"You just repeat everything he tells you," Mary Anne flared. "You're not so smart!"
"I'm smart enough to know that rocket could be sent further than the moon—right now."
Mary Anne gasped. "You're crazy. Daddy knows what he's doing."
"Sure he does. If he sent it as far as it could go it would disappear in space. He couldn't prove anything and he'd be in real trouble. They'd say he got rid of it because it wouldn't work and kept the forty thousand dollars for himself."
"The Earth-child is right!" a tiny voice said. "That rocket can and must carry us to our home planet. It is our last remaining hope."
For an instant Melvin felt as if he had swallowed a goldfish. Something flopped in his throat, coldly and horribly, and though the voice rang clear in his ears it seemed to come from deep inside his head.
"He hears us!" the voice said. "Before he sees us we'd better train the beam on him. All Earth-children are emotional but the males are the hardest to control."
It was Mary Anne who screamed in protest. She stood as if frozen, staring down with swiftly widening eyes at the three tiny men who had come striding into the room through the wall. They had come in with a blaze of light behind them, a shimmering of the wall itself that seemed to go right through to the other side.
Mary Anne could have crushed them simply by raising her foot and bringing it down dead center above them. But their eyes warned her to be still.
Do not scream again, Earth-child, the eyes warned. We are not as ugly as we seem to you and your fright is very distasteful to us.