tube in one wall. Their slipper soles clanked and clicked in an erratic
rhythm. Brent walked with the mincing steps necessary for movement in
weightlessness. The others imitated him. Their hands no longer hung
naturally by their sides, but tended to make extravagant gestures with
the slightest muscular impulse. They swayed extraordinarily as they
walked. Brent was a slender figure, and Joe was more thick-set, and
Haney was taller, and lean. The burly Chief and the forty-one inch
figure of Mike the midget followed after them. They made a queer
procession indeed.

Minutes later they were in a blister on the skin of the Platform. There
were quartz glass ports in the sidewall. Outside the glass were metal
shutters. Brent served out dense goggles, almost black, and touched the
buttons that opened the steel port coverings.

They looked into space. The dimmer stars were extinguished by the
goggles they wore. The brighter ones seemed faint and widely spaced.
Beneath their feet as they held to handrails lay the featureless
darkness of Earth. But before them and very far away there was a vast,
dim arch of deepest red.

It was sunlight filtered through the thickest layers of Earth's air. It
barely outlined the curve of that gigantic globe. As they stared, it
grew brighter. The artificial satellite required little more than four
hours for one revolution about its primary, the Earth. To those aboard
it, the Earth would go through all its phases in no longer a time. They
saw now the thinnest possible crescent of the new Earth. But in
minutes--almost in seconds--the deep red sunshine brightened to gold.
The hair-thin line of light widened to a narrow ribbon which described
an eight-thousand-mile half-circle. It brightened markedly at the