“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
