he 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
middle. It remained red at its ends, but in the very center it glowed
with splendid flame. Then a golden ball appeared, and swam up and
detached itself from the Earth, and the on-lookers saw the breath-taking
spectacle of all of Earth's surface seemingly being born of the night.

As if new-created before their eyes, seas and lands unfolded in the
sunlight. They watched flecks of cloud and the long shadows of
mountains, and the strangely different colorings of its fields and
forests.

As Brent had told them, it was good to watch.

It was half an hour later when they gathered in the kitchen of the
Platform. The man who had been loading launching tubes now briskly
worked to prepare a meal on the extremely unusual cooking-devices of a
human outpost in interplanetary space.

The food smelled good. But Joe noticed that he could smell growing
things. Green stuff. It was absurd--until he remembered that there was a
hydroponic garden here. Plants grew in it under sunlamps which were
turned on for a certain number of hours every day. The plants purified
the Platform's air, and of course provided some fresh and nourishing
food for the crew.

They ate. The food was served in plastic bowls, wit