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!"

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 

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