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."

"You old Plutonian, you want to blow up Earth!" Tommy said, and smashed the television screen.

"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 

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