it. In some crazy way, it
seemed that he _did_ mean it.

He walked her home. Then he went to the next house, and up to his rented
room. He showered, and for once climbed very early into bed, feeling
that he must have nightmares. About strange sounds in the thin winds,
over the mysterious thickets of Mars. Or about some blackened, dried-out
body of a sentient being, sixty million years dead, floating free in the
Asteroid Belt. A few had been found. Some were in museums.

Instead, he slept the dreamless sleep of the just--if there was any
particular reason for him to consider himself just.

II

Gimp Hines put the finishing touches on the first full-scale ionic
during that next week. The others of the Bunch, each working when he
could, completed cementing the segments of the first bubb together.

On a Sunday morning they carried the bubb out into the yard behind the
store and test inflated the thirty-foot ring by means of a line of hose
from the compressor in the shop. Soapsuds dabbed along the seams
revealed a few leaks by its bubbling. These were fixed up.

By late afternoon the Bunch had folded up the bubb again, and were
simulating its practice launching from a ground-to-orbit rocket--as well
as can be done on the ground with a device intended only for use in a
state of weightlessness, when the operators are supposed to be
weightless, too. The impossibility of establishing such conditions
produced some ludicrous results:

The two Kuzaks diving with a vigor, as if from a rocket airlock, hitting
the dirt with a thud, scrambling up, opening and spreading the great
bundle, attaching the air hose. Little Lester hopping in to help fit
wire rigging, most of it still imaginary. A friendly dog coming over to
sniff, with a look of mild wonder in his eyes.

"Laugh, you leather-heads!" Art Kuzak roared at the others. He grinned,
wiping his muddy face. "We've got to learn, don't we? Only, it's like
make-believe. Hell, I haven't played make-believe since I was four! But
if we keep doing it here, all the kids and townspeople will be peeking
over the fence to see how nuts we've gone."

This was soon literally true. In some embarrassment, the Bunch rolled up
their bubb and lugged it into the shop.

"I can borrow a construction compressor unit on a truck," Two-and-Two
offered. "And there's a farm I know..."

A great roll of stellene tubing, to have a six-feet six-inch inside
diameter when inflated, was delivered on