Certainly the aspect of things had changed very greatly.  I no longer doubted at all the enormous possibilities of the substance, but I began to have doubts about the gun-carriage and the patent boots.  We set to work at once to reconstruct his laboratory and proceed with our experiments.  Cavor talked more on my level than he had ever done before, when it came to the question of how we should make the stuff next.

“Of course we must make it again,” he said, with a sort of glee I had not expected in him, “of course we must make it again.  We have caught a Tartar, perhaps, but we have left the theoretical behind us for good and all.  If we can possibly avoid wrecking this little planet of ours, we will.  But—­there must be risks!  There must be.  In experimental work there always are.  And here, as a practical man, you must come in.  For my own part it seems to me we might make it edgeways, perhaps, and very thin.  Yet I don’t know.  I have a certain dim perception of another method.  I can hardly explain it yet.  But curiously enough it came into my mind, while I was rolling over and over in the mud before the wind, and very doubtful how the whole adventure was to end, as being absolutely the thing I ought to have done.”

Even with my aid we found some little difficulty, and meanwhile we kept at work restoring the laboratory.  There was plenty to do before it became absolutely necessary to decide upon the precise form and method of our second attempt.  Our only hitch was the strike of the three labourers, who objected to my activity as a foreman.  But that matter we compromised after two days’ delay.

Chapter 3

The Building of the sphere

I remember the occasion very distinctly when Cavor told me of his idea of the sphere.  He had had intimations of it before, but at the time it seemed to come to him in a rush.  We were returning to the bungalow for tea, and on the way he fell humming.  Suddenly he shouted, “That’s it!  That finishes it!  A sort of roller blind!”

“Finishes what?” I asked.

“Space—­anywhere!  The moon.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mean?  Why—­it must be a sphere!  That’s what I mean!”

I saw I was out of it, and for a time I let him talk in his own fashion.  I hadn’t the ghost of an idea then of his drift.  But after he had taken tea he made it clear to me.

“It’s like this,” he said.  “Last time I ran this stuff that cuts things off from gravitation into a flat tank with an overlap that held it down.  And directly it had cooled and the manufacture was completed all that uproar happened, nothing above it weighed anything, the air went squirting up, the house squirted up, and if the stuff itself hadn’t squirted up too, I don’t know what would have happened!  But suppose the substance is loose, and quite free to go up?”

“It will go up at once!”