THE BUILDING OF THE SPHERE
"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 all 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 those 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
39
