Murray Leinster

“ To a ten-year-old boy, adults do not often seem intelligent. Few of them have any interest in Space Captain McGee or the Star Rover.
But Tommy's father was talking about interplanetary communication! Of signals from the planets of another sun! From creatures who might be super-intelligent vegetables like the Wangos the Star Rover had to fight, or immaterial entities like those misty things that almost defeated Captain McGee on the Ghost Planet because when he swung his mighty fist there wasn't anything solid for him to hit. Tommy's father was talking about things like that! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 short-wave receiver. No modulation has ever been detected. But no explanation's been offered either." [1]
Professor Wardle moved, inside the laboratory. ”

“ A television screen glowed faintly.
"Now it's transferred to the screen," he told Tommy, "but it's still all scrambled. Nothing happens. It's quite a job to unscramble a television signal even when you know all about the transmitter. If there's a transmitter sending this, I don't know any of its constants." Over Tommy's head he said to Professor Wardle, "The possible combinations run ten to the ninth." ”

“ They had been watching Earth with radar for centuries, so It told Tommy jovially. They knew that sooner or later Earthmen would roam the stars and benevolently rule all the planets of all the suns of the Galaxy in which Earth is placed. Because, of course, Earth has uranium and other heavy metals supplying atomic energy, while other planets are not so fortunate. ”

“ But in the comic books mind-to-mind communication of alien peoples is common enough. Captain McGee had done it more than once, and the Star Rover frequently, wandering more widely than McGee, as he did.
Tommy knew what the Thing was saying, and his piping small-boy voice answered in his father's laboratory, and he knew that the Thing understood him, too. The comic books were specifically coming true. ”

“ And Space Captain McGee would gaze into the television screen and see the worm monsters of Blathok about to chloroform Jenny—Captain McGee's girl friend—to transfer the brain of a worm-monster into her skull. Her body would thereafter house an inveterate enemy to the human race, with specific plans for annihilating it.
Tommy argued. Impassionedly. In the end his father had to resort to authority to stop his arguing. And then Tommy was tempted to revert to his former disillusionment about scientists. ”

“ 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. ”