"The Junior Fall dance is in two weeks," she said. "But I guess you'll be too busy to be interested?"
"'Guess' just isn't the word, Nance. I regret that—truly."
He looked and sounded as though he meant 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: