Boys -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Supernovae -- Fiction; Telepathy -- Fiction
He meant it. I could tell that he meant it. I ran upstairs and bundled
Jackie up in a blanket--I didn't even bother to put his clothes on,
just a blanket over his pajamas--and took him down to the Observatory
in a taxi.
I wish you could have seen the place. Jackie sitting on a table, in his
pajamas, telling Professor Milliken all about Mig and the spaceship and
the little sealed capsule and the _erling_ and all the rest of it.
I guess you can imagine what a week we went through. Scientists, and
reporters, and psychologists and parapsychologists and just plain
debunkers. And the crackpots. Oh yes, the crackpots. And then they dug
up the records about Jackie's father.
They couldn't even let the poor man rest quiet in his grave, and when
they found out about the Bombing, they talked about hard radiations and
mutations until I darn' near went crazy, and Beth had to quit her job.
They even talked about telepathy, just as if Jackie was some kind of
a freak. We had to take the poor kid out of kindergarten. He hated
that--he was getting so much good out of it. And he enjoyed it so much,
having the other children to play with, and painting, and making those
cute little baskets, and he'd learned to tell time, and everything.
And then the spaceship landed, and I tell you, we haven't had a
minute's peace since.
Oh, _that's_ all right! I was going to call them in for lunch in a few
minutes, anyway. "Jackie! _Jackie_--will you and Mig come in here for
a few minutes? A friend of your uncle Dave's wants to talk to you two
boys."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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