The pumps began to exhaust the air from the airlock.
Corey's space suit inflated visibly. Presently the pump stopped. Corey
opened the outer door. He went out, paying plastic rope behind him. An
instant later he reappeared and removed the rope. He'd made his line
fast outside. He closed the outer lock-door. Air surged into the lock
and Haney crowded in. Again the pumping. Then Haney went out, and was
anchored to the Platform not only by his magnetic boots but by a rope
fastened to a hand-hold. Brent went out. Mike. Joe came next.

They stood on the hull of the Space Platform, waiting in the incredible
harsh sunshine of emptiness. The bright steel plates of the hull swelled
and curved away on every hand. There were myriads of stars and the vast
round bulk of Earth seemed farther away to a man in a space suit than to
a man looking out a port. Where shadows cut across the Platform's
irregular surface, there was utter blackness. Also there was horrible
frigidity. Elsewhere it was blindingly bright. The men were specks of
humanity standing on a shining metal hull, and all about them there was
the desolation of nothingness.

But Joe felt strangely proud. The seventh man came out of the lock-door.
They tied their plastic ropes together and spread out in a long line
which went almost around the Platform. The man next to the lock was
anchored to a steel hand-hold. The third man of the line also anchored
himself. The fifth. The seventh. They were a straggling line of figures
with impossibly elongated shadows, held together by ropes. They were
peculiarly like a party of weirdly costumed mountaineers on a glacier of
gleaming silver.

But no mountain climbers ever had a background of ten thousand million
stars, peering up from below them as well as from overhead. Nor did any
ever have a mottled greenish planet rolling by 4,000 miles beneath
them, nor a blazing sun glaring down at them from a sky such as this.

In particular, perhaps, no other explorers ever set out upon an
expedition whose purpose was to throw tin cans and dried refuse at all
the shining cosmos.

They set to work. The space suits were inevitably clumsy. It was not
easy to throw hard with only magnetism to hold one to his feet. It was
actually more practical to throw straight up with an underhand gesture.
But even that would send the tin cans an enormous distance, in time.
There was no air to slow them.

The tin cans twinkled as they left the Platform's steel