"L-look!" said Professor Wardle, dry-throated. "It's true! L-look what he made! Wh-what this thing would do—"
With shaking hands he disconnected a wire so it could not possibly be turned on by accident. Then he trembled.
Tommy wept himself back to something like composure in his mother's arms. The antics of his father and Professor Wardle helped, of course. They babbled at each other over his contrivance. They looked incredulously at each other. Then they drew diagrams at each other, talking feverishly.
Then Tommy's father remembered him. "Captain," said Tommy's father, and there was sweat on his face, "you did a good day's work, all right, but please don't do it again without warning me! This—this contrivance of yours isn't a ray pistol. It's a thing that will start a chain reaction in carbon and iron. If you'd turned it on, all the carbon and iron within its range would have started to act like an atomic pile, and it would have spread, and we couldn't have stopped it. There—wouldn't have been any more Earth."
Tommy blinked at him, catching his breath from time to time as a small boy will do after desperate weeping. Then his eyes began to shine.
"Gee!" said Tommy. "That—that Thing was trying to destroy Earth, wasn't he? And I stopped him!"
"He was," said Tommy's father in a very queer voice indeed, "and you did. If a grown-up had been in your place, the trick would have been different, and it probably would have worked."
Tommy ceased to catch his breath. He glowed.
"I was like Captain McGee!" he said breathlessly.
Tommy's father swallowed. He needed to hold tightly to his self-control. He, like Professor Wardle, had all the sensations now of a man who has just realized that his life, and that of his family, and that of every other human being on Earth, had hung by a hair for seconds.
But he saw, too, that the deadly small contrivance which had not annihilated humanity made use of and so revealed exactly the new principles Earth's scientists needed most urgently to know. It would mean atomic engines and power and space-ships and ray-guns. They would mean a Space Patrol to protect Earth against just such creatures as had been foiled by Tommy Driscoll. And that meant—
"Yes," said Tommy's father gently. "Just like Captain McGee, Tommy. It appears that the comic books are coming true."