h elastic thread
covers through which they could see and choose the particular morsels
they fancied next. The threads stretched to let through the forks they
ate with. But Brent used a rather more practical pair of tongs in a
businesslike manner.

They drank coffee from cups which looked very much like ordinary cups on
Earth. Joe remembered suddenly that Sally Holt had had much to do with
the design of domestic science arrangements here. He regarded his cup
with interest. It stayed in its saucer because of magnets in both
plastic articles. The saucer stayed on the table because the table was
magnetic, too. And the coffee did not float out to mid-air in a hot,
round brownish ball, because there was a transparent cover over the cup.
When one put his lips to the proper edge, a part of the cover yielded as
the cup was squeezed. The far side of the cup was flexible. One pressed,
and the coffee came into one's lips without the spilling of a drop.

At that moment Joe really thought of Sally for the first time in a good
two hours. She'd been anxious that living in the Platform should be as
normal and Earth-like as possible. The total absence of weight would be
bad enough. She believed it needed to be countered, as a psychological
factor in staying sane, by the effect of normal-seeming chairs and
normal-tasting food, and not too exotic systems for eating.

Joe asked Brent about it.

"Oh, yes," said Brent mildly. "It's likely we'd all have gone off the
deep end if there weren't some familiar things about. To have to drink
from a cup that one squeezes is tolerable. But we'd have felt hysterical
at times if we had to drink everything from the equivalent of baby
bottles."

"Sally Holt," said Joe, "is a friend of mine. She helped design this
stuff."

"That girl has every ounce of brains that any woman can be trusted
with!" Brent said warmly. "She thought of things that would never have
occurred to me! As a psychologist, I could see how good her ideas were
when she brought them up, but as a male I'd never have dreamed of them."
Then he grinned. "She fell down on just one point. So did everybody
else. Nobody happened to think of a garbage-disposal system for the
Platform."

It came into Joe's mind that garbage-disposal was hardly a subject one
would expect to be discussing in interplanetary space. But the Platform
wasn't the same thing as a spaceship. A ship could jettison refuse and
leave it behind, or store it during a voyag