Some were brighter than others, and they were of every imaginable color.
Tiny glintings of lurid tint--through the Earth's atmosphere they would
blend into an indefinite faint luminosity--appeared so close together
that there seemed no possible interval. However tiny the appearance of a
gap, one had but to look at it for an instant to perceive infinitesimal
flecks of colored fire there, also.

Each tiniest glimmering was a sun. But that was not what made Cochrane
catch his breath.

There was a monstrous space of nothingness immediately before his eyes.
It was round and vast and near. It was black with the utter blackness of
the Pit. It was Earth, seen from its eight-thousand-mile-wide shadow,
unlighted even by the Moon. There was no faintest relief from its
absolute darkness. It was as if, in the midst of the splendor of the
heavens, there was a chasm through which one glimpsed the unthinkable
nothing from which creation was called in the beginning. Until one
realized that this was simply the dark side of Earth, the spectacle was
one of hair-raising horror.

After a moment Cochrane said with a carefully steadied voice:

"My most disparaging opinions of Earth were never as black as this!"

"Wait," said Babs confidently.

Cochrane waited. He had to hold carefully in his mind that this visible
abyss, this enormity of purest dark, was not an opening into nothingness
but was simply Earth at night as seen from space.