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.

Stinky called the space helmets kid stuff. He was always saying things like say hello to the folks on Mars for me, and bring back a bottle of canal number five, and all like that, you know. Course, they did look like kid stuff, I guess. We bought them at the five-and-dime, and they were meant for kids. Of course when Skinny got through with them, they worked fine.

We tested them in the air lock of the compression chamber when we got the compressor in. They tested out pretty good for a half-hour, then we tried them on in there. Well, it wasn't a complete vacuum, just twenty-seven inches of mercury, but that was O.K. for a test.

So anyway, we got ready to take off. Stinky was there to watch, of course. He was saying things like, farewell, O brave pioneers, and stuff like that. I mean it was enough to make you sick.

He was standing there laughing and singing something like up in the air junior birdmen, but when we closed the air-lock door, we couldn't hear him. Skinny started up the atomic power plant, and we could see Stinky laughing fit to kill. It takes a couple of minutes for it to warm up, you know. So Stinky started throwing rocks to attract our attention, and Skinny was scared that he'd crack a porthole or something, so he threw the switch and we took off.

Boy, you should of seen Stinky's face. I mean you really should of seen it. One minute he was laughing you know, and the next minute he looked like a goldfish. I guess he always did look like a goldfish, but I mean even more like, then. And he was getting smaller and smaller, because we had taken off.

We were gone pretty near six hours, and it's a good thing my Mom made me take a lunch. Sure, I told her where we were going. Well ... anyway I told her we were maybe going to fly around the world in Skinny and my spaceship, or maybe go down to Carson's pond. And she made me take a lunch and made me promise I wouldn't go swimming alone, and I sure didn't.

But we did go around the world three or four times. I lost count. Anyway that's when we saw the satellite—on radar. So Skinny pulled the spaceship over to it and we got out and looked at it. The spacesuits worked fine, too.

Gosh no, we didn't steal it or anything. Like Skinny said, it was just a