in disgrace. Tommy looked at his father numbly. He shook all over.
"I said, where have you been?" his father repeated. "Your mother and I have been worried!"
Tommy swallowed. Then, suddenly, he went all to pieces. He burst into raging tears and flung the contrivance the Thing had described into the midst of the breakfast table dishes.
"That old Thing!" he sobbed in hysterical fury. "It was in the television screen and it told me how to make this ray gun! And it—it told me to turn it on and I was going to when I remembered that octopus scientist from Centauri who left a note for Captain McGee to make something, and signed it Doc Blandy, and if he'd made it it would have blown up the whole Earth!"
His father and mother stared. To have one's small son arrive at the breakfast table in a state of frenzy is upsetting. It is worse when he flings odd objects on the table and shatters a flower vase, while sobbing of impossibilities.
"What—what's this?" asked his father, at once startled and uneasy. "What are you talking about, son?"
Tommy beat on the table with his fists. He blubbered, but he babbled with the starkly precise articulation of hysteria. His face was utterly white. He was beside himself.
"I—tuned in the set in the laboratory!" he cried, in little sobbing bursts of speech. "I—unscrambled it! And the—Thing looked at me . . . It was a Thing that hated humans! It told me how to make this and—and—"
Tommy's father went pale, himself. He got up quickly and his chair fell over backward. He tried to touch Tommy comfortingly, but Tommy thrust him away.
"Too many comic books," said Tommy's father, frightened. "I'll get him to the doctor."
"I—guessed what It wanted!" panted Tommy, sobbing. "And It knew what I was thinking and It got mad! I knew It got mad! It laughed at me and asked me if I was a coward and scared to try the thing I'd made! And I said, "You old Mercurian! You old Plutonian! You want to blow up Earth!' And I went bang. I sma-smashed that t-television screen and I sm-smashed—"
Then Tommy buried his head in his mother's lap and howled. And his father and mother looked at each other, white-faced, because they thought his mind had cracked. Even temporarily it was awful to think about.
But then Professor Wardle, breakfasting with them, said very softly:
"Great heavens!"
HE WAS looking at the contrivance Tommy had made under the Thing's instruction. It wasn't quite like anything that anybody on Earth had ever made before, but a scientist looking at it would see more than Tommy could have imagined. Professor Wardle saw aspects that made sense. Then he saw things, that he could understand but could not possibly have devised. And then he saw the implications.