Operation: Outer Space | Page 8

Murray Leinster
with the zest of being
where she'd never dared hope to be able to go.
"I wouldn't want to be cured of being a crackpot," protested Cochrane,
"if only I could afford such a luxury! I'd--"
Babs said urgently:
"You'll have to hurry, really! They told me it starts in ten minutes, so I
came to find you right away."

"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.
Cochrane waited. He had to hold carefully in his mind that this visible
abyss, this enormity of purest dark, was not an opening into
nothingness but was simply Earth at night as seen from space.
Then he saw a faint, faint arch of color forming at its edge. It spread
swiftly. Immediately, it seemed, there was a pinkish glowing line
among the multitudinous stars. It was red. It was very, very bright. It
became a complete half-circle. It was the light of the sun refracted
around the edge of the world.
Within minutes--it seemed in seconds--the line of light was a glory
among the stars. And then, very swiftly, the blazing orb which was the
sun appeared from behind Earth. It was intolerably bright, but it did not
brighten the firmament. It swam among all the myriads of myriads of
suns, burning luridly and in a terrible silence, with visibly writhing
prominences rising from the edge of its disk. Cochrane squinted at it

with light-dazzled eyes.
Then Babs cried softly:
"Beautiful! Oh, beautiful!"
And Cochrane shielded his eyes and saw the world new-born before
him. The arc of light became an arch and then a crescent, and swelled
even as he looked. Dawn flowed below the space platform, and it
seemed that seas and continents and clouds and beauty poured over the
disk of darkness before him.
He stood here, staring, until the steel shutters slowly closed. Babs said
in regret:
"You have to keep your hand on the button to keep the shutters open.
Else the
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