She sat very still, waiting for Melvin to speak to her. Suddenly he did, deep inside her head.
The little men had come from far, far away. They had come from a big cloud of stars in the sky called the Great Nebula in Andromeda. Nearly everything in the universe curved and they had come spinning along the biggest curve of all in hundreds and hundreds of punched-out disks that glowed in the dark like Roman candles.
The cow pasture Melvin and she played in was—she knew what it was but she waited for Melvin to say it—rocket proving-ground. It was their own secret playing place but daddy called it a rocket proving-ground.
Daddy wouldn't send the rocket to the moon from his laboratory in the cellar. He'd take it out to the proving-ground and ask even the President of the United States to watch it start out for the Moon.
The President would come because her daddy was a very important and wonderful man. He didn't have much money but he'd be rich and famous if the rocket reached the moon.
Most men as wonderful as her daddy were poor until they did something to make people stand up and shout. The little men didn't want her daddy to become rich so that he could send Melvin through college and she could go to college too. The little men didn't want her to learn domestic housekeeping and make the handsomest man in all the world happy.
The little men wouldn't—couldn't—take the rocket out to the proving-ground. It would start off blazing and go straight up through the roof into the sky. It would blow the cellar apart and the cottage would come tumbling down in ruins. Melvin would be killed and her daddy....
She had never been so terrified in all her life and if Melvin hadn't started thinking she would have burst out crying.
Melvin was thinking something now about the cottage. Water came in from the sea. It did too—she remembered daddy complaining about it when he went down to stoke the furnace. Water in the cellar and the ground underneath all soft and soggy.
Salt-marsh seepage. Why, it was like quicksand down below the solid strata. The words came quick and clear from Melvin thinking. Solid strata. Even the solid strata wasn't all solid. There were porosities in it—like a sponge. If something very heavy went down through the cellar floor it would go right on sinking.