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Ross was not in sight.
    Mr. Jenkins shook hands with him and offered him a chair. “Cigarette, Doctor? Cigar?”
    “Neither, thank you.”
    “If you smoke a pipe,” Mrs. Jenkins added, “please do so.”
    Cargraves thanked her and gratefully stoked up his old stinker.
    “Ross tells me a strange story,” Mr. Jenkins started in. “If he were not pretty reliable I’d think his imagination was working overtime. Perhaps you can explain it.”
    “I’ll try, sir.”
    “Thanks. Is it true, Doctor, that you intend to try to make a trip to the moon.”
    “Quite true.”
    “Well! Is it also true that you have invited Ross and his chums to go with you in this fantastic adventure?”
    “Yes, it is.” Doctor Cargraves found that he was biting hard on the stem of his pipe.
    Mr. Jenkins stared at him. “I’m amazed. Even if it were something safe and sane, your choice of boys as partners strikes me as outlandish.”
    Cargraves explained why he believed the boys could be competent junior partners in the enterprise. “In any case,” he concluded, “being young is not necessarily a handicap. The great majority of the scientists in the Manhattan Project were very young men.”
    “But not boys, Doctor.”
    “Perhaps not. Still, Sir Isaac Newton was a boy when he invented the calculus. Professor Einstein himself was only twenty-six when he published his first paper on relativity—and the work had been done when he was still younger. In mechanics and in the physical sciences, calendar age has nothing to do with the case; it’s solely a matter of training and ability.”
    “Even if what you say is true, Doctor, training takes time and these boys have not had time for the training you need for such a job. It takes years to make an engineer, still more years to make a toolmaker or an instrument man. Tarnation, I’m an engineer myself. I know what I’m talking about.”
    “Ordinarily I would agree with you. But these boys have what I need. Have you looked at their work?”
    “Some of it.”
    “How good is it?”
    “It’s good work—within the limits of what they know.”
    “But what they know is just what I need for this job. They are rocket fans now. They’ve learned in their hobbies the specialties I need.”
    Mr. Jenkins considered this, then shook his head. “I suppose there is something in what you say. But the scheme is fantastic. I don’t say that space flight is fantastic; I expect that the engineering problems involved will some day be solved. But space flight is not a back-yard enterprise. When it comes it will be done by the air forces, or as a project of one of the big corporations, not by half-grown boys.”
    Cargraves shook his head. “The government won’t do it. It would be laughed off the floor of Congress. As for corporations, I have reason to be almost certain they won’t do it, either.”
    Mr. Jenkins looked at him quizzically. “Then it seems to me that we’re not likely to see space flight in our lifetimes.”
    “I wouldn’t say so,” the scientist countered. “The United States isn’t the only country on the globe. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear some morning that the Russians had done it. They’ve got the technical ability and they seem to be willing to spend money on science. They might do it.”
    “Well, what if they do?”
    Cargraves took a deep breath. “I have nothing against the Russians; if they beat me to the moon, I’ll take off my hat to them. But I prefer our system to theirs; it would be a sour day for us if it turned out that they could do something as big and as wonderful as this when we weren’t even prepared to tackle it, under our set-up. Anyhow,” he continued, “I have enough pride in my own land to want it to be us , rather than some other country.”
    Mr. Jenkins nodded and changed his tack. “Even if these three boys have the special skills you need, I still don’t see why you picked boys. Frankly, that’s why the scheme looks rattlebrained to me.