He was still focusing his eyes when they saw the weird blur of color on the bulkhead above the crewman's head. Teleview screen of course—and the middle blur—Earth.
In moments he was able to see it plainly as it receded—a tan and blue mass dotted with white, shadowed to the shape of a football, hanging in what seemed direct contradiction to all the laws of physics in a great, black void.
For minutes he stood without moving, oblivious to the immaculately polished masterpiece of engineering which surrounded him.
As a video-image, what he saw could have been nothing more than a cleverly-done stage prop, an ingenious painting by some futuristic artist. But the realization that it was real held him fascinated. Of all the human emotions, here was one that could only flounder helplessly for expression, for it had no precedent for comparison. The awe and the strangely-placid fear were intermingled with a sense of brute power; the sudden loneliness and strange humility were woven inextricably with an irrepressible consciousness of godliness, of unbounded omnipotence. And Doug knew that the first airmen had but touched a tiny edge of the sky, for here was the sky in her entirety—the infinite woman, at once belonging to man, yet an unending mystery to him, and granting of her uncountable secrets but slowly, enticingly, stubbornly.
As he watched, the tan-and-blue shape shrank gradually as though Space were tauntingly erasing it from existence.
The interior of the compartment in which he stood had been designed with the same simplicity of line as had the ship itself, and with so smooth a compactness that it seemed to occupy more of the ship's long interior than a bare third. The two crewmen had evidently not seen him as yet; they stood with their backs to him, their eyes intent on the long, curving banks of dials which ran the gamut of geometrical shapes. Oddly, their hands hung idle at their sides. Doug wondered if they constituted the entire crew, and if they did not, how many more of them there were.
He would let them speak first. He walked over to a panel of dials, gave them a studied scrutiny. The officer turned immediately.
"Ablast thirteen minutes, sir, at fourteen thousand miles. I believe you'll find our track with zero variation. C-limit was passed four minutes ago. Glad to have you aboard again, sir."
Doug returned the salute, nodded his head in acknowledgement of information he had no way of understanding.