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Through his size vie, still polarized at half lare, Lieutenant Don Merriam USSF watched the last curved sliver of solid sun, already blurred by Earth&039;s ate behind the solid bulk of the ht reproduced with frightening exactitude the winter sun setting through the black tangle of leafless trees a quarter mile west of the Minnesota far his head toward the righthand ued a key to cut polarization ("The airless planets will be pioneered by ues," Coested)

The stars sprang out in their ht squared, a night with sequins The pearly shock of Sol&039;s corona blended with the Milky Way

Earth was ringed by a ruddy glow - sunlight bent by the planet&039;s thick athout the eclipse The ring was brightest near the planet&039;s crust, fading out a quarter dia the lefthand rim behind which the sun had just vanished

Don noted without surprise that the central bulk of Earth was the blackest he had ever seen it Because of the eclipse, it was no longer brushed with the ghostly glow ofback and supporting hiet an easy view of Earth, which was halfway to his zenith Noith a wrist-flick nicely gauged to the ravitation, he caht and ring-glow tinged with bronze the dark gray plain of dust, netic iron oxide

Back when Croland, Hevelius had naht sunlight Don could not have seen the walls of Plato That near-h, circular rampart, thirty miles away from him moon-east, north, south, and west, was hidden by the curve of the moon&039;s surface, sharper than the earth&039;s

The same close horizon cut off the bottoood to see those five little glowing portholes at the in between the dark plain and the starfield - and near theht, the truncated cones of the base&039;s three rocket ships, each standing high on its three landing legs

"How&039;s the dark dark?" Johannsen&039;s voice softly asked in his ear "Roger and over"

"Warer to you"

"Outside tenified fluorescent dials beneath the vie "Dropping past 200 Kelvin," he replied, giving the absolute equivalent of a terees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale still widely used in Earth&039;s English-speaking areas

"Your SOS working?" Johannsen continued

Don tongued a key and a faint musical ululation filled his helmet "Loud and clear, my captain," he said with a flourish

"I can hear it," Johannsen assured hiued it off

"Have you harvested our cans?" Johannsen next asked, referring to the tiny, rod-supported cannisters regularly put out and collected to check on theradioactively tagged atoms planted at various distances from the Hut

"I haven&039;t sharpened my scythe yet," Don told hi snort as he signed off He and Don ell aware that planting and harvesting the cans was et atier from moonquakes - when Earth and Sun were dragging at the moon from the same side, as now, or from opposite sides, as would happen in teeks Gravitational traction has been thought to trigger earthquakes, and so, possibly,beyond the raph keyed to the solid rock below the dust cushioning the Hut had hardly quivered; just the sa a ht - at "new earth" and "full earth" (or full o, or si tides) Thus if the unexpected did occur and the Hut sustained serious da outside his basket

It was just another of the many fine-drawn precautions Moonbase took for its safety Besides, it provided a tough regular check on the efficiency of spacesuits and of personnel working solo

Don looked up again at the Earth The ring was glowing less lopsidedly now He couldn&039;t h he knew the eastern Pacific and the Americas were to the left and the Atlantic and the western tips of Africa and Europe to the right He thought of dear, slightly hysterical Margo and good old neurotic Paul, and truly even they seemed to him rather trivial at theunder the bark of Earth&039;s atlittering whiteness Not whiteness literally, yet the effect of a new-fallen Minnesota snow by starlight had been duplicated with devilish precision Carbon dioxide gas, seeping steadily up through the pumice and oxide of Plato&039;s floor, had suddenly crystallized throughout into dry-ice flakes for onto it al less inhumanly distant from life Theshot, but she was getting to seem just a little like a chilly Older Sister

Balo Gelhorn and the cat Miaow along the Pacific Coast Highway At alrow until it plainly said slide area or falling rock zone, and then it would duck out of the headlight beaenerally narrow strip between the beach and an alically infantile ravel, and other sedih

Margo, her hair strea, sat half switched around with her knees on the seat between her and Paul, so she could watch the sly bronzed moon She had her jacket spread on her lap On it was Miaow, curled up in a gray doughnut and fast asleep, or giving a good i Two," Paul said "We could look at the h one of the Project &039;scopes"

"Will Morton Opperly be there?" Margo asked

"No," Paul replied, s faintly "He&039;s over in the Valley these days, at Vandenberg Three, playing ed and looked sideways up "Doesn&039;t the moon ever black out?" she wondered "It&039;s still sooty copper"

Paul explained to her about the ring-glow

"How long does the eclipse last, anyway?" she asked, and when he said, "Two hours," she objected: "I thought eclipses were over in seconds, with everybody getting excited and dropping their cameras"

"Those are the eclipses of the sun - the totality part"

Margo sraphs," she said "You can&039;t possibly be overheard in acar And I&039; about Don - the eclipse is just a bronze blanket for hiain "I promise not to rev my mind at all I&039;d just like to understand the Even the astro big-wigs onlyOpperly"

"Well?"

Paul wove the tires around a tiny scatter of gravel Then he began "Well, ordinarily, star photos don&039;t get seen around for years, if ever, but the astro boys on the Project have a standing request out with their pals at the observatories to be shown anything unusual We&039;ve even had star pix the day after they were taken"

Margo laughed "Late Sports Final of the Stellar Atlas?"

"Exactly! Well, the first photo cao It showed a starfield with the planet Pluto in it But so the exposure so that the stars around Pluto had blanked out or shifted position I got to look at it myself - there were three very faint squiggles where the brightest stars near Pluto had shifted Black-on-white squiggles - in real astronoo said solemnly Then, "Paul!" she cried "There was a newspaper story thisabout a man who claimed to have seen some stars twirl! I remember the headline: STARS MOVED, SAYS WRONG-WAY DRIVER"