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"What did you do then?"
"Well, the Robot was advancing on our position. We had seen that ordinary guns wouldn't stop it - bullets bounced right off of its metal plating. So I did the only thing I could think of."
"The disintegration gun?"
"Exactly. If the Robot could use it to blast through our best defenses, I supposed that I should be able to use it to blast through the Robot. I took my aim, fired - and what do you think happened next?"
"KABOOM!"
"Yes, but not in the way you might expect. The trouble is, I was using a weapon whose workings I did not understand.
How
does a disintegration gun disintegrate things? I had no idea. To make matters worse, the Robot was not made out of ordinary metal. What happens when you combine two unknown factors?"
"I don't know..."
"Precisely. There is no way to tell what the result will be. And this particular result turned out to be quite unexpected."
"What happened?"
"Instead of disintegrating, the Robot
absorbed
the energy from the gun. It began to glow. And then it began to
grow
. It grew and it grew until it was bigger than my jeep. And it kept growing until it was bigger then a house! It was so big it could have stepped on any of us and squashed us flat!"
"Did anybody get squished?"
"Thankfully, no. But it scooped up Miss Smith, our journalist, and carried her off down the road!"
"Did it eat her?"
"It actually was trying to get her to safety before it destroyed the rest of humanity. When all was said and done it was a very sad Giant Killer Robot."
"How did you stop it?"
"It turned out that the Robot was made of something called Living Metal. This is why it grew so big when I shot it. Now, the Doctor had been studying it, and had cooked up an anti-metal - a sort of a virus that would attack the Living Metal directly. We just needed to get close enough to it and - "
"KABOOM!"
"Quite. Well, we drove right up next to it. It was stomping around trying to squash us, or pick us up with hands the size of motor cars. But we splashed the anti-metal all over its leg and drove away as fast as we could."
"Did the Robot asplode?"
"It turned bright red as the virus did its work. And then it started to shrink again. Smaller and smaller, back down to its normal size. And it kept shrinking and shrinking until it shrank away to nothing and was gone."
"Hooray!"
"But that is why Science has to lead. If you attack before knowing the full situation, you often end up making things worse. You always need to use the proper tools for the job, and only science can give those to you."
"Nother one!"
"That's all for tonight. It's past your bedtime."
"Goodnight, Daddy."
"Goodnight, Kate."