lvy, of the University of Juno, took violent
exception to Septimus Spink's derisive attitude and stoutly defended the
theory of adiabatic expansion. It was at this juncture that Spink
practically disintegrated the meeting._

_"For the last seventy years," he orated, "all we have thought about was
outer space. All that we have been hepped up about is what is up in the
attic and have forgot the cellar. What proof has any knucklehelmet got
that nobody lives far under the coal mines and the oil pockets?
Something lives everywhere! Adam never believed anythin' lived in water
until he was bit by a crab. Gentlemen, I am announcin' for the benefit
of the press and everybody from here to Mars and Jupiter and back that I
intend to explore inner space! I have already got the project
underway."_

_A near panic ensued as representatives of the press made for the
audio-viso stellartypes. "You think volcanoes are caused by heat
generated far down inside the earth. They are only boils or carbuncles.
Awright, where do earthquakes come from?" Here Spink laughed once more.
"They are elastic waves sent out through the body of the Earth, huh?
Their observed times of transmission give a means of finding their
velocities of propagation at great depths. I read that in a book that
should be in the Terra-firmament Institute along with the Spirit of St.
Louis."_

_Septimus Spink walked out at this point, surrounded by Interplanetary
scribes, one of whom was Exmud R. Zmorro. Spink informed the Fourteenth
Estate that he would let them have a gander at the model of his inner
space machine in due time. He inferred that one of his financial backers
in the fabulous enterprise was Aquintax Djupont, and that the fact that
Djupont had recently been brain-washed at the Neuropsychiatorium in
Metropolita had no bearing on the case whatsoever._

* * * * *

I am seeing and listening to that news item right now which has been
repeated a dozen times the last twenty-four hours as if nobody could
believe it. I am Septimus Spink, and descended from a long line of
Spinks that began somewhere back at the time they put up the pyramids.

All my ancestors was never satisfied with what progress they saw during
when they lived, and they are the reasons we have got where we are
today. And if there was no Spinks today the scientists would get away
with saying that the Earth was only a drop from the sun that got a crust
on it after milli