little men of space By Frank Belknap Long The children were very young--and the crisis they were called upon to face would have driven most adults into a straitjacket. _As befits a former protégé of the late great Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Mr. Long is a master of the horror story. More, he is well aware that the deepest terror may not always stem from the infinitely large. Sometimes the infinitely small can be even worse._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe June-July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] 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 light-hearted 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. Mary Anne was in the lead. She squealed with delight when she caught sight of her father's entranced face, as if by some miracle he had become all at once a gift-bestowing snowman quite as remarkable as the hollow dolls, one within the other, which she had received from him as a goodwill offering on her last birthday. Eleven-year-old Melvin was more circumspect. In his son's eyes John Elwood represented all the real values of life in so far as they could be translated into model locomotives and bridge-building sets. But he knew his father to be a man of dignity who could not be easily cajoled. It was best to let his sister try first and when she failed.... For an instant as he stared Elwood found himself secretly envying his son. At a quarter-past eleven Melvin had a firm grasp of elementary physics. His feet were firmly planted on the ground and he wasn't serious-minded enough yet to make the tragic mistakes that come with adult unsureness. Not the kind of mistakes which he, James Seaton Elwood, had made with the moon rocket, for instance. Or the mistake which he was making now by whimsically comparing the ages of his son and daughter to the moving hands of a clock. How absurd it was to think of Mary Anne as a quarter-past seven when her budding feminine intuition made her as ageless as the Sphinx. All children were ageless really and it was absurd to imagine that they could be made to conform to any logical frame of reference, scientific or otherwise.