the instant's tugging by its rockets before they were released.

It turned about in emptiness. Its steering-rockets spouted smoke. It
began to cancel out its velocity away from the Platform, and to swim
slowly and very carefully toward it.




3


Making actual contact with the platform was not a matter for instruments
and calculations. It had to be done directly--by hand, as it were. Joe
watched out the ports and played the controls of the steering jets with
a nerve-racked precision. His task was not easy.

Before he could return to the point of rendezvous, the blinding sunlight
on the Platform took on a tinge of red. It was the twilight-zone of the
satellite's orbit, when for a time the sunlight that reached it was
light which had passed through Earth's atmosphere and been bent by it
and colored crimson by the dust in Earth's air. It glowed a fiery red,
and the color deepened, and then there was darkness.

They were in Earth's shadow. There were stars to be seen, but no sun.
The Moon was hidden, too. And the Earth was a monstrous, incredible,
abysmal blackness which at this first experience of its appearance
produced an almost superstitious terror. Formerly it had seemed a
distant but sunlit world, flecked with white clouds and with sprawling
differentiations of color beneath them.