At around ten P.M. on July 20, 1969, eight-year-old Peter Diamandis positioned himself in front of the large television set in the wood-paneled basement of his family’s home in Mount Vernon, New York. His mom, dad, younger sister, and grandparents were seated nearby. Peter, in pajamas and cape, aimed his mom’s Super 8 camera at the screen, panned the room, paused on his white German shepherd, Prince, and returned to the television.
On the carpet next to Peter were his note cards and newspaper clippings, organized by NASA mission—Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo—and by rockets—Redstone, Atlas, Titan, and Saturn. The third-grader, unable to sit still under normal circumstances—his mother called him ataktos, Greek for unruly—fidgeted, bounced, and rocked in place. This was the moment Peter had dreamed about, a moment that promised to be better than all the electronics he could buy at Radio Shack, cooler than every Estes rocket ever made, more exciting even than the M80s lit on his birthday, sending his mom and friends diving for cover.
The Sears Silvertone TV was turned to CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, the seasoned newsman who was at Cape Kennedy, Florida. Peter, with the camera on, read the words “MAN ON THE MOON: THE EPIC JOURNEY OF APOLLO 11.” He listened to a clip from a speech given by President Kennedy in May 1961: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” The onscreen countdown began for Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin to park their lunar lander on the surface of the Moon, a quest for the ages, a Cold War imperative, and a high-stakes contest between nations that had begun when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957. Now, almost twelve years later, America was trying to make history of its own. Astronaut Michael Collins, piloting Apollo 11’s command module Columbia, had already separated from the lander and was alone in lunar orbit, waiting for his fellow astronauts to walk on the Moon.
If all went according to plan, Collins, Aldrin, and Armstrong would reunite in orbit in less than a day. About seventeen thousand engineers, mechanics, and managers were at the Florida space center for the launch. In all, an estimated four hundred thousand people had worked on some part of the Apollo program, from the women in Dover, Delaware, who did the sewing and gluing of the life-protecting rubberized fabric of the spacesuits, to the engineers at NASA, Northrop, and North American Aviation who worked for years on the clustering, three-chute parachute system for Columbia. The cost of the program was put at more than $25 billion.
Peter daydreamed constantly about exploring the glittering and dark expanse in his own spaceship, like the Robinson family in the television series Lost in Space, with the precocious nine-year-old son Will Robinson and the humanized and weaponized Robot. But on this night, the TV screen had his undivided attention.
Cronkite, in his deep voice and languid manner, said, “Ten minutes to the touchdown. Oh boy . . . Ten minutes to landing on the Moon.” The program flashed between streamed images of the Moon and simulations of the landing done by CBS with NASA’s help. The signal from the lunar camera had to be transmitted a quarter of a million miles to the Parkes Radio Astronomy Observatory west of Sydney, Australia, and then across the Pacific Ocean by satellite to the control center in Houston. From there, the images would go to television networks and finally to television sets in the United States and abroad.
In the first few minutes of flight, the Saturn V first stage—which had its design origins as a ballistic missile used by the Germans in World War II—had used four and a half million pounds of propellant, and the craft’s velocity relative to Earth had gone from zero to 9,000 feet per second in ascent.*
Cronkite announced: “Go for landing, three thousand feet.”
“Eagle looking great,” said Mission Control in Houston, as grainy black-and-white images of a barren, rock-strewn landscape appeared on television sets.
“Altitude sixteen hundred feet,” Cronkite narrated. “They’re going to hover and make a decision. . . . Apparently it’s a go. Seven hundred feet, coming down.”
“Nineteen seconds, seventeen, counting down,” Cronkite said. It was just before dawn on the Moon, and the sun was low over the eastern horizon behind the lunar lander.
Peter focused his camera on the screen. He had used his mom’s camera to film NASA television broadcasts before. He had clipped countless newspaper and magazine stories of space missions and written letters to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He had a “Short Glossary of Space Terms,” issued by NASA, and he memorized terms like “monopropellant” and “artificial gravity.” He won first place in a county dental poster contest with his drawing of the launch of Apollo to the Moon and the caption “Going away? Brush three times a day.” He and his elementary school friend Wayne Root made their own stop-motion movies, using Star Trek models on fishing line as props. Peter learned that he could scratch the film in postproduction to make spaceships fire laser beams. On weekends, Peter loved to sit his family down in the living room upstairs and give lectures on stars, the Moon, and the solar system, explaining terms like “LEO,” for low-Earth orbit.
The launch of the Saturn V rocket on July 16, four days before the scheduled Moon landing, had been to Peter every Fourth of July rolled into one. Three men riding on top of a fiery rocket aimed at space! Five F-1 engines burning liquid oxygen and kerosene and producing 7.5 million pounds of thrust! It was like sending the Washington Monument rocketing skyward.* Peter littered his schoolbooks with sketches and doodles of planets, aliens, and spaceships. He had drawn the Saturn V over and over, with its first stage, second stage, and third stage, its lunar module, service module, and command module.
At 363 feet, it was taller than a football field set on end, both beauty and monster, weighing more than 6.4 million pounds when prepared for launch. Peter had watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climb through the docking tunnel from Columbia to Eagle to check on the lunar module. The lunar module—the LM, pronounced “LEM” and originally called the Lunar Excursion Module—had never been tested in the microgravity of the Moon. Peter was not alone in wondering whether this spaceship would make it back to Earth. Columbia would return at more than 17,000 miles per hour. If its descent was too steep, it would burn up; if too gradual, it wouldn’t make it through the atmosphere back to Earth. Even when coming into the atmosphere perfectly—threading the needle at supersonic speeds—Columbia would be a fireball, with temperatures on the outside exceeding three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Peter’s father, Harry Diamandis, appreciated this moment in history and welcomed any news that wasn’t about the Vietnam War or the emotional civil rights struggles of the day. But he couldn’t understand his son’s fascination with space, given the challenges of life on Earth. He and his wife, Tula, had come from the small Greek island of Lesbos, where he grew up tending goats and bartering for food—olives for almonds, kale for milk—and working at his father’s café. Harry’s mother, Athena, was a housekeeper who would bring home surplus bits of dough in her apron pockets to bake for the family. One of Harry’s favorite Christmas presents was a red balloon. He was a village boy, the first in his family to graduate from high school and go to college. Harry had wanted to be a doctor, and passed his medical boards in Athens before setting his sights on America. He arrived in the Bronx speaking no English. Their journey from Lesbos to America, and Harry’s path to becoming a successful obstetrician, at times felt like its own trip to the Moon, with improbable odds, an element of fear, and a feeling of being a stranger in a foreign land.
On the television screen in the Diamandises’ living room, images showed a simulation of the lunar landing. Then Apollo 11 commander Armstrong radioed, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” The Eagle sat silently on the Sea of Tranquility in the Moon’s northern hemisphere. Mission Control radioed back, “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”
“The lunar module has landed on the Moon,” Cronkite marveled. “We’re home. Man on the Moon.”
More than five hundred million people, from crowds gathered before screens in Disneyland to American soldiers in Vietnam, watched as the white-suited, tank-headed Armstrong, a ghostly, blocky figure, backed out of the module and made his way down the steps. Tula watched Peter, hoping her son remembered to breathe. Armstrong said, “I’m at the foot of the ladder. The surface appears to be very, very fine-grained as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder. I’m going to step off the LM now.”
It was just minutes before eleven P.M. in the Diamandis household. From Earth, the Moon was in a waxing crescent phase. Slowly, Armstrong moved his cleated foot onto the talcum surface, becoming the first human to ever touch another celestial body. “That’s one small step for man,” Armstrong said, “one giant leap for mankind.” The view was desolate but mesmerizing, a desert scrubbed clean. The sky looked thick and dark like black velvet.
Peter stopped filming. This was the difference between believing in God and witnessing God. It was both answer and question, new frontier, old Earth. It was NASA doing what it said it would do. The astronauts were modern-day Magellans.
Cronkite rubbed his hands together and dropped his paternal demeanor. “There’s a foot on the Moon,” he said, removing his black-rimmed glasses and wiping his eyes. “Armstrong is on the Moon. Neil Armstrong—thirty-eight-year-old American—standing on the surface of the Moon! Boy, look at those pictures—240,000 miles to the Moon. I’m speechless. That is really something. How can anybody turn off from a world like this?”
It was close to midnight when Tula finally got the kids to bed. Marcelle, who was six, was asleep before her head hit the pillow. Peter, still wired with excitement, told his mom once again that he was going to be an astronaut when he grew up. Tula’s reply never varied: “That’s nice, dear. You’re going to be a doctor.” Medicine was known; space was experimental. Besides, the first-born son in a Greek family always followed his father’s path. Family friends were already calling young Peter the future Dr. Diamandis. Tula had given Peter a child’s doctor’s kit, and he would sometimes have her recline on the sofa so he could check her pulse and listen to her heartbeat. Being a doctor would be an honorable profession for Peter.
After Tula left the room, Peter turned on his flashlight and ducked under his tented bedspread. He made entries in his secret diary: The Moon was freezing in the shadows but baking in the sun. He would need a suit and the right boots—maybe his ski boots. There was no air to breathe on the Moon, so he’d need oxygen. He’d need food, water, and of course, a rocket. He drew more pictures of Saturn V, and of the astronauts. Late into the night, drawings and notes scattered around him, Peter fell asleep wondering how he could possibly be a doctor when he needed to get to the Moon.
—
In the years following the lunar landing, Peter began making his own rovers, among other machines. He was predatory in his pursuit of motors to hack. In one case, the lawn mower motor disappeared, turning up later on his go-kart. Then the bedsheets went missing, revealing themselves eventually as parachutes for the go-kart. The Diamandis family lived in the middle of the block on a middle-class street on the north side of Mount Vernon, New York, about thirty minutes from New York City and bordering the Bronx. Their house was a two-story white Dutch colonial with blue shutters, a big front yard, and a narrow gravel driveway where Peter liked to set up jumps for his bike. The house also had a side yard and backyard, with cherry trees and a swing set put together with great effort by his dad and uncle.
Peter drove his lawn mower–powered go-kart down the street from his house, turned onto Primrose Avenue, and pushed the cart to the top of an enormous hill. Wearing no helmet, he blasted down Primrose Avenue like a junior John Stapp,* the Air Force colonel who studied g-forces by famously riding rocket-powered sleds to a top speed of 639 miles per hour. Peter deployed his go-kart’s “parachute” only when precariously close to the busy intersection.
Peter took particular delight in his sister’s toys, eyeing them as a raven stares at a meaty carcass. When Marcelle received a new Barbie Dream House, Peter discovered that its motor was perfect for one of his projects, and the Barbie window shades provided the ideal chain to automate the arm of one of his robots. Marcelle and her parents went from amused to exasperated. Peter also hatched various weapon-related plans, including one that used a pipe cleaner fashioned as a projectile for his BB gun. When it didn’t work, Peter mistakenly tried to suck it out of the barrel, only to have the discharged pipe cleaner shoot straight down his throat. He was rushed to the hospital and back to his experiments by nightfall. Peter got good grades, but his teachers wrote on his report cards, “Peter talks too much,” and he could “work a little harder on settling down.”
Every Sunday, Peter and his family drove to the Archangel Michael Greek Orthodox Church near Roslyn, where Peter was an altar boy, tasked with carrying the incense, candles, or the large gold cross and helping with communion. Confession wasn’t required, but he talked openly with the kind Reverend Father Alex Karloutsos, telling him that he regularly took his sister’s toys and too often made his parents worry. And he told him about his love of space; it was his “guiding star.”
Peter shared with Father Alex his belief that they were all living in a biosphere, a kind of terrarium seeded with life by aliens. The aliens returned, Peter confided, to collect people as specimens or seedlings, but only in rural places like Nebraska where they wouldn’t be noticed. Father Alex liked listening to Peter and knew that he was not a boy who could be placated by statements like “God is love.” Father Alex told Peter that the greatness of the universe was a reflection of God’s presence in our lives.
In early spring, Peter was out riding his gold Schwinn Stingray banana-seat bike when he came across a neighborhood boy selling fireworks. Not long after, when it came time for Peter’s birthday, Tula and Peter went over the party plan. Peter wanted to light off his new “fireworks.” Tula, concerned about the noise, decided she could mute the sounds by burying the M80—Peter kept insisting these were everyday fireworks—under a pile of gravel in their narrow driveway. She said she would light the fuse herself. Peter’s buddy Wayne Root was there with camera in hand. Tula told the kids to step back, nervously lit the red fuse, and scurried off. There was a long pause. The suburban neighborhood was quiet. Then—the sounds of gunfire. Pop! Pop! Tula yelled out, “Duck! Everybody duck!” Gravel flew, glass shattered, and she and the kids dove for cover.
When Tula finally looked up, there were clouds of lingering smoke and wide-eyed kids. Wayne was still holding his camera. Miraculously, no one was injured, and—at first glance—only a small side window of their house was cracked. Tula, heart racing, feeling as if they’d all just been shot at, gave Peter a you’re-in-big-trouble look. Peter did his best to appear solemn, all the while thinking excitedly about the power and possibilities of projectiles powered by a fraction of a stick of dynamite.
—
The Diamandis family moved from Mount Vernon to Kings Point, Long Island, in the summer of 1974, when Peter was entering eighth grade. Harry Diamandis’s medical practice was thriving in the Bronx.
They moved to Long Island for the schools, and because Tula fell in love with a century-old house she saw advertised in The New York Times, which had been on the market for three years. It was eight thousand square feet, at the bottom of a hill, with access to a community tennis court, swimming pool, and marina. Where others saw a white elephant and a lot of hard work, Tula saw possibility, and quickly set about restoring the house room by room.
Great Neck, a thirty-minute commute to Manhattan, was the fictional setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; it had sprawling verdant lawns, long driveways leading to estate homes, and nine miles of waterfront along Long Island Sound and Manhasset Bay. The Diamandis home was in Kings Point, the village at the northern tip of the Great Neck peninsula in Nassau County.
Peter claimed the third floor of the house for himself, posting a green and white “ADULTS KEEP OUT” sign, printed on his new dot matrix printer, at the top of the stairs. Peter’s domain consisted of three rooms, one for sleeping and studying, one for projects—robots, rockets, chemistry, general experimentation—and the third for playing Ping-Pong, rerouting his electric train set, watching TV, and listening to music and studying.
Peter still decorated his bedroom with NASA posters, but now the posters were of the Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt, NASA’s first scientist-astronaut. Their mission in 1972, two years earlier, had spanned twelve days and included three days of exploration on the surface of the Moon. Cernan, who drove the Lunar Rover more than twenty miles collecting geologic samples, made a wishful statement before departing the Moon: “As we leave, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.” The Apollo missions were over, but the new space shuttle program had begun, announced by President Nixon in 1972 as a rocket that would land like an airplane and would be “a reusable orbital vehicle that will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it.” In Peter’s mind, NASA could do no wrong, though he thought the name “space shuttle” was uninspired when compared with Apollo.
It didn’t take long for Peter and a new friend in Great Neck, Billy Greenberg, to realize they were going to need more money for their projects and experiments. Cannibalizing household appliances and siblings’ toys would get them only so far. They rounded up like-minded friends Gary Gumowitz, Danny Pelz, and Clifford Stober, pooled their cash, and set off on their bikes to the bank.
The boys explained to the teller that they wanted to open an account to pay for cool stuff for their club.
“Does your club have a name?” the teller asked.
The boys looked at one another quizzically.
“Well, what do you do?”
“I don’t know,” Peter said, “we build stuff.”
“Like what?”
Rockets, trains, robots, remote-control planes, remote-control cars, boats.
“It sounds like you do everything,” the teller said finally. “Why don’t you call it ‘The Everything Club’?”
The loosely formed Everything Club was officially launched. The boys met in Peter’s tree house, intentionally built with a stepladder too rickety to support adults. And they met in Peter’s project room. They ordered Estes rocket kits organized by skill level, beginning with the classic Der Red Max, which had red wood fins, a black nose, and a skull and crossbones. Standing sixteen inches tall, the rocket flew to around 500 feet and had parachute recovery. The boys had a schedule to work their way up the skill levels, from one to five, and then start building their own rockets and making their own propellant.
Peter and Billy and the rest of the boys joined the Great Neck North High School computer club, math club, and future physicians club. They started programming on Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments calculators, and then programmed on computers that were offered as vocational training for high school students. They learned electronics by building Heathkits, making small transistor radios with resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, a rheostat, and a small loudspeaker. Their classmate Jon Lynn was the first in their group to build a working computer, the Sol-20 by Processor Technology, similar to the early Altair. Their first “computers” relied on punch cards for programming, based on the same mechanical principle as the Jacquard loom, with the punch-card reader converting the perforations into on/off electrical signals, which the computer interpreted as numbers and instruction codes for the calculation. Carrying the punch cards around school was like being a part of a secret fraternity.
After school, the boys hung out at the Gold Coast video arcade, playing Pong, Tank, and Speed Race. One of their favorite games was Lunar Lander, where they used arrow keys to rotate the lander and change the thrust, with the goal of landing safely on an X on the Moon. Peter was on the high school diving team, and though he was never very interested in sports, he was muscular like a wrestler and could do a backflip from the standing position. He had thick and dark feathered hair, wore a gold chain with a cross, and got teased for his height—he had topped out at five feet five inches tall.
Peter and his friend Billy’s outlook for building and flying powerful rockets improved greatly when they found themselves in the popular Mr. Tuori’s chemistry class. Mr. Tuori, who had taught chemistry at Great Neck North for decades, favored experiments that woke kids up and left an impression. Peter and Billy were lab partners and watched attentively. This was learning they would use.
In class, lab coats and goggles on, Peter and Billy followed as Mr. Tuori took metallic-looking gray iodine crystals from a small jar and put them into a beaker. Mr. Tuori then relocated to the fume hood to pour a small amount of concentrated solution of ammonia over the crystals. He shook the mixture gently, explaining that the new compound, nitrogen triiodide, with three iodine atoms stuck around a single nitrogen atom, was pretty safe while wet. Once dry, though, anything could set it off, from a snowflake to a feather. After giving the chemicals time to react, Mr. Tuori filtered the mud-colored mixture to get rid of the excess ammonia. It was critical, Mr. Tuori again cautioned, to set it down before it had time to dry. When it came time for testing, Peter and Billy were front and center. Using a long pole, Mr. Tuori reached toward the charred-looking material. Peter noticed a fly buzzing just above the nitrogen triiodide. He gently elbowed Billy to look in the direction of the six-legged interloper. As Mr. Tuori’s stick approached the compound, the fly landed on the powder—setting off a loud and sharp snap! A poof of purple smoke followed. The unfortunate fly was blown to smithereens.
Soon, shipments of explosives began arriving at Peter’s door in boxes marked with a skull and crossbones and the warning “DANGER: EXPLOSIVES” stamped on top. The boys discovered they could find whatever they wanted through chemical supply companies advertised in the back of Popular Science magazine. They could have chemicals sent in bulk by UPS directly to their door. Peter secretly turned one of his third-floor closets into a chemical supply room, apprehending the boxes before his mom and dad made it home. Peter and Billy split the supplies in half, so if one of them was found out, they’d lose only half their supply.
The boys ordered equipment for their chemistry labs: beakers, Bunsen burners, flasks, stoppers, droppers, funnels, and thermometers. Peter was drawn to the alkaline earth metals, especially magnesium, which burned a bright white light. He ordered boxes of magnesium ribbons and powder, and he’d add barium to make it burn green and strontium to make it burn red. He did tests with calcium and—of course—loved potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal, the mainstays of gunpowder.
The only thing that Peter didn’t like was that potassium nitrate and sulfur needed oxygen to burn. He wanted to find something that wasn’t saddled with that requirement. To Peter, chemistry pushed into the unknown, into what felt like the opposite of ordinary schoolwork. It held mystery, order, and logic. Chemistry reminded him of being a little boy again and jumping into rain puddles. Only now, he got to make the puddles and cause the ripples.
Peter began studying rocketry, reading books by the Russian teacher and physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was born in 1857, was nearly deaf, largely self-educated, and introduced ideas about space travel and rocket science still in use more than a century later. In the late 1800s, Tsiolkovsky wrote about the effects of zero gravity on the body, predicted the need one day for pressure suits for space travel, developed Russia’s first wind tunnel, envisioned rockets fueled by a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, and developed the mathematical formula for changes in a rocket’s momentum and velocity.* Peter also read about Robert Goddard, the American physicist who built and launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926, an event likened in significance to the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk. Goddard was ridiculed when he stated his belief that a big enough rocket could one day reach the Moon, but he drew support from aviator Charles Lindbergh. Peter appreciated how Goddard’s rocket experiments as an undergraduate at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute yielded explosions and smoke that sent professors running for fire extinguishers.
Peter learned about German physicist Hermann Oberth, also a believer in liquid-fueled rockets over solid-fuel rockets, and another German, Wernher von Braun, father of the Saturn V, which came out of his work for Nazi Germany on the V-2 ballistic missile during World War II.* Peter knew that if it weren’t for von Braun and his group of German engineers, the United States would not have reached the Moon by the end of the 1960s.
On weekends, Peter and his rocket-making pals packed their creations, along with various remote-controlled planes, into their backpacks and hopped on their bikes. They rode to the nearby Merchant Marine Academy in King’s Point. Sometimes they’d pick a football field just outside the gates to launch their Estes rockets. It never took long before the academy guards chased them away.
Other times, the boys persuaded one of their parents to drive them to Roosevelt Field, where Lindbergh took off in the Spirit of St. Louis to try to fly to Le Bourget Field in Paris. The field had a parking lot and vast open space. The boys filled their rockets with homemade gunpowder, sometimes getting a poof, other times a firework, and sometimes an unwanted ballistic missile that tore at them like a flying snake, coming close on at least one occasion to taking out an unsuspecting Harry Diamandis.
One of Peter and Billy’s best creations was a rocket series they called Mongo, with Mongo 1, 2, and 3 getting progressively taller and driven by the most powerful motors they could get their hands on. They built an autonomous launch system that could fire up to three rockets in sequence using a circuit they designed around the 555 Timer IC. This way, when it was just two of them, one rocketeer could be downfield tracking the launch and the other taking photos. This won them first place in an Estes rocket design competition, awarding them certificates to buy more rockets. While working on their arsenal and making their way down the periodic table, Peter and Billy made an important discovery: potassium chlorate made better explosions than potassium nitrate.
Peter also discovered important properties about potassium perchlorate. Not only was it highly explosive, but it also produced its own oxygen when it decomposed. He bought the colorless crystalline substance—common in fireworks, ammunition, sparklers, and massive rocket motors—in five-pound boxes. He experimented by drilling holes in film canisters and covering the holes with automotive body filler. To make an explosion with potassium perchlorate or chlorate, he would need to combine it with something else that would combust, like sulfur or aluminum powder. The right concoctions shot out of the filled hole; some fizzled or failed altogether.
One winter afternoon, the boys met up at Jon Lynn’s house. They filled film canisters with various potions, wrapped them in duct tape, and lit them off in the icy driveway. One flew directly at a boy’s head, several worked as planned, and a few fizzled. After more experimentation, a new plan was hatched: They should take one of their potassium perchlorate film canister bombs and put it underwater to see what would happen. Potassium perchlorate didn’t need oxygen to burn.
The boys ran to the back of the house, where the Lynns had a swimming pool, which was partially frozen over. They put one of the canisters in the water below the ice. The boys stood slightly off to the side, watching and waiting. Nothing happened. Seconds passed. Then they heard a muted booosh! The ice rose up an inch—the boys stepped back—and then it appeared to settle. Peter was relieved. But then came an enormous, clear crack. Jon Lynn’s mom, Suzanne, inside preparing dinner, suddenly felt the house move.
It was becoming more and more evident that this suburban neighborhood was not a big enough canvas for Peter’s rocket dreams.