I smiled back, seeing him through a shiny kind of mist which must have been tears. I reached for him, and he reached for me at the same time.
When we let go, he tried to start the car, and it wouldn't work. Of course. I'd forgotten till then. I started laughing and crying at the same time in a sort of a crazy way, and took him back inside and showed him the projector. They'd forgotten to give me any commands about not doing that, I guess. Or they thought it wouldn't matter.
It did matter. Larry looked it over, and puzzled over it a little, and fooled around, and asked me some questions. I didn't have much technical knowledge, but I knew what it did, and he figured out the way it did it. Nothing with an electro-magnetic motor was going to work while that thing was turned on, not within a mile or so in any direction. And there wasn't any way to turn it off. It was a homing beam, and it was on to stay—foolproof.
That was when he looked at me, and said slowly, "You got here three days ago, didn't you, babe?"
I nodded.
"There was—God-damn it, it's too foolish! There was a—a flying saucer story in the paper that day. Somebody saw it land on a hilltop somewhere. Some crackpot. Some ... how about it, kid?"
I couldn't say yes and I couldn't say no, and I did the only thing that was left, which was to get hysterical. In a big way.
He had to calm me down, of course. And I found out why the television shows stop with the kiss. The rest is very private and personal.
Author's note: This story was dictated to me by a five-year-old boy—word-for-word, except for a very few editorial changes of my own. He is a very charming and bright youngster who plays with my own five-year-old daughter. One day he wandered into my office, and watched me typing for a while, then asked what I was doing. I answered (somewhat irritably, because the children are supposed to stay out of the room when I'm working) that I was trying to write a story.