KILLER IN THE CRIB

Originally published in Fantastic, April 1955.

It was three days after Joel’s first birthday that Philip Lyde first had the feeling that his son was a lot brighter than even a doting father could expect him to be. They’d had a party for him. Just the three of them. There was a tiny cake with one huge candle stuck into the middle of it. Catherine had consulted the pediatrician and then baked a cake that even Joel could eat without coming out in spots. They put a paper hat on the baby’s head and Philip took flash photos. They tape-recorded the sounds of the party, holding the microphone to Joel’s lips occasionally in the hope that he might just choose this historic day to speak his first word.

Philip had four sets of prints made of the photographs—one each for the grandparents, one for the baby book and one to take to the office and show the fellows.

Irwin, the salesman, who had an eighteen-month-old son of his own, examined the prints with reciprocal interest at the office water-cooler.

“How’d you get him to keep his paper hat on?” Irwin asked. “Glue?”

“No trouble,” said Philip. “Why?”

“I tried that once. No luck. My Harry snatched it right off, but instantly, and proceeded to eat it.”

“Talent. Some have it, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” said Irwin. “Sure. But he is a bright-looking kid, Phil. Took these yourself, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I can tell by this picture. Your boy has the proper contempt for a damfool amateur photographer—especially a father making a jackass of himself trying to get a good shot of the son and heir. See? If that isn’t a sneer on young Joel’s face then I’ve never seen one. It’s a dead ringer for the one I get all the time from Soskin, the buyer at Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh.”

Irwin was joking, of course, but as Philip Lyde looked at the snapshots again later he couldn’t explain away the expression the camera had caught. It wasn’t a trick of the lighting, or a bad angle. Of course it was just the way Joel’s face happened to be at that fraction of a second, in all innocence, but there was no other word for it. It was a sneer, and it upset him more than he cared too admit.

* * * *

It was Thursday evening and Catherine was away at her ceramics class. Philip set up the play pen in the living room and popped Joel into it with a cardboard box full of toys to keep him occupied while he fooled with the tape recorder. He was considering editing the tape of the first birthday party and transcribing three minutes of the highlight onto a conventional phonograph record to send to his parents in Cleveland. Catherine’s parents, who lived just across town, were coming next week and Philip also decided he’d better give the tape a run-through first to see how much of it they could stand.

Joel had tipped the box on its side and taken out his favorite animal, a limp rubber horse that he seemed to like better now than when it had been inflated. He munched on one rubber foot with his seven teeth and sat watching his father.

Philip sped the tape past a symphony and a mystery program they had recorded experimentally from the radio, trying to outguess the commercials, and came to the party segment. He winked at Joel and started it up.

“Say something, Joel,” Philip heard his voice saying. “Say Mommy. Mom-my.”

Joel had moved his lips encouragingly, Philip recalled, though he hadn’t said anything.

But apparently he had. The sensitive microphone had picked up the sound their ears had not.

It was just one word.

A chilling tingle started at Philip’s scalp and crawled down his back.

Joel was looking directly into his eyes. The rubber horse dropped. The baby’s face showed as much intelligence as any adult’s. It showed shocked surprise and a sudden malevolence that matched the word he had uttered on his first birthday.

Philip’s hand shook as he set the tape back. Not wanting to, but compelled, he started it again and turned up the volume.

Joel had got to his feet now, and was standing at the railing of the pen, both his baby hands tense on the slats.

“Say something, Joel,” Philip’s voice boomed. “Say Mommy. Mom-my.”

The baby voice came then, alien and horribly distinct.

“Fools!” it said.

Philip had had two stiff shots and was nursing a third when Catherine came back. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his eyes staring out of focus at a red flower in the pattern of the plastic tablecloth. The door to the living room was closed.

Catherine looked at her husband and the glass in his hand and the bottle at his elbow.

She let her purse thud to the tabletop.

“Well!” she said.

The baby, who had been utterly still since Philip snapped off the tape recorder and ran out of the room, began to cry when he heard her voice. The crying became piteous and insistent.

“Look at you!” Catherine said. “How long has this been going on?”

She went into the living room and came back with Joel in her arms. He stopped crying.

“The poor child is soaked,” she said. “Philip! What kind of father are you? Look at him!”

Philip forced himself to look. Catherine’s eyes were blazing at him contemptuously. Joel, his head nestling against her shoulder so she couldn’t see his face, was looking at him too. The expression on his infant face was a cool, confident smirk.

Philip tore his eyes away and tossed down the liquor. He got up, knocking over the chair. Without picking it up he half ran to the hall closet and got his coat.

He ran out of the house.

“Philip!” his wife yelled after him.

He turned once, at the street, and looked back. The two of them were at the window, the baby’s head close to Catherine’s, looking after him.

He ran until the house was out of sight.

It was a bar loud with talk and a juke box. The noise soothed him, but not enough. He must have looked wild, because the bartender hesitated before serving him a double shot and asked, “You all right, Mac?”

“Argument with the wife,” he improvised. The bartender nodded and said nothing more. He poured the glass to the brim and left the bottle.

God! Philip forced himself to drink slowly. He took a sip and lit a cigarette shakily. He tried to concentrate on the words accompanying the guitar-thwanging, piano-thumping popular song blasting out of the gaudy Wurlitzer. They only reminded him of how he had sent up the volume of his own machine and heard that improbable word.

He tried to blank that out of his mind and concentrated on reading the fine print on the label of a brandy bottle at the back of the bar. It reminded him of the bottle on his own kitchen table, and the boy-creature in the next room, silent as death, likely staring with God knows what expression at the closed door between them. With God knows what thoughts inside that baby skull, under that curly blond hair.

Philip took another sip. It burned good as it went down but it didn’t help him forget.

He realized he was sweating. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead, his upper lip and the back of his neck. He felt cold and suddenly he was shivering all over. He forced himself to stop and down the rest of the whiskey.

The bartender was a good one, one of the psychic kind, apparently. He had been busy at the other end of the bar, but then he was opposite Philip, pouring another drink, again to the brim.

“Don’t brood about it, Mac,” he said. “It’ll work itself out. Always does.”

“Sure,” said Philip, grateful to him. “Thanks.”

“Everybody and their brother’s here tonight, or I’d stick around, if it’d help any. Feel free to pour your own if I’m busy.”

“Thanks,” he said again. “I’ll be all right.”

The two men on his right were talking baseball and the man and girl on his left, obviously theater people, were comparing Alfred and Lynn with Rex and Lilli. After a while, by concentrating his eyes on the brandy bottle label and his ears on the simultaneous conversations, he began to feel more normal. Finally, midway through his third drink—his sixth, counting the three at home—he stopped feeling scared.

He didn’t discount what he’d heard on the tape or what he’d seen in Joel’s face, but now he could think about them rationally, as if these things had happened to somebody else. He pretended they had happened to his friend Roy and tried to imagine what he would say to his friend Roy.

Roy, he would say, first let me say that I believe you. I postulate that this actually happened, that you weren’t mistaken. Now, then—

But he couldn’t think of any Now, then.

Except Catherine. He had hated both of them, irrationally, when he rushed out of the house. Now he no longer hated, or feared, but he did feel concern for his wife, alone in the house, with—it.

He got up, leaving some change on the bar, and smiled and nodded to the bartender to show him he was all right now, and went home.

A small light had been left for him. He listened at the doors of the nursery and the bedroom. Both the baby and Catherine were asleep. There was no note. He left one for his wife, saying he was sorry and that he’d explain in the morning, then brushed his teeth vigorously and went to bed.

* * * *

He was hard to arouse in the morning. When he did wake up there was time only to race through a shave and drink a cup of coffee before he dashed for his bus.

He wondered if he was subconsciously trying to avoid telling Catherine about Joel.

But that evening, as he called Catherine from the office to say he’d have to work a bit later and not to wait supper for him, he admitted to himself that he was trying to avoid Joel.

He did have some work to do, though it could have waited, and he finished it while he ate a sent-out-for sandwich. Then he dawdled, cleaning up his desk and looking out the window at the deserted business street.

He reached home after the baby had been put to bed.

Catherine didn’t holler at him, as he felt he deserved.

“I made drinks,” she said. “No offense intended, but would you like a hair of the dog?”

“I would,” he said. “Mastiff sized. You’d better have a stiff one yourself. I’ve got something to show you.”

“Oh?”

He went to the tape recorder. “Better take a good swallow of that first,” he said. “This may be a shock.”

She looked puzzled but said nothing. She obediently took a long drink from her glass.

“This is why I got drunk last night,” he said, and started the machine. “Listen.”

His voice came from the tape:

“Say something, Joel. Say Mommy. Mom-my.”

Philip braced himself.

But there was only silence where there should have been that single unearthly word.

Then Catherine’s voice came from the tape:

“Say Daddy, Joel. Dad-dy.” Philip switched off the machine. He looked at his wife with amazement. “He didn’t say anything!”

“That’s nothing to get drunk about,” she said. “You can’t expect him to perform on cue. He’ll talk in good time.”

“I’m not talking about that.” He set the tape back and ran it again. But again there was a silence, even when he turned the volume up, where there should have been that other voice.

“I couldn’t have been mistaken,” he muttered. “I heard it.”

“What?”

“Has anyone been fooling with this machine?”

“Of course not. You’re the only one who ever touches it. You made the rule yourself.”

“Was Joel in here today?” The question blurted out.

“Yes, he was. I set up his play pen here and put him in it while I did some washing down the basement. But I doubt very much that he climbed over the railing and recited Hamlet’s soliloquy into your precious machine.”

“So he was in here.” Philip stared at the machine in horror. “It’s worse than I thought.”

“What, for heaven’s sake?” she asked exasperated.

“Somebody,” he said slowly, “has wiped the tape. In just one spot, deleting just one word. Expertly.”

* * * *

Joel first communicated with Philip late the next morning, while Catherine was out doing her Saturday shopping.

Catherine had gone on her way unperturbed by Philip’s oddness, which she was satisfied was the result of a drunken fantasy.

She reminded him of the time he’d got high as the Matterhorn on Gibsons and explained to her quite seriously about the green lion-head marmosets that lived under the studio couch in the living room. He’d pleaded with her to be careful when she vacuumed under there, because they were very tiny and might easily be sucked into the dust bag. She didn’t see them, he realized, because she had green eyes and they filtered out the image of the marmosets.

Philip protested that he’d been making that up, about the marmosets, to amuse her, and she knew it, but she laughed and went off to the supermarket with her wheeled grocery basket.

Joel acted like a normal year-old baby for perhaps three-quarters of an hour. He made a mess in his diaper like any infant and Philip changed him, even forgetting himself so far as to go “bra-a-ack” with his lips against Joel’s belly-button. The baby laughed uproariously, and quite normally.

Joel had his lunch in his high chair, fussing a bit over the chopped meat that Philip was spooning into him, but greedily putting away the mashed carrots and puree of apricots. Joel submitted to the face-washing ritual afterwards with fewer protests than usual and allowed his bib to be removed. Philip put the bib in the hamper and hung up the washcloth.

Then he sat down again opposite his son and said, only half-jokingly:

“You’re not as dumb as you look, boy.”

The baby expression on Joel’s face vanished, as if on cue. It was replaced by an adult, intelligent look.

“I’m not dumb at all,” Joel said. He spoke with the barest trace of a baby lisp. “The voice reproducer told you that.”

Philip started to tremble. He forced himself to stop by gripping the sides of his chair. He tried to force himself to think rationally, but had less success.

His thoughts went back to Catherine’s pregnancy, when they were picking out boys’ and girls’ names. They’d decided it would be Tracy if a girl, and Catherine was holding out for Joel for a boy. Philip objected on the grounds that Joel Lyde would be ambiguous. People hearing his name would think it was Joe Elide. Catherine refused to listen and when a boy was born he was recorded as Joel Lyde.

And now he’s Joe Elide, Philip thought crazily. He’s elided the years between infancy and adulthood. Skipped from goos and urghs to mature speech.

“Joe Elide,” Philip said vaguely, dropping his gaze from the eyes of this person who had once been his infant son. “Wonder boy.” He stared at the feet, which were still baby feet.

“Joel Lyde,” the other said. “The name you gave me. You’re confused, aren’t you?”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Philip said to the feet. “I’m scared to death.”

“You should not fear me. I’m your son still. But I’m also your son plus. There are really two of us.”

“Two of you,” Philip said dully, not looking up.

“You’re trying to understand, aren’t you? I’m glad of that. You do have a modicum of intelligence.”

“Thanks,” said Philip bitterly, in a reflex.

“Good. I had hoped the insult would sting you out of your torpor.”

“Who the hell are you?” asked Philip, still coasting on the reflex. He looked at the child now, almost angrily.

“Another kind of human being, from another place. A scout, you might say. I’ve come to look you over.”

“See anything?” asked Philip, stung again. Then he felt tricked, as if he were the child using childhood retorts to this other, so much more the grown-up.

“I see a good man,” the other said, perhaps flatteringly, “trying manfully to understand what he cannot possibly understand without further explanation. I have been rude. I apologize. I am indebted to you for having taken me in.”

“I’m the one who’s been taken in,” Philip said. He felt almost superior again, having turned a phrase.

“An idiom, I suppose.” The head nodded and the expression on the infant face was so sage that Philip smiled. “Good. We approach each other more closely. That is part of my mission.”

“So now you have a mission. Fifty-three weeks old and already you have a mission.” Philip got up suddenly and stood looking down at the person in the high chair. “You’ll forgive me if I babble, but I feel drunker now than the other night when I really was.”

“I forgive you,” the other said, “because I know your limitations. You’re only human—”

“And you?” Philip interrupted. “What are you?”

“I’ll tell you,” Joel’s voice said.

* * * *

There was a speck of land in a great sea on a tiny planet circling a double sun. Once the land had been more and the sea less, and the people had prospered. But now the waters lapped at the edges of the planet’s tallest mountain and the end of their world was in sight. Subterranean explosions occurred now and again and after each the land settled a little deeper into the water. The survivors moved higher on the slopes, or tried to find room on the great central plateau, already overcrowded.

Everyone knew how it would end. Members of the Science Guild put aside their minor differences and agreed broadly on the alternatives. There weren’t many. It was impossible to reverse evolution and become a water-dwelling race—not in the few years that remained to them before the mountaintop was inundated. Nor was it possible to build a sunken world. Several attempts had been made but each time the explosion that shrank the land also sent the subterranean tunnels and caverns crashing in, or flooded them.

Two things remained possible for the people of the mountain. They were escape by air or escape by sea.

Each course had it faults and its perils. Those who fled by sea would be fleeing to nowhere. Perhaps generations would be born and die before the ocean receded again or another mountain thrust its head above the waves. They would have to subsist on the rain they could gather, the food they could grow and the fish they could catch. The ships would have to be immense to provide room for these vital activities. And they could build only a dozen or so in the time left to them, and not everyone could be accommodated.

Escape by air was a bigger gamble. They would be going beyond the air, in search of another planet that could support them. They’d sent out spaceships before. Many had been lost. The few that came back reported no possibility of life on any of the four other worlds circling their double sun. But they had since built better ships, which could range beyond their solar system, to explore the worlds of other stars.

“I am from one of the spaceships,” the adult-baby voice of Joel said. “It has been a long journey. My grandparents were among the original passengers, all of them dead now. My parents and their generation also died en route. But the third generation lives. And we have found our world.”

* * * *

Philip had been sitting slumped in his chair, listening without apparent emotion. Now he said mildly, as if he were merely stating the literal truth:

“I thought it was our world.”

“You shall share it with us. There are not many of us.”

“Decent of you.”

“You’ve expressed no curiosity about how I came to be in your son’s body,” the other said, as if he resented the apathy with which Philip had heard about his people’s epic journey. “Shall I tell you about that?”

“If you like.”

“I’ll make it as simple as I can, to put no strain on your intelligence.”

“Thanks,” Philip said. They “anchored” their spaceships in an orbit near the Moon. Their instruments indicated that the mother world of the satellite would be suitable for habitation. But the instruments also revealed that the world was inhabited already and that the inhabitants had a technology advanced enough to be dangerous, especially when coupled with the low boiling-point of their culture. In other words, the inhabitants might shoot first at a scout ship hurtling down from the Moon, and then try to put the pieces together to learn what had been inside it.

There were too few of them to risk any such disaster, so physical exploration of the new world was deferred. There would have to be, first, a psychic invasion.

(The word invasion was a slip, Philip thought. He maintained his indolent posture, but something was ticking over in his mind now. He did not know what it was, yet, but he encouraged it to keep ticking.)

The travelers from the far-off mountaintop world had perfected new skills during the long years of their journey through the void. They developed a means of traveling mentally, from mind to mind, among themselves.

It wasn’t easy. It required the utmost concentration. Even then, blocks were sometimes encountered, or a kind of mental static, which could prevent a transfer that previously had taken place with ease.

“And so we traveled to your world, from our anchorage at the satellite, by mental means,” said Joel’s voice. The baby body sat in the high chair, its face adult and its fat infant arms gesticulating. “We found suitable bodies and we entered them. We’re here—in the bodies—merely as observers, seeing your world through native eyes, helping decide when and how the spaceships should come down, and where our people, in their own bodies, would find it best to settle.”

(He’s lying now, Philip thought. He wouldn’t be telling me all this if he weren’t lying for a purpose. He needs me for something. Something he and his mind travelers can’t do for themselves.)

“And then?” Philip said aloud.

“Then we scouts leave the bodies where we’ve been guests, with thanks for the hospitality. We’ll become merely another of the thousands of races upon your planet, bothering no one, not displacing any of you. We’re very like you—a little shorter, a little fatter, perhaps. Our needs are simple and our technology is advanced. We could settle somewhere in the vastness of Africa or the central desert of Australia—land useless to you—and develop it to serve us. By thus redeeming waste land, we would also be of real service to you.”

“I see,” Philip said noncommittally.

He was considering asking if all the mind travelers had lodged themselves in the bodies of infants when his wife opened the front door and the conversation came to an end.

“How’s the marmoset situation?” Catherine called to him as she wheeled her market basket into the kitchen.

Joel had snapped back to babyhood. He gave his mother an infant smile and the clumsy, wrist-swiveling wave he’d learned.

Philip looked at him closely, but was unable to tell anything.

“Nobody here but us extraterrestrials,” Philip muttered.

* * * *

Philip was awake, staring at the dim whiteness of the bedroom ceiling long after his wife, had fallen asleep.

“Daddy!”

It was his son calling. He knew that instantly as he sat up and swung his feet to the floor. It was his son, speaking for himself—not the alien speaking through him. He didn’t know why or how. He just knew.

He ran to the nursery. Joel was standing in his crib in the dark. Philip snapped on the light and saw his frightened eyes.

He lifted the baby out of the crib and sat down with him in his lap.

“What is it, son? What’s the matter?”

“I’m scared, Daddy. I’m grown up all of a sudden, I guess. Is it being grown up when there’s somebody in with you and you learn to talk?”

Philip felt cold and frightened again. But he struggled now to accept the abnormal as the normal, knowing only that this was his son talking and not the other.

“People grow up in different ways, Joel,” he said. He held the boy close to his chest and stroked his soft hair. “Don’t be afraid. Is—is he in with you now?”

“No. He went away. He had something to do. He’s coming back but he went away and I called you when he did. I learned to talk after he was in with me but he didn’t know it, I don’t think. I learned all of a sudden. I don’t like him, Daddy.”

“I don’t like him either, Joel. We’ll have to figure out what to do. When he’s in with you, what happens? Does he make you do what he wants?”

“No. He sort of—displaces me. I feel everything just like before, but I’m also outside someplace, watching. Like when he climbed out of the play pen and did that to the tape recorder. I felt myself climbing out, even though I knew I couldn’t by myself, but at the same time I was up in the middle of the room, like, watching him do it. It’s scary.”

“Where did he go? Do you know?”

“Back to the ship. To report. They all had to go back at the same time.”

“You know about the others?”

“Yes. I know everything he knows. He su-per-im-posed—that’s a hard one—his mind on mine and when he went away it left a pattern. He told you a lot of lies, Daddy, like the one about the way his people look. Not like us. They’re big, and stick out all over, and they’re hard and shiny like glass.”

“What about the others—the other mind travelers? Were they all in with babies of your age, or were some of them in with grown-ups?”

“All babies. They couldn’t get in with grown-ups. They could only superimpose on minds whose thought patterns hadn’t formed. A year old was the best age because they were old enough to do things if they were directed, but not so old that there was any rejection of an alien. I know about some of the babies they were in with.”

“Who?”

“The son of the Assistant Under Secretary of State. The son of Dr. Nils Bolstadt of the University of Chicago. The daughter of the secretary to the president of General Electric. The grandson of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff… I feel so funny, Daddy, knowing all these things and not knowing what they mean.”

Philip held the boy close to him. He felt like a monster, grilling this infant who’d had an alien mind printed on his. But he had to do it. He had to learn all he could, while he could, dispassionately, before the alien returned. For his son’s sake, for the sake of all of them, he had to forget for now that Joel was physically an infant and instead to pump his supercharged brain for all the information it held.

“You’re being wonderful, Joel,” he said. “Now, why did he get in with you? All those other children are close to big important people, but I’m only a clerk in a business office. What do they want with me?”

“You’re the Average Man. They talked tel-e-path-i-cal-ly about you. The one who was in with me was trying to find out how you thought about their coming, and things like that. That’s why he talked to you through me. The others didn’t. They just spied. They thought you were very un-co-op-er-a-tive. They wished they could read your mind, but they can’t get in with grown-ups.”

“Thank God for that. We may beat them yet because of it, if we can keep you safe—and the other children.”

“Are they bad, Daddy?”

“Yes, Joel. They’re bad for us.”

“I thought they were when he lied to you. He wasn’t telling the truth, either, when he said they were going to live in Africa or Australia. They can’t live on this planet in their own bodies. The atmosphere is wrong. So they’re not just using our bodies to scout with. They’re coming back to live in them, and all the others are coming, too, from the ships. And they’re going to use the old bodies like mine and a whole bunch of new ones. And they’re going to wait for us to grow up, they said, and then they’ll take over…

“Daddy, I don’t want him to come back in with me! Daddy, I’m scared!”

The child was shivering in his arms. The tiny arms clung to him. Joel began to cry, not like an infant, but like a man who has seen and felt too much and has to let go in gulping, smothered sobs.

Philip comforted him as best he could. But he had to ask one more question.

“Joel, boy,” he whispered. “How many of them are there in the ships? Sixty? A hundred?”

The child blurted out the answer between sobs.

“Three million,” he said.

* * * *

Joel, exhausted, had fallen asleep and Philip tiptoed out of the room. He looked into the bedroom. It seemed inconceivable that Catherine could still be asleep, that he had left her just a few minutes ago. But she slept peacefully.

He closed the bedroom door again and went to the telephone. He dialed long distance. An operator came on after several rings.

“I want to make a person-to-person call to Admiral Randall Clarendon, in Washington, D. C. I don’t know his number.”

“Thank you.” There was a long wait, then the operator said, “I’m sorry, sir; we have no listing for any Admiral Randall Clarendon.”

“But you must have. He’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

“I see. Then his home number is probably unlisted. I can connect you with the Department of Defense.”

“No, thanks.”

He looked at the clock. A little after 1 A.M. A little after 2, Washington time. He’d get some sleepy duty officer at the Pentagon who’d never listen to a wild story about the JCS Chairman’s grandson being infiltrated by an extraterrestrial.

He picked up the phone again and asked for Dr. Nils Bolstadt in Chicago. Bolstadt was the atomic scientist. Philip might have more success with a man who worked every day with the seemingly improbable.

But Dr. Bolstadt, when he came to the phone, was barely civil. He listened briefly as Philip began his explanation, then interrupted. He said Philip might not be a drunk or a crackpot but the chances were that he was. He had an average of two calls a week from members of the Anti-Atom Bomb Society, or from people with plans for hooking up baby atomic reactors to the house current, and if he listened to all of them he’d never have time to do any work.

“Just do one thing,” Philip pleased. “This will prove what I’m trying to say. Talk to your son. Just talk to him and listen when he answers.”

“I have two sons,” Dr. Bolstadt said, “and—”

“The one who’s just a year old. You must believe—”

“My sons are asleep, as I should be. I’m going to hang up now and if you ring again I promise you I’ll have the call traced and report you to the police. Good-bye.”

The connection was cut and Philip hung up in despair. He sat with his head in his hands.

“Daddy.”

He went into the nursery. Joel was sitting up in his crib.

“Are you all right, son?” He had a moment of nausea when he thought that the alien might have taken over his son’s mind again.

“Yes, Daddy. I woke up when I heard you telephoning. They don’t believe you, I guess.”

“No. I was crazy to think that they would. But I had to do something.”

“Maybe I can help. I can talk to Georgie.”

“Georgie?”

“Georgie Clarendon. His grandfather is that man in Washington, the Admiral. I could talk to Georgie tel-e-path-i-cal-ly, I think, and he could talk to his grandpa. The one who was in with me talked to the one who was in with Georgie and now that they’re gone I think I could talk to Georgie without them.”

“By all means, boy. Try!”

Joel stood inside his crib and set his face in a scowl of concentration. The minutes ticked by. Then Philip saw his son’s lips move, as if he had made contact and was communicating.

“I woke Georgie up,” said Joel with a little smile, “and first he thought it was a dream. Then when I explained to him, he didn’t know he could talk. So he practiced a while and then went to wake up his grandpa.” Joel sat down in his crib. “It sure made me tired.”

“Do you feel all right otherwise, Joel?” His father looked at him anxiously. “You don’t sense him—the alien—coming back yet, do you?”

“No,” Joel said, then motioned his father to be quiet. “But Georgie’s back.” He sat in a listening attitude. “His grandpa is very surprised and he doesn’t know whether he believes him.”

“He’s got to!” said Philip. “Tell Georgie to tell him about Dr. Bolstadt’s son, if he needs confirmation. It’ll take time, but we’ve got to convince him.”

Joel nodded and concentrated again. Finally he said: “The Admiral has a message for you. He says to tell you he’s a professional skep… skep-tic, but he’d already had secret reports about something funny going on near the Moon’s surface and he’s checking back on them right away.”

“Thank God,” said Philip. He looked out the window at the Moon. It was in its last quarter and there was a star twinkling near the back of its crescent. The star belonged there. But there were things up there that didn’t belong. Maybe radar had already picked them up. He hoped there was a tangible trace of the aliens—something, more than just a series of conversations with an infant who sometimes spoke like a man and sometimes like a creature from an alien and hostile race.

Philip went to peer into the bedroom to see if Catherine was still asleep. She was. He picked up a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray on his way back to the nursery.

“What’s happening now, Joel?”

“The Admiral’s telephoning. He’s made a dozen calls, I guess. Daddy?”

“Yes, son?”

“This is going to sound in-con-gru-ous, but—could you change my pants? They’re wet.”

Philip laughed. He laughed a little louder than he should have, in that quiet threatened house, but he needed the partial release from the tension he’d been under for days.

“Of course, Joel.” He picked up the infant and put him on his back on the top of the bathinette. “You don’t know what pleasure it will give me to change your wet pants.”

“Well, I can’t help it,” Joel said defensively. “Besides, they’re a distraction.”

“You’re doing a man’s work, son,” Philip chuckled, “and the least you ought to have is a clean diaper.”

Later, when he’d been pinned up again, Joel reported: “Message from the Admiral. He says it’s the damnedest campaign he’s ever run. It may also be the most important war this country’s ever fought, though only a handful of people will ever know about it. He’s swearing you to secrecy.”

“War?” said Philip.

“Yes. An aircraft carrier and an air force base are at battle stations. But he insists that you swear.”

“I swear,” said Philip. “Of course.”

“They’ve sent up Lark V and Eegulus missiles and a super-Nike from the base. Atomic warheads on all of them. Look at the Moon.” Philip took his son in his arms and sat with him at the window. Low in the sky, thin and cold the Moon rode, next to its companion, the star. They watched. And waited.

* * * *

Joel screamed. The infant body gave a convulsive jerk.

“Daddy!” the baby cried in terror. “He’s back. He’s trying to get in with me again! Don’t let him, Daddy!”

Philip held the boy tight against him.

“Fight him, son,” he whispered fiercely. “If you can just hold out…

His eyes strained into the night as he willed the missiles up, up, faster, faster…

The baby voice gurgled to silence. When it spoke again it was no longer his son’s.

“You fool,” it said scornfully. “Did you think—”

At that instant there was a pinprick of light against the dark area between the horns of the crescent Moon. Then another, and a third, and a dozen others.

The alien voice stopped, cut off.

“Daddy,” Joe said weakly.

“My boy…my boy.”

Philip hugged the soft, shivering body to him.

“Message from the Admiral,” Joel said faintly. “He says…it’s the first war he ever fought in his pajamas.”

Seconds later he was asleep.

Philip put him tenderly into his crib, on his stomach. Joel automatically drew his knees up under him.

Philip drew the soft blue blanket up to his son’s neck. He patted the little rump, looking out at the serene Moon.

* * * *

Catherine found her husband in the nursery in the morning. He had pulled an armchair into the room and was asleep in it, an ashtray full of cigarette butts on the chest of drawers at his elbow.

Philip woke with a start.

“What’s the matter?” Catherine asked. She went to the crib. Joel was still asleep. “Did he wake up during the night?”

“Little while ago,” Philip said inaccurately. “He had a bad dream, I guess. He’s all right now.”

“You should have called me,” she said. “Poor little fellow. I wonder what goes on in his little head.”

“I wonder.”

Catherine went to the kitchen and began to fix breakfast.

Joel opened his eyes. Philip went to him.

The child clambered to his feet and his father picked him up.

“Daddy,” Joel said. “I…remember, but it’s getting dim. It’s all…going…away…”

“I’m glad, son. I’m very glad.”

“Daddy, I… Daddy. Daddy. Da-da.”

“Catherine,” Philip called. She came in.

“I think he said his first word,” Philip said. “Say Daddy, Joel. Show Mommy. Say Dad-dy.”

“Da,” said Joel, concentrating hard. Then, triumphantly, pounding his father’s shoulder with a tiny fist, “Da-da. Da-da!”