“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.

And it grew—­the sphere.  December passed, January—­I spent a day with a broom sweeping a path through the snow from bungalow to laboratory—­February, March.  By the end of March the completion was in sight.  In January had come a team of horses, a huge packing-case; we had our thick glass sphere now ready, and in position under the crane we had rigged to sling it into the steel shell.  All the bars and blinds of the steel shell—­it was not really a spherical shell, but polyhedral, with a roller blind to each facet—­had arrived by February, and the lower half was bolted together.  The Cavorite was half made by March, the metallic paste had gone through two of the stages in its manufacture, and we had plastered quite half of it on to the steel bars and blinds.  It was astonishing how closely we kept to the lines of Cavor’s first inspiration in working out the scheme.  When the bolting together of the sphere was finished, he proposed to remove the rough roof of the temporary laboratory in which the work was done, and build a furnace about it.  So the last stage of Cavorite making, in which the paste is heated to a dull red glow in a stream of helium, would be accomplished when it was already on the sphere.

And then we had to discuss and decide what provisions we were to take—­compressed foods, concentrated essences, steel cylinders containing reserve oxygen, an arrangement for removing carbonic acid and waste from the air and restoring oxygen by means of sodium peroxide, water condensers, and so forth.  I remember the little heap they made in the corner—­tins, and rolls, and boxes—­convincingly matter-of-fact.

It was a strenuous time, with little chance of thinking.  But one day, when we were drawing near the end, an odd mood came over me.  I had been bricking up the furnace all the morning, and I sat down by these possessions dead beat.  Everything seemed dull and incredible.