Part 2

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.