"Mind the glare!" Sergeant Hanako called out. Hastily Matt set his visor for maximum interference and adjusted it to shade his face and eyes. He did not attempt to look at the Sun; he had dazzled his eyes often enough from the viewports of the ship's recreation rooms, trying to blank out the disc of the Sun exactly, with a coin, so that he might see the prominences and the ghostly aurora. It was an unsatisfactory business; the usual result was a headache and spots before his eyes.
But he never grew tired of looking at Earth. *
She hung before him, great and fat and beautiful, and seeming more real than when seen through a port. She swelled across Aquarius, so huge that had she been in Orion she would have concealed the giant hunter from Betelgeuse to Rigel.
Facing them was the Gulf of Mexico. Above it sprawled North America wearing the polar cap like a chef's hat. The pole was still bright under the failing light of late northern summer. The sunrise line had cleared North America except for the tip of Alaska; only the central Pacific was dark.
Someone said, "What's that bright dot in the Pacific, over near the edge? Honolulu?"
Honolulu did not interest Matt; he searched, as usual, for Des Moines-but the Mississippi Valley was cloudy; he could not 'find it. Sometimes he could pick it out with his naked eyes, when the day was clear in Iowa. When it was night in North America he could always tell which jewel of light was home-or thought he could.
They were facing Earth so that the North Pole seemed "up" to them. Far off to the right, almost a ship's width from the Earth, nearly occulting Regulus in Leo, was the Sun, and about half way between the Sun and Earth, in Virgo, was a crescent Moon. Like the Sun, the Moon appeared no larger than she did from Earth surface. The gleaming metal sides of Terra Station, in the sky between Sun and Moon and ninety degrees from Earth, outshone the Moon. The Station, a mere ten miles away, appeared half a dozen times as wide as the Moon.
That's enough rubbernecking," announced Hanako. "Let's .move around." They walked forward, looking the ship over and getting the feel of her size, until the sergeant stopped them. "Any further and we'd be slapping our feet over the Commandant's head. He might be asleep." They sauntered aft and Hanako let them work around the edge of the stern until they looked across the openings of her mighty tubes. He called them back promptly. "Even though she ain't blasted in years, this area is a little bit hot-and you're not shielded from the pile abaft frame ninety-three anyhow. Forward, now!"
By hot he did not mean warm to the touch, but radioactive.
He led them amidships, unhooked himself from the cadet next to him and hooked the lad's line to the ship. "Number twelve-hook to steel," he added.