Elaine, who was still blushing, drew away and went toward the kitchen. "I'll get the water for you, Mr. Platt."
"Call me Leroy. And not too much water, honey."
"There isn't any liquor in the house," Fay said. "We just moved in yesterday, but I can get some coffee ... "
"No, that's OK, I've got a bottle in the car -- the bottomless bottle, thanks to your boy here -- I'll bring it in later and we'll have a ball, but listen, Dave -- " the cigarette spilled ash down his frayed sweater -- "I want to tell you, you're the biggest genius of them all. My chapeau is off to you, boy, I mean it! I wish I'd invented that! But you did it, son -- you're the greatest. I mean it. Well" -- he took the brimming glass of water from Elaine and raised it -- "here's to you, Dave Ewing, and long may you Gismo!" He sipped and made a mock-wry face, then gulped the water down.
Ewing said, "What makes you think I -- "
"Who was working with Schellhammers?" Platt cried. "You think I didn't see your John Henry all over that thing? Going to tell me you didn't do it?"
"No, but -- "
"Sure, you did! The second I saw that, I could tell. I said to myself, I got to find old Dave, and I'll do it, too, if I have to track 'm down like a bloodhound!"
Fay put in, "Leroy, how did you find us?"
"I'll tell you, honey. See, Dave and yours truly were old army buddies, and back at Fort Benning he always used to tell me how he wanted to go live in the mountains some day -wanted to be a goddamn eagle and sneer down at all the flatland foreigners. So I figured, where would Dave go if he wanted to get out of sight in a hurry? Not down to L.A., because there's going to be hell popping down there. Not up the coast, because that'd take too long and he might get stuck anywhere along the way. I figured, he'd head out on route ninety-one and stop the first time he came to a high place. So I followed my hunch, and when I saw this little pimple with a house on it, I came on up. See?"
The Ewings looked at each other in dismay. Fay's hand was on the little portable radio; she must have switched it on, because a power hum came out of the speaker. But there were no voices: the last of the local stations had gone off the air yesterday evening. She turned it off, still looking stricken.
"Well, hell, you don't have to stay here, do you?" Platt demanded. "Not that anybody else would find you this easy, but listen, old buddy, you too, Fay, what are you going to do with yourselves, now you don't have to work for a living?"
Ewing cleared his throat. "We haven't really had time to talk about it. I'd like to build a lab somewhere, when things settle down ... "
"Sure you would. You will, too, boy. Hell, the sky's the limit, and that brings me to the moral of my tale. Listen, thanks to you, we can all do what we want now -- and Dave, listen, you know what I want to do?"
Ewing said the first fantastic thing that came into his head. "Fly to the moon, I guess."
"Right. Good boy -- smart as a razor, no flies on you."
"Oh, no," said Ewing, clutching his head.
"Sure! Dave, listen, come on with me, bring the family -- I've got the place picked out, and I know ten, twenty other people that'll come in with us, but you're the boy I wanted to see first. It's big, boy, it's the biggest thing in the world!"
"You really want to build a spaceship?"
"Going to build one, boy. Up in the Santa Rosas -- the Kennedy labs, they're made to order. All the room you want, and heavy equipment -- two months to get organized, and then watch us go."
"Why not White Sands?"
Platt shook his head impatiently. "I don't want it, Davey. One thing, every space-happy nut in the country will be there by now -- you'll have to elbow 'em out of the way to spit. Then, what have they got that we need? Hardware, yes, missile frames, yes, but most of it is the wrong scale. We're going to start fresh, Davey, and do it right. You can't make an interplanetary vehicle out of a Viking, boy -- might as well put rockets on an outhouse. Think about this, now. Really see it." He hitched closer, spreading his ungainly arms. "Build your ship -- any size. Make it as big as an apartment house if you want -- and all payload, Davey! Put 'everything in. Bedrooms, bowling alleys, kitchens -- wup, no kitchens; don't need 'em. But libraries, movie theaters, laboratories -- "
Ewing started. "Leroy, have you been drinking liquor copied by the Gismo? You said something before -- "
"Sure," said Platt impatiently. "Eating the food, too: Why not? Just put it through twice, make sure you don't get any reversed peptide chains. Now listen, boy, pay attention -- you build all that, whatever you want, get the picture? Now: put your rocket motors underneath. All you want. With the Gismo, you can have ten or a million. Now what about fuel -- all those big tanks that used to kill us dead before we got off the ground? Davey, two little tanks, hydrazine and oxygen, and two Gismos. We make our fuel as we need it. Forget about your goddamn mass-energy ratios! I can jack up the goddamn Mormon Temple and take it to the moon! The moon, hell!"
He took a breath. "Dave, think about it! We can go any goddamn where in the universe! This time next year, we'll be on Mars. Mars." He stood up, arms out, and became a space-suited Martian explorer, staring keenly into the distance. "What's that I see? Strange pyramids? Little men with six noses? We'll find out, but let's make it quick, because we got a date on Venus. But we'll leave behind a bunch of big Gismos as an atmosphere plant -- fifty years, a hundred years, there'll be enough air on Mars to breathe without these helmets. Then Venus -- same thing there. If there's no oxygen, we'll make it. Davey, a lousy hundred years from now, mankind'll own the universe. I'm telling you! We can have Mars, and Venus, and the Jovian system, just for the asking! Then what about the stars? Listen, Davey, why not? In that ship we can live indefinitely -- we can have kids there, and they'll keep going when we kick off. Do you see it now? Doesn't it send you?"
He paused and glared incredulously at Ewing. "No?"
"No. Now look, Leroy, just to take one point -- this atmosphere scheme of yours. You're going to be adding mass -- billions of tons of it. It isn't like releasing free oxygen chemically, from oxides in the soil or something like that -- you're going to perturb the orbits of the planets."
"Not to bother about," said Platt energetically. "Look, look -- say the mass of a small planet like Mars ... " Still talking, he hauled out a small celluloid slide rule and began flipping the cursor back dad forth.
"Wait a minute," Ewing said, "you're going off half-cocked again." He produced his own slide rule from his back pocket, and they bent closer to each other, both trying to talk at once.
When she saw this, Fay got up and went into the kitchen, taking her resigned children with her.
Half an hour later, when she came back with coffee and sandwiches, Platt was just getting to his feet in an ecstasy of despair at human stupidity. "Well, hell," he said. "Well, hell. Well, hell, boy. I'll get the bottle and we'll have a snort to celebrate, anyway. Maybe that'll loosen you up," he added in a stage aside. The screen door banged behind him.
Ewing grinned ruefully and put his arm around his wife as she sat down beside nun. "Better get the spare room ready," he said.
"Dave, no, it's just that hot little room with the water heater in it. And we haven't even got a mattress for him."