"Who's trying to be funny? There's only two things wrong with taking your helmet off now. First, we haven't warmed this place, and you'd have frozen your pretty little head off in half a minute. Second, there's less air here than in a vacuum tube, and even after we turn on the air generators I want to examine the dome for possible leaks before you go around taking off your helmet. See?"
"Y-yes." She suddenly looked frightened. "It's just that the place looks so warm and homey, Jerry."
It did. We were standing in a foyer and I could see a couple of bedrooms off on the left, comfortable, all metal and metal fibre construction. Further down the hall there was a pantry and when Clair opened the door we found it to be full of canned goods, all glued to the shelf lightly against the tricks which could be played by the negligible gravity. Beyond that, we found a first-class, compact kitchen unit, and you should have seen Clair's eyes light up. If there's anything that makes a girl sparkle all over, it's the first sight of a good kitchen over which she's to have domain. You can be anywhere—New York or here on 4270 or out on Pluto, it wouldn't matter. She hardly heard a word I said for the next ten minutes, as I patiently lined up the things we must do first. Three things, primarily. We had to start the heating units within the dome, do the same for the air generators, and check the dome itself for any leakage.
Gramps took care of items one and two, and I felt an urge to take off my helmet without checking further. But that was silly. We had played the game right thus far, and it would be pointless to get into serious trouble over a thing like that.
So for the next fifteen minutes, Clair and I just knocked off our grav-plates and swarmed all over the inside of the dome like a couple of trained houseflies. From this height I could see almost half way around my side of the little planet, and Clair's line of vision probably came close to meeting mine someplace around the equator. And after a time I was satisfied that my side of the dome couldn't lose as much as a molecule of air.
"Tight as a thermos bottle," I called over the intercom. "How's yours, Clair?"
Her answer was a scream. It jarred me from my precarious hold on the under surface of the dome, and I went floating to the ground as light as a feather.
Clair still clung up on top yelling so loud that the intercom only reproduced the sound as garbled noise and static. And I couldn't do anything but float down slowly, with Gramps motioning me down with his arms, as if I could do anything to hurry.
Clair scrambled down her side of the dome and waited there next to Gramps, hands on hips, looking up at me like a vexed mistress might look at her lap dog when he didn't come to her call soon enough. But she looked more composed now, and she took off her helmet. The air situation, then, was all right, and I unscrewed my own fishbowl and let it float down beside me.