(continued)

"There's Mars—clear atmosphere, novel surroundings, exhilarating sense of lightness.  It might be pleasant to go there."

"Is there air on Mars?"

"Oh, yes!"

"Seems as though you might run it as a sanatorium.  By the way, how far is Mars?"

"Two hundred million miles at present," said Cavor airily;  "and you go close by the sun."

My imagination was picking itself up again.  "After all," I said, "there's something in these things.  There's travel—"

An extraordinary possibility came rushing into my mind.  Suddenly I saw, as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavorite liners and spheres deluxe.  "Rights of pre-emption," came floating into my head—planetary rights of pre-emption.  I recalled the old Spanish monopoly in American gold.  It wasn't as though it was just this planet or that—it was all of them.  I stared at Cavor's rubicund face, and suddenly my imagination was leaping and dancing.  I stood up, I walked up and down;  my tongue was unloosened.

"I'm beginning to take it in," I said;  "I'm beginning to take it in."  The transition from doubt to enthusiasm seemed to take scarcely any time at all.  "But this is tremendous!" I cried.  "This is Imperial!  I haven't been dreaming of this sort of thing."

Once the chill of my opposition was removed, his own pent-up excitement had play.  He too got up and paced.  He too gesticulated and shouted.  We behaved like men inspired.  We were men inspired.

"We'll settle all that!" he said in answer to some incidental difficulty that had pulled me up.  "We'll soon settle that!  We'll start the drawings for mouldings this very night."

"We'll start them now," I responded, and we hurried off to the laboratory to begin upon this work forthwith.

I was like a child in Wonderland all that night.  The dawn found us both still at work—we kept our electric light going heedless of the day.  I remember now exactly how these drawings looked.  I shaded and tinted while Cavor drew—smudged and haste-marked they were in every line, but wonderfully correct.  We got out the orders for the steel blinds and frames we needed from that night's work, and the glass sphere was designed within a week.  We gave up our afternoon conversations and our old routine altogether.  We worked, and we slept and ate when we could work no longer for hunger and fatigue.  Our enthusiasm infected even our three men, though they had no idea what the sphere was for.  Through those days the man Gibbs gave up walking, and went everywhere, even across the room, at a sort of fussy run.

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