We Didn't Do Anything Wrong, HardlyKuykendall, Roger
Science
We Didn't Do Anything Wrong, Hardly
Kuykendall, Roger
Boys -- Fiction; Humorous stories; Science fiction; Short stories; Space flight -- Fiction
Anyway, Stinker said something about how he was going to be a rocket
pilot when he grew up, and I told him that Skinny had told me that there
wouldn't be any rockets, and that antigravity would be the thing as soon
as it was invented. So Stinker said it never would be invented, and I
said it would so, and he said it would not, and I said ...
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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