What if your father's rocket brought something home? When two children discover three tiny alien visitors have emerged from their father's experimental spacecraft, they realize these are no friendly visitors from the stars. The aliens' leader has one desperate mission: steal the rocket and flee back to a dying world. But Melvin and Mary Anne possess something the little men never anticipated. They can read the aliens' thoughts. As a battle of wills unfolds in the quiet corners of a suburban home, the children must outthink beings from an advanced civilization whose patience is running thin. Frank Belknap Long wrote this in 1953, when space travel was still dream and danger, and he understood something about childhood fear that few sci-fi writers captured. The real terror here isn't the tiny invaders. It's the moment when your home becomes alien ground and the people who should protect you are powerless against something from the dark. This is Cold War paranoia filtered through a child's nightmare, where imagination itself becomes a weapon and the line between reality and fantasy collapses.
