--in fact, both his legs were now artificial.

The cadets, who had thought him a bit stuffy at first, were changing
their minds fast. Why hadn't he quit, they wanted to know?

"Leave space?" said Scott. "I'd rather die. I can't blast off any more.
But here at the station I'm still a spaceman."

The red light went out, and they opened the door.

In sharp contrast to the bustle and noise on the power deck, the meteor,
weather, and radar observation room was filled with only a subdued
whisper. All around them huge screens displayed various views of the
surface of Venus as it slowly revolved beneath the station. Along one
side of the room was a solid bank of four-foot-square teleceiver screens
with an enlisted spaceman or junior officer seated in front of each one.
These men, at their microphones, were relaying meteor and weather
information to all parts of the solar system. Now it was Roger's turn to
get excited at seeing the wonderful radar scanners that swept space for
hundreds of thousands of miles. They were powerful enough to pick up a
spaceship's identifying outline while still two hundred thousand miles
away! Farther to one side, a single teleceiver screen, ten feet square,
dominated the room. Roger gasped.

Scott smiled. "That's the largest teleceiver screen in the universe," he
said. "The most powerful. And it's showing you a picture of the
Andromeda Galaxy, thousands of light years away. Most of the lights you
see there are no more than that, just light, their stars, or suns,
having long ago exploded or burned. But the light continues to travel,
taking thousands of years to reach our solar system."

"But--but--" gasped Tom. "How can you be so accurate with this screen?
It looks as though we were smack in the center of the galaxy itself!"

"There's a fifty-inch telescope attached to the screen," Scott replied,
"which is equal to the big one-thousand-inch 'eye' back at the Academy."

"Why is that, sir?" asked Roger.

"You don't get any distortion from atmosphere up here," replied the
young officer.

As Tom and Roger walked silently among the men at the teleceiver
screens, Scott continued to explain. "This is where you'll be, Manning,"
he said, indicating a large radarscope scanner a little to one side and
partially hidden from the glow of the huge teleceiver screen. "We need a
man on watch here twenty-four hours a day, though there isn't much doing
between midnight and eight A.M. on radar watch. A little