Short Fiction · Little Men of Space (1/3)

Little Men of Space

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 lighthearted 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 didn’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 T.N.T.”

“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 workbench 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 extrasensory 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.”