The Journey by Murray Leinster

Author:Murray Leinster [Leinster, Murray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom's eBooks
Published: 2021-08-14T21:00:00+00:00

The End

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From Beyond the Stars,

by Murray Leinster

Thrilling Wonder Stories June 1947 {as by “Will F. Jenkins”}

Short Story – 4426 words

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 defeating—for the fifteenth time since he had acquired the book—the 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.

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