the Star Rover all rolled into one—in his own mind—and definitely he was ten-year-old Tommy Driscoll. He remembered, of course, how his father had turned on the short-wave set and the television screen. No small boy could forget those items!

He sat down before the controls and threw the two switches with a grandly negligent gesture that Captain McGee himself could not have bettered. And then he started, blindly but with infinite confidence, to unscramble the Jansky Radiation.

He was one-half making believe, and one-half deadly earnest, and all absolute faith. Naturally. The odds against any one setting of the controls being the right one to unscramble the Jansky radiation were several billion to one. But the heroes of comic books always win against odds like that.

So did Tommy Driscoll. The comic books were fated to come true.

The faintly glowing television screen quite impossibly flickered as he turned the controls. His heart pounded. He worked on, his eyes shining and his head far above the clouds out in interstellar space with Captain McGee and the Star Rover.

Presently, quite impossibly, the screen became a steadily pulsating rectangle which at its brightest was very bright indeed. He found a maximum brightness on which he could not improve. He worked other controls at random.

One made odd streaks appear on the screen. At the peak of streakiness, Tommy's heart was thumping in his throat. He, Tommy Driscoll, was about to make contact with the people of another planet, circling another, distant sun!

Another knob suddenly gathered together the streakings and the pulsations. They made the vaguest of patterns, and then the fuzziest of images. His hand shaking uncontrollably, Tommy Driscoll continued to turn that knob with the slowest possible movements.

He had a flash of clearness, and his heart leaped. Then everything was fuzzy again. He turned the knob back, his breath coming in excited pantings.

And then, in total defiance of the laws of Chance, but in strict obedience to Fate and Destiny, there was abruptly a perfectly clear picture on the screen. It was not a picture of any place on Earth, but of somewhere else—a place so alien in every respect that Tommy would never be able to describe it. And there was a Thing looking out of the screen at Tommy Driscoll!

His heart did 

 Prev. P 6/12 next