"Leave space?" said Scott. "I'd rather die. I can't blast off any more. But here at the station I'm still a spaceman."
The red light went out, and they opened the door.
In sharp contrast to the bustle and noise on the power deck, the meteor, weather, and radar observation room was filled with only a subdued whisper. All around them huge screens displayed various views of the surface of Venus as it slowly revolved beneath the station. Along one side of the room was a solid bank of four-foot-square teleceiver screens with an enlisted spaceman or junior officer seated in front of each one. These men, at their microphones, were relaying meteor and weather information to all parts of the solar system. Now it was Roger's turn to get excited at seeing the wonderful radar scanners that swept space for hundreds of thousands of miles. They were powerful enough to pick up a spaceship's identifying outline while still two hundred thousand miles away! Farther to one side, a single teleceiver screen, ten feet square, dominated the room. Roger gasped.
Scott smiled. "That's the largest teleceiver screen in the universe," he said. "The most powerful. And it's showing you a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy, thousands of light years away. Most of the lights you see there are no more than that, just light, their stars, or suns, having long ago exploded or burned. But the light continues to travel, taking thousands of years to reach our solar system."
"But—but—" gasped Tom. "How can you be so accurate with this screen? It looks as though we were smack in the center of the galaxy itself!"
"There's a fifty-inch telescope attached to the screen," Scott replied, "which is equal to the big one-thousand-inch 'eye' back at the Academy."
"Why is that, sir?" asked Roger.
"You don't get any distortion from atmosphere up here," replied the young officer.
As Tom and Roger walked silently among the men at the teleceiver screens, Scott continued to explain. "This is where you'll be, Manning," he said, indicating a large radarscope scanner a little to one side and partially hidden from the glow of the huge teleceiver screen. "We need a man on watch here twenty-four hours a day, though there isn't much doing between midnight and eight A.M. on radar watch. A little traffic, but nothing compared to what we get during the regular working day."
"Any particular reason for that, sir?" asked Tom.