WE DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG, HARDLY By ROGER KUYKENDALL Illustrated by Freas [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction May 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] After all—they only borrowed it a little while, just to fix it— I mean, it isn't like we swiped anything. We maybe borrowed a couple of things, like. But, gee, we put everything back like we found it, pretty near. Even like the compressor we got from Stinky Brinker that his old man wasn't using and I traded my outboard motor for, my old m ... my father made me trade back. But it was like Skinny said ... You know, Skinny. Skinny Thompson. He's the one you guys keep calling the boy genius, but shucks, he's no ... Well, yeah, it's like Skinny said, we didn't need an outboard motor, and we did need a compressor. You've got to have a compressor on a spaceship, everybody knows that. And that old compression chamber that old man ... I mean Mr. Fields let us use didn't have a compressor. Sure he said we could use it. Anyway he said we could play with it, and Skinny said we were going to make a spaceship out of it, and he said go ahead. Well, no, he didn't say it exactly like that. I mean, well, like he didn't take it serious, sort of. Anyway, it made a swell spaceship. It had four portholes on it and an air lock and real bunks in it and lots of room for all that stuff that Skinny put in there. But it didn't have a compressor and that's why ... What stuff? Oh, you know, the stuff that Skinny put in there. Like the radar he made out of a TV set and the antigravity and the atomic power plant he invented to run it all with. He's awful smart, Skinny is, but he's not like what you think of a genius. You know, he's not all the time using big words, and he doesn't look like a genius. I mean, we call him Skinny 'cause he used to be—Skinny. But he isn't now, I mean he's maybe small for his age, anyway he's smaller than me, and I'm the same age as he is. 'Course,
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