"Why stop?"
"I want to dance," she told him. "We'll not pay entry, nor can we buy a drink. But we can use their floor and we can dance right through the other customers and never get an elbow in the ribs."
Ackerman laughed. This 'time-space' had some advantages. "But if your feet get trampled, I can't blame some clumsy-footed stranger."
Joan nodded, and her raven hair rippled tantalizingly. "Nope," she said, "you can't; so if you dance on my feet I'll bark your shin with a spike heel. Fair enough?"
"Fair," he said.
7
With smiles of mutual amusement, Joan and Les walked through the door of a small nightclub, past the hatcheck girl, past the headwaiter, and into the clubroom. "First time," said Joan, "that anybody has ever got into a jernt like this without paying well for the privilege."
"It has its disadvantages," said Ackerman; "we get no table."
"That's easy," laughed Joan. She led Les across the dancefloor and seated herself on the edge of the bandstand, sitting right through the saxophone player's music stand. Ackerman sat beside her, his shoulder partway through the cornetist's knee. It was sometime later that they both noticed that they were not really sitting on the bandstand but upon something as firm at least three inches below the floor-level. It was, he was beginning to understand, a matter of temporal mass and temporal inertia—which Ackerman associated with permanence, dependability, and ponderosity. The earth was quite permanent; it had been a functioning factor for a good many billion years. The building was more or less permanent, but far from having the permanence of a brick wall, for instance.