“A primitive would have been sorely tempted to kill you, Earth-child,” he said. “Fortunately for you we have a high and undeviating code of ethics.”
Back and forth over the children Tall-Thin played the beam, as if to make sure there would be no further unpleasantness from that source.
Then he clicked off the tube again, and turned to his remaining companion—a little man who apparently believed that silence and good order were the foundation of all things.
In a more primitive society he would have been considered a stooge but there appeared to be no such cultural concept in Tall-Thin’s scale of values. He spoke with the utmost respect, as if anyone who agreed with him automatically became as exalted as himself.
“The primitive who constructed this rocket had a remarkable mind,” he said. “We could not have constructed it for every culture, no matter how primitive, has resources peculiar to itself.”
“That is very true, Hilili!”
Mary Anne tried to turn her head to look at Melvin but her neck felt as stiff as when she’d had the mumps and everyone had felt sorry for her. She was sure that the little men did not feel in the least sorry and all she could do was stare in helpless anger as they turned and scrambled into the rocket.
Finally she did manage to turn her head, just far enough to see what Melvin was doing.
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
