Well, if you're going to keep interrupting me, how can I ...
All right. Anyway, Skinny broke into the argument and said that he could prove mathematically that antigravity was possible, and Stinky said suure he could, and Skinny said sure he could, and Stinky said suuure he could, like that. Honestly, is that any way to argue? I mean it sounds like two people agreeing, only Stinky keeps going suuure, like that, you know? And Stinky, what does he know about mathematics? He's had to take Remedial Arithmetic ever since ...
No, I don't understand how the antigravity works. Skinny told me, but it was something about meson flow and stuff like that that I didn't understand. The atomic power plant made more sense.
Where did we get what uranium? Gee, no, we couldn't afford uranium, so Skinny invented a hydrogen fusion plant. Anyone can make hydrogen. You just take zinc and sulfuric acid and ...
Deuterium? You mean like heavy hydrogen? No, Skinny said it would probably work better, but like I said, we couldn't afford anything fancy. As it was, Skinny had to pay five or six dollars for that special square tubing in the antigravity, and the plastic space helmets we had cost us ninety-eight cents each. And it cost a dollar and a half for the special tube that Skinny needed to make the TV set into a radar.
You see, we didn't steal anything, really. It was mostly stuff that was just lying around. Like the TV set was up in my attic, and the old refrigerator that Skinny used the parts to make the atomic power plant out of from. And then, a lot of the stuff we already had. Like the skin diving suits we made into spacesuits and the vacuum pump that Skinny had already and the generator.
Sure, we did a lot of skin diving, but that was last summer. That's how we knew about old man Brinker's compressor that Stinky said was his and I traded my outboard motor for and had to trade back. And that's how we knew about Mr. Fields' old compression chamber, and all like that.
The rocket? Well, it works on the same principle as the atomic power plant, only it doesn't work except in a vacuum, hardly. Course you don't need much of a rocket when you have antigravity. Everyone knows that.
Well, anyway, that's how we built the spaceship, and believe me, it wasn't easy. I mean with Stinky all the time bothering us and laughing at us. And I had to do a lot of lawn mowing to get money for the square tubing for the antigravity and the special tube for the radar, and my space helmet.