Up They Go
Up They GoWe reached the cove and Fatty locked his car. The sloop was all ready to go, as we’d fixed her up the night before. When we shoved off, she handled like a dream that Lipton might have had as a boy. She was gaff-rigged, but not too broad of beam so that we couldn’t run a little if we wanted to. Fatty handled the tiller and I crewed. That way, we only needed ballast forward.
Neither of us were crazy about fishing. We’d made that up as an excuse for Edna. Sailing in the moonlight in the great, big loneliness of Cassowary Cove, with the smells of the Atlantic resting quietly around us—that was all the wallop we wanted.
“But suppose,” I said, as soon as I’d trimmed sail, “suppose we got to Venus and there’s a kind of animal there that finds us more appetizing than chili
