And then came the moon. It came and went very quickly, pocked and scarred and with only one face. And small. Very small and very close.
Pete felt closed in, suffocated. The radar alarm was screaming at him that something was near, too near.
He clamped down savagely on himself. There was an explanation somewhere. He had to find it! He had to think!
Item. The stars. Distorted. Blurred.
Item. Saturn. A hundred yards across.
Item. A tiny replica of the moon, like a pimple on the inside of an egg.
Replica? No. The moon. The only moon. Reality.
Hypothesis. Say that space is not as men imagined it. Say that it is an illusion, without lightyears, without great suns, without huge planets. Say for the sake of argument that it is a shell with holes in it, and light outside, and the Sun itself an illusion of heat and power, and—
Say that this hollow shell is man's new frontier; a fraud, a toy for things outside—
The alarm screamed at him. The ship was plunging toward the blurry light of the stars.