"Murray Leinster - From Beyond the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

an ample slice of cake.
Then he came to a grand and desperate resolution. He slipped out the back door and trudged across
the dew-wet campus to his father's laboratory.
He wormed unseen into the small building. His heart beat fast. He was scared, but he was Space
Captain McGee and the Star Rover all rolled into one—in his own mind—and definitely he was
ten-year-old Tommy Driscoll. He remembered, of course, how his father bad turned on the short-wave
set and the television screen. No small boy could forget those items!
He sat down before the controls and threw the two switches with a grandly negligent gesture that
Captain McGee himself could not have bettered. And then he started, blindly but with infinite confidence,
to unscramble the Jansky Radiation.
He was one-half making believe, and one-half deadly earnest, and all absolute faith. Naturally. The
odds against any one setting of the controls being the right one to unscramble the Jansky radiation were
several billion to one. But the heroes of comic books always win against odds like that.
So did Tommy Driscoll. The comic books were fated to come true.
The faintly glowing television-screen quite impossibly flickered as he turned the controls. His heart
pounded. He worked on, his eyes shining and his head far above the clouds out in interstellar space with
Captain McGee and the Star Rover.
Presently, quite impossibly, the screen became a steadily pulsating rectangle which at its brightest was
very bright indeed. He found a maximum brightness on which he could not improve. He worked other
controls at random.
One made odd streaks appear on the screen. At the peak of streakiness, Tommy's heart was
thumping in his throat. He, Tommy Driscoll, was about to make contact with the people of another
planet, circling another, distant sun!
Another knob suddenly gathered together the streakings and the pulsations. They made the vaguest
of patterns, and then the fuzziest of images. His hand shaking uncontrollably, Tommy Driscoll continued
to turn that knob with the slowest possible movements.
He had a flash of clearness, and his heart leaped. Then everything was fuzzy again. He turned the
knob back, his breath coming in excited pantings.
And then, in total defiance of the laws of Chance, but in strict obedience to Fate and Destiny, there
was abruptly a perfectly clear picture on the screen. It was not a picture of any place on Earth, but of
somewhere else—a place so alien in every respect that Tommy would never be able to describe it. And
there was a Thing looking out of the screen at Tommy Driscoll!
His heart did multiple flip-flops and he shook all over. But it shocked him much less than it would
have shocked an adult, because he was wholly familiar with such apparitions from the comic books.
This Thing looked rather like the people on the planet Zmyg, who had tried to wall up Captain
McGee in a glass pyramid so he would roast to death when their purple sun rose above the horizon. But
also It looked rather like Mr. Schneider, who mowed the lawns on Faculty Row. And It grinned at
Tommy.
"Hello!" he said in a clear treble, which shook uncontrollably with his excitement. "I'm Tommy
Driscoll of Earth. We're friendly if you're friendly. We're tough if you're tough. How about it?"
That was an exact quotation from the comic book in which Captain McGee had made contact with
the people of the System of the Twenty Suns—and later had to fight against swarms of space-ships
which wanted to capture his star maps so they could find Earth and attack it treacherously, without
warning. The Thing answered Tommy.

IT DIDN'T use words, of course. But in the comic books mind-to-mind communication of alien
peoples is common enough. Captain McGee had done it more than once, and the Star Rover frequently,
wandering more widely than McGee, as he did.
Tommy knew what the Thing was saying, and his piping small-boy voice answered in his father's
laboratory, and he knew that the Thing understood him, too. The comic books were specifically coming