his arguing. And then Tommy was tempted to revert to his former disillusionment about scientists.

But continued belief offered high reward in excitement. So he believed. Still it was a rebellious small boy who accompanied his father and Professor Wardle home. Even the expected ice-cream cone did not console him. He consumed it in an avid gloom. His father tried to comfort him.

"After all, we're not sure," he told Tommy. "It might not be a signal at all. Or it might be a signal of a type that would seem simple enough to the creature who sent it, but hopelessly complicated to us. They might be so much farther advanced in science. In any case, it's not a thing to be solved off-hand."

"But you're going to try, aren't you, Dad?" asked Tommy desperately. "You said it wouldn't do any harm! You said we could lick them! They couldn't harm Earth!"

"I'll try," his father assured him. "It's simply useless to go it blind. That's all. I'll have my calculations done in a couple of weeks, and you can watch while I try the whole business. All right?"

Tommy gulped. He was unable to speak for disappointment. When one is ten years old, odds of billions to one are negligible, but two weeks of waiting is eternity. It is exactly the same as never. And this, too, was not only in the necessary pattern of things if the comic books were to come true, but it was perfectly natural small boy.

That night Tommy went rebelliously to bed the third time he was told. He had hung around his father and Professor Wardle, listening hungrily to every incomprehensible word they said. He was keyed up to enormous excitement.

He slept only fitfully. The comics had been a make-believe world in which he believed only with a book in his hand. Now they promised to become real, and he was filled with a monstrous hunger for the adventure they promised.

He woke at dawn and his lurid, fitful dreams had made him ripe for desperate and daring deeds. He slipped into his shorts and sandals and went downstairs. He gulped a huge glass of milk and stuffed down an ample slice of cake.

Then he came to a grand and desperate resolution. He slipped out the back door and trudged across the dew-wet campus to his father's laboratory.

He wormed unseen into the small building. His heart beat fast. He was scared, but he was Space Captain McGee and 

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