“What starts?”

“We’re in eclipse now,” explained Babs, starry-eyed.  “We’re in the Earth’s shadow.  In about five minutes we’ll be coming out into sunlight again, and we’ll see the new Earth!”

“Guarantee that it will be a new Earth,” Cochrane said morosely, “and I’ll come.  I didn’t do too well on the old one.”

But he followed her in all the embarrassment of walking on magnetic-soled shoes in a total absence of effective gravity.  It was quite a job simply to start off.  Without precaution, if he merely tried to march away from where he was, his feet would walk out from under him and he’d be left lying on his back in mid-air.  Again, to stop without putting one foot out ahead for a prop would mean that after his feet paused, his body would continue onward and he would achieve a full-length face-down flop.  And besides, one could not walk with a regular up-and-down motion, or in seconds he would find his feet churning emptiness in complete futility.

Cochrane tried to walk, and then irritably took a hand-rail and hauled himself along it, with his legs trailing behind him like the tail of a swimming mermaid.  He thought of the simile and was not impressed by his own dignity.

Presently Babs halted herself in what was plainly a metal blister in the outer skin of the platform.  There was a round quartz window, showing the inside of steel-plate windows beyond it.  Babs pushed a button marked “Shutter,” and the valves of steel drew back.

Cochrane blinked, lifted even out of his irritableness by the sight before him.

He saw the immensity of the heavens, studded with innumerable stars.  Some were brighter than others, and they were of every imaginable color.  Tiny glintings of lurid tint—­through the Earth’s atmosphere they would blend into an indefinite faint luminosity—­appeared so close together that there seemed no possible interval.  However tiny the appearance of a gap, one had but to look at it for an instant to perceive infinitesimal flecks of colored fire there, also.

Each tiniest glimmering was a sun.  But that was not what made Cochrane catch his breath.

There was a monstrous space of nothingness immediately before his eyes.  It was round and vast and near.  It was black with the utter blackness of the Pit.  It was Earth, seen from its eight-thousand-mile-wide shadow, unlighted even by the Moon.  There was no faintest relief from its absolute darkness.  It was as if, in the midst of the splendor of the heavens, there was a chasm through which one glimpsed the unthinkable nothing from which creation was called in the beginning.  Until one realized that this was simply the dark side of Earth, the spectacle was one of hair-raising horror.

After a moment Cochrane said with a carefully steadied voice: 

“My most disparaging opinions of Earth were never as black as this!”

“Wait,” said Babs confidently.