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.
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