Little Men of Space

Little Men of Space

James Seaton Elwood, a scientist working in his basement laboratory, has secretly built a small government-funded rocket he claims is designed for genuine spaceflight, powered by concentrated atomic energy derived from post-Eniwetok research. When his children, eleven-year-old Melvin and seven-year-old Mary Anne, come home from school, he shows them the finished rocket and explains its capabilities before going upstairs to rest, exhausted from overwork. He allows Melvin to stay in the lab, extracting a promise that the boy will not touch the rocket itself. After their father leaves, Melvin tells Mary Anne he believes the rocket could actually be sent much farther than the moon. Before the argument can go further, three tiny men appear through the wall, having entered by dissolving it with light. They are shriveled, bald, mottled brown-and-green beings no bigger than chess pawns. Using a beam-projecting tube, the tallest of them, called Hilili, paralyzes and mentally controls Melvin, then threatens Mary Anne to keep her silent. Telepathically, the two children learn that the little men are the last survivors of a much larger expedition that came from the direction of the Great Nebula in Andromeda in disk-shaped ships to colonize Earth; disease and deteriorating ships destroyed nearly all of them, and the small band that remains needs the rocket to return home and warn "The Twenty" against a repeat colonization attempt without better safeguards. A dispute breaks out between Hilili and his companion Rujit over whether unnecessary killing is justified for survival; Hilili accuses Rujit of endangering the group by insisting on exploring the whole planet, then kills him with the beam despite his pleading, invoking their revealed status as biogenetic twins. Only two of the little men can fit in the rocket. Hilili then turns the weakened beam on Mary Anne as well, boasting of their people's "ethics" for not killing her outright. While both children remain telepathically linked to each other and to the little men, Melvin and Mary Anne realize the aliens don't understand the rocket's auxiliary fuel system as well as the atomic mechanism, since they observed construction only from outside. Melvin deliberately projects the idea that the ground beneath the cottage is soft, water-logged salt-marsh with porous strata beneath it, hoping to trick the aliens into misjudging what will happen if the rocket fires without leaving through the roof. He mentally urges the little men to turn the wrong dial, shielding his true intentions from them by throwing up a mental block during the crucial exchange. The remaining two aliens, preoccupied with the atomic systems and dismissive of what they consider trivial controls, do turn the wrong dial. The rocket does not launch upward. Instead, its base glows white hot and it sinks straight down through the cellar floor into the soft, waterlogged ground, extinguished by rushing water, sparing the cottage and the children. Melvin and Mary Anne compare notes afterward, realizing their telepathic abilities—granted temporarily by the aliens' mind-reading beam—are already fading and were mutual, allowing Melvin to mislead the aliens without their detecting his true plan. The next morning, John Elwood, furious that the rocket is gone, blames Melvin for tampering with the heat exchanger dial despite his promise, dismissing the children's insistence about "little men" as childish lying, and mockingly cites a magazine article praising Melvin's own scientific genius (he has won the Seabury Medal) as proof he should know better than to invent such stories. As Elwood rants that if he ever saw a "little man" he'd consult a psychiatrist, Rujit's voice suddenly speaks up: he did not die after all, having "wavered back" by force of will after Hilili believed he'd extinguished him, and now, injured, alone, and doomed by disease organisms fatal to his kind, he throws himself on the family's mercy, revealing himself standing weakly against the coffee percolator on the breakfast sideboard. Melvin and Mary Anne see him and react with alarm calling out to their father — and Elwood, seeing the tiny figure himself, faints face-down on the floor, unable to respond.

By Frank Belknap Long · First published 1941 · Genre: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Children's Literature · 7,169 words

First lines

The children were coming home. Elwood could see them from the cottage doorway, shouting and rejoicing in the bright October sunlight. They carried lunch baskets and -- as they came tripping toward him across the lawn -- he was ready to believe that nothing in life could be quite as enchanting as the simple wonder of childhood itself with its lighthearted merriment and freedom from care.

He was ready to forget the laundry bills and the scuffed shoes, the father-and-son problems, all the tormenting lesser difficulties which could demolish parenthood as an exact science and turn it into a madcap adventure without rhyme or reason.

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Little Men of Space is listed on Textopian as a novel by Frank Belknap Long, dated 1941 CE.

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Science Fiction · Space Opera · Short Story Collection · Pulp Magazine · Early 20th Century Literature · American Science Fiction · Cosmic Horror · Alien Invasion · Interplanetary Travel · Human Evolution · Social Commentary · Satire

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