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

HE WAS looking at the contrivance Tommy had made under the Thing's instruction. It wasn't quite
like anything that anybody on Earth had ever made before, but a scientist looking at it would see more
than Tommy could have imagined. Professor Wardle saw aspects that made sense. Then he saw things,
that he could understand but could not possibly have devised. And then he saw the implications.
"L-look!" said Professor Wardle, dry-throated. "It's true! L-look what he made! Wh-what this thing
would do—"
With shaking hands he disconnected a wire so it could not possibly be turned on by accident. Then
he trembled.
Tommy wept himself back to something like composure in his mother's arms. The antics of his father
and Professor Wardle helped, of course. They babbled at each other over his contrivance. They looked
incredulously at each other. Then they drew diagrams at each other, talking feverishly.
Then Tommy's father remembered him. "Captain," said Tommy's father, and there was sweat on his
face, "you did a good day's work, all right, but please don't do it again without warning me! This—this
contrivance of yours isn't a ray pistol. It's a thing that will start a chain reaction in carbon and iron. If
you'd turned it on, all the carbon and iron within its range would have started to act like an atomic pile,
and it would have spread, and we couldn't have stopped it. There—wouldn't have been any more
Earth."
Tommy blinked at him, catching his breath from time to time as a small boy will do after desperate
weeping. Then his eyes began to shine.
"Gee!" said Tommy. "That—that Thing was trying to destroy Earth, wasn't he? And I stopped him!"
"He was," said Tommy's father in a very queer voice indeed, "and you did. If a grown-up had been in
your place, the trick would have been different, and it probably would have worked."
Tommy ceased to catch his breath. He glowed.
"I was like Captain McGee!" he said breathlessly.
Tommy's father swallowed. He needed to hold tightly to his self-control. He, like Professor Wardle,
had all the sensations now of a man who has just realized that his life, and that of his family, and that of
every other human being on Earth, had hung by a hair for seconds.
But he saw, too, that the deadly small contrivance which had not annihilated humanity made use of
and so revealed exactly the new principles Earth's scientists needed most urgently to know. It would
mean atomic engines and power and space-ships and ray-guns. They would mean a Space Patrol to
protect Earth against just such creatures as had been foiled by Tommy Driscoll. And that meant—
"Yes," said Tommy's father gently. "Just like Captain McGee, Tommy. It appears that the comic
books are coming true."

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IN THE CARDS
A Fantastic Complete Novelet of a Twist in Time
By GEORGE O. SMITH