n the world outside or in your own mind--is
that it's a weapon."

"Anything worthwhile in your mind is a weapon!" Alice interjected with
surprising intensity.

"You see?" Pop said. "That's what I mean about the both of you. That
sort of thinking's been going on a long time. Cave man picks up a rock
and right away asks himself, 'Who can I brain with this?' Doesn't occur
to him for several hundred thousand years to use it to start building a
hospital."

"You know, Pop," I said, carefully tucking the cube back in my pocket,
"you _are_ sort of preachy at times."

"Guess I am," he said. "How about some grub?"

* * * * *

It was a good idea. Another few minutes and we wouldn't have been able
to see to eat, though with the cans shaped to tell their contents I
guess we'd have managed. It was a funny circumstance that in this wonder
plane we didn't even know how to turn on the light--and a good measure
of our general helplessness.

* * * * *

We had our little feed and lit up again and settled ourselves. I judged
it would be an overnight trip, at least to the cracking plant--we
weren't making anything like the speed we had been going east. Pop was
sitting in back again and Alice and I lay half hitched around on the
kneeling seats, which allowed us to watch each other. Pretty soon it got
so dark we couldn't see anything of each other but the glowing tips of
the cigarettes and a bit of face around the mouth when the person took a
deep drag. They were a good idea, those cigarettes--kept us from having
ideas about the other person starting to creep around with a knife in
his hand.

The North America screen still glowed dimly and we could watch our green
dot trying to make progress. The viewport was dead black at first, then
there came the faintest sort of bronze blotch that very slowly shifted
forward and down. The Old Moon, of course, going west ahead of us.

After a while I realized what it was like--an old Pullman car (I'd
traveled in one once as a kid) or especially the smoker of an old
Pullman, very late at night. Our crippled antigravity, working on the
irregularities of the ground as they came along below, made the ride
rhythmically bumpy, you see. I remembered how lonely and strange that
old sleeping car had seemed to me as a kid. This felt the same. I kept
waiting for a hoot or a whistle. It was the sort of loneliness that
settles in your bones and k