"Murray Leinster - From Beyond the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

FROM BEYOND THE STARS
By WILL F. JENKINS

Tommy Driscoll, ten-year-old scientist's son, emulates one of his favorite heroes when the
Earth is in peril

TOMMY DRISCOLL lay on his stomach in the grass outside his father's laboratory and read his
comic books. He was ten years old and wholly innocent of any idea that Fate or Chance or Destiny
might make use of him to make the comic books come true.
He was clad in grubby shorts, with sandals, and no socks or blouse. Ants crawled on his legs as he
lay on the ground, and he absently scratched them off. To the adult eye he was merely the son of that
Professor Driscoll who taught advanced physics at Harwell College, and in summer vacation puttered
around with research.
As such, Tommy was inconsiderable from any standpoint except that of Fate or Chance or Destiny.
They had use for him.
He was, however, wholly and triumphantly a normal small boy. As he scratched thoughtfully and
absorbed the pictures in his comic book, he was Space Captain McGee of the rocket-cruiser
Omadhoum, gloriously defeatingтАФfor the fifteenth time since he had acquired the bookтАФthe dastardly
scheme of the Dictator of Pluto to enslave the human race to the green-skinned stalk-eyed denizens of
that dark planet.
A little while since he had been the Star Rover, crimson-cloaked and crimson-masked and
mysteriously endowed with the power to survive unharmed the frigidity and airlessness of interstellar
space. As the Star Rover, he had triumphantly smashed the attempt of some very unpleasant Mercurians
to wipe out the human race so that they could emigrate to Earth.
As both splendid figures, at satisfyingly frequent intervals, Tommy had swung mighty blows at the
jaws or midriffs of Mercurians, green-skinned Plutonians, renegade Earthmen, and others.
But he had just finished reading both comics three times in succession. He heaved a sigh of
comfortable mental repletion and rolled over, imagining further splendid if formless adventures with
space-ships and ray-guns.
Locusts whirred monotonously in the maple trees of Harwell College campus. His father's laboratory
was a small stone structure off the Physics Building, and Tommy waited for his father and Professor
Wardle to come out. When they did, he would walk home with them and possibly acquire an ice-cream
cone on the way. With luck he might wangle another comic.

HE HEARD his father's voice. Talking to Professor Wardle, who was spending the week-end with
them.
"There's the set-up," said his father inside the laboratory. "Absurd, perhaps, but this Jansky radiation
bothers me. I've found out one rather startling thing about it."* (*Note: The Jansky Radiation as
described, is an actual and so-far-unexplained phenomenon. It does come from beyond the Solar System
from the general direction of the Milky Way. It does affect sensitive short-wave receivers. It's cause is as
obscure as its reality is certain. K. G. Jansky, of the Bell Telephone research laboratories, has described
his discovery in the Institute of Radio Engineers Proceedings (I.R.E. Proc.) Vol. 20, No. 12, 1532, and
Vol. 23, No. 10, 1935. It has further been discussed by G. C. Southworth in Jour. of F.I., Vol. 23, No.
4, April, 1945.)
"My dear fellow," Professor Wardle said drily, "if you publish anything about the Jansky radiation the
newspapers will accuse you of communicating with Mars!"
Tommy knew by his father's tone that he was grinning.
"I've not thought of anything so conservative. Everybody knows that the Jansky Radiation comes
from the direction of the Milky Way and from beyond the Solar System. It makes a hissing noise in a
sensitive shortwave receiver. No modulation has ever beer detected. But no explanation's been offered