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The opening · free to read
The children were very young--and the crisis they were called upon to face would have driven most adults into a straitjacket.
As befits a former protégé of the late great Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Mr. Long is a master of the horror story. More, he is well aware that the deepest terror may not always stem from the infinitely large. Sometimes the infinitely small can be even worse.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe June-July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The children were coming home. Elwood could see them from the cottage doorway, shouting and rejoicing in the bright October sunlight. They carried lunch baskets and--as they came tripping toward him across the lawn--he was ready to believe that nothing in life could be quite as enchanting as the simple wonder of childhood itself with its light-hearted merriment and freedom from care.
He was ready to forget the laundry bills and the scuffed shoes, the father-and-son problems, all the tormenting lesser difficulties which could demolish parenthood as an exact science and turn it into a madcap adventure without rhyme or reason.
Mary Anne was in the lead. She squealed with delight when she caught sight of her father's entranced face, as if by some miracle he had become all at once a gift-bestowing snowman quite as remarkable as the hollow dolls, one within the other, which she had received from him as a goodwill offering on her last birthday.
Eleven-year-old Melvin was more circumspect. In his son's eyes John Elwood represented all the real values of life in so far as they could be translated into model locomotives and bridge-building sets. But he knew his father to be a man of dignity who could not be easily cajoled. It was best to let his sister try first and when she failed....
For an instant as he stared Elwood found himself secretly envying his son. At a quarter-past eleven Melvin had a firm grasp of elementary physics. His feet were firmly planted on the ground and he wasn't serious-minded enough yet to make the tragic mistakes that come with adult unsureness.
Not the kind of mistakes which he, James Seaton Elwood, had made with the moon rocket, for instance. Or the mistake which he was making now by whimsically comparing the ages of his son and daughter to the moving hands of a clock.
How absurd it was to think of Mary Anne as a quarter-past seven when her budding feminine intuition made her as ageless as the Sphinx. All children were ageless really and it was absurd to imagine that they could be made to conform to any logical frame of reference, scientific or otherwise.
Children were illogically imaginative, with a timelessness which gave them an edge on adults when it came to solving problems that required a fresh approach to reality. What was it Wordsworth had said? Trailing clouds of glory....
"Daddy, Mr. Rayburn let us out early--so we could have a picnic. It would have been fun if Melvin hadn't spoiled everything. He ate up all of the peanut butter sandwiches himself."
"Tattle tale!"
"He got in a fight too. Freddy Mason didn't want to fight but Melvin started it!"
"I _did_n't!"
"You did! You know you did!"
"That's a lie!"
Elwood lowered his eyes and saw that both of his children were now as close to him as they could ever be. Mary Anne was tugging at his sleeve, begging him to take her part, and Melvin was appealing to him in man-to-man fashion, his contemptuous masculinity acting as a foil to his sister's feminine wiles.
It was a grave crisis and Elwood recognized it as such. Ordinarily he would have shunned a cut-and-dried solution but for once he had no choice.
When children fall out, when you are backed into a corner and your authority totters, there is only one sure way to save yourself--_Occupy their minds with something else_.
"You're spoiling the surprise, kiddies," Elwood said, striving to sound embittered. "It's been a lonesome hard day for me but I kept telling myself you'd soon be home to share my triumph. I suppose I shouldn't say this--but your mother just doesn't understand me the way you do."
"What is it, daddy?" Mary Anne asked, a sudden warm solicitude in her gaze.
"Yeah, Pop, tell us!" Melvin chimed in.
"The rocket is just about completed," Elwood said.
He felt Mary Anne's hand tighten on his sleeve and realised with elation that she was a scientist's daughter to her fingertips. He was gratified quite as much by the sudden hiss of Melvin's indrawn breath.
"Come along--I'll show you!" he said.
Elwood derived the most intense pleasure from showing groups of visiting dignitaries--scientific big shots for the most part--through his basement laboratory. But when the dignitaries happened to be his own children his elation knew no bounds.
Down the basement stairs they trooped, Melvin to the right of him, Mary Anne to the left. A door opened with a gentle click, a light came on and Melvin let out a yell which resounded through the house.
"You've got the blast reflector set up. Pop!"
The rocket stood out, silver on black at its base, with a dull shine where it tapered to catch and hold the light.
It was not large as rockets go. It was barely five feet in height, a miracle of technical craftsmanship wrought by the unerring skill and scientific knowhow of a very practical man with a family to support. But it had been built with an eye to beauty as well and as the light glimmered and danced on its sloping vanes it seemed as gracefully poised for flight as some half-mythical bird cast in metal by a long-vanished elfin race.
As gracefully poised and as shiningly beautiful....
It was Mary Anne who broke the spell. "Daddy, will it really go to the moon?"
Elwood looked down at his daughter and patted her tousled red-gold hair. "How many times must I tell you it isn't an experimental model?" he chided. "It was designed for actual space flight."
"But daddy--"
"If you've any more silly notions you'd better get rid of them right now. You may never get another chance. Yesterday Melvin and I discussed the details as fellow-scientists. Suppose you tell her just how much the Government is contributing, son."
"Forty thousand dollars!" Melvin said promptly, rolling the figure over his tongue as though it had some mysterious magic of its own which could elevate him to man's estate--if he repeated it often enough.
"A research grant," Elwood added as if thinking aloud for his own benefit. "I had a tough time persuading them to let me do all the construction work right here in my own laboratory. I've probably cut more yards of official red tape than any odd duck since Archimedes."
He smiled a little ruefully. "In case you're interested--I've had to pay through the nose for the technical assistance I've been getting. Those owl-faced characters you've seen drifting in and out won't work for peanuts."
"But all of the rockets in the stereo-cineramas are much bigger!" Mary Anne protested. "Why is that, daddy?"
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