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

"Scared, no!" said Tommy in his clear treble, but with the portentious grimness of McGee. "I'm just
cagey! I'll have my father look this over to see if it's what you say it is!"
 Then the Thing raged. Into Tommy's brain there came such menaces, such threats, that his mind
reeled. There was authority there, too, and at ten years one is accustomed to obey authority.
But there was sudden deep suspicion in Tommy's mind, too, and he was fortified by all his
knowledge of how the Star Rover and Captain McGee behaved when defying worm monsters and
giraffe-men and immaterial entities and other non-human races.
As the Thing raged at him, trying to overwhelm his will with iterated and reiterated commands and
threats and sneers and mockery and derision and everything else which should have made Tommy try out
his gadget —as the Thing raged at him, Tommy fought sturdily, but under a strain which manifested itself
as terror, and then panic, and then as hysterical defiance.
Which, of course, was essential if the comic books were ordained by Fate and Destiny to come
true.
Tommy was white and shaking and terrified when he got home. His family was at breakfast. He went
into the dining room on leaden feet and with a whipped, scared look on his chalky-white face. It was nine
o'clock. Tommy had slipped away at sunrise. Now he returned, carrying a seemingly crude and
seemingly purposeless object in his hand. It was made of copper wire with a bit of carbon and a morsel
of iron.
"Where've you been?" demanded his father sternly. He didn't call Tommy "Captain," which meant
that Tommy was in disgrace. Tommy looked at his father numbly. He shook all over.
"I said, where have you been?" his father repeated. "Your mother and I have been worried!"
Tommy swallowed. Then, suddenly, he went all to pieces. He burst into raging tears and flung the
contrivance the Thing had described into the midst of the breakfast table dishes.
"That old Thing!" he sobbed in hysterical fury. "It was in the television screen and it told me how to
make this ray gun! And it—it told me to turn it on and I was going to when I remembered that octopus
scientist from Centauri who left a note for Captain McGee to make something, and signed it Doc Blandy,
and if he'd made it it would have blown up the whole Earth!"
His father and mother stared. To have one's small son arrive at the breakfast table in a state of frenzy
is upsetting. It is worse when he flings odd objects on the table and shatters a flower vase, while sobbing
of impossibilities.
"What—what's this?" asked his father, at once startled and uneasy. "What are you talking about,
son?"
Tommy beat on the table with his fists. He blubbered, but he babbled with the starkly precise
articulation of hysteria. His face was utterly white. He was beside himself.
"I—tuned in the set in the laboratory!" he cried, in little sobbing bursts of speech. "I—unscrambled it!
And the—Thing looked at me . . . It was a Thing that hated humans! It told me how to make this
and—and—"
Tommy's father went pale, himself. He got up quickly and his chair fell over backward. He tried to
touch Tommy comfortingly, but Tommy thrust him away.
"Too many comic books," said Tommy's father, frightened. "I'll get him to the doctor."
"I—guessed what It wanted!" panted Tommy, sobbing. "And It knew what I was thinking and It got
mad! I knew It got mad! It laughed at me and asked me if I was a coward and scared to try the thing I'd
made! And I said, "You old Mercurian! You old Plutonian! You want to blow up Earth!' And I went
bang. I sma-smashed that t-television screen and I sm-smashed—"
Then Tommy buried his head in his mother's lap and howled. And his father and mother looked at
each other, white-faced, because they thought his mind had cracked. Even temporarily it was awful to
think about.
But then Professor Wardle, breakfasting with them, said very softly:
"Great heavens!"