“There’s the big space ship we got off,” Sue pointed out. “It’s beginning to drop back to Earth.”
“And there’s the ‘Wheel in the Sky,’” Steve said, looking ahead. “We’ll soon be there! Isn’t it great?”
Compared to the tiny ship they were in, which was shaped like a medicine capsule, the Wheel in the Sky was a gigantic thing. It looked like an automobile wheel and by its moving spokes the children saw that it was turning just like one.
“Why does the Wheel spin, Dad?” Steve asked.
“That’s in order to give the people inside of it a feeling of weight,” Mr. Shannon explained. “As I told you before, things in space have no weight because there is no gravity out here to speak of. What happens when you ride on the merry-go-round on the school playground?”
“You have to hold on tight or it’ll throw you off,” Steve answered.
“The Wheel in the Sky does the same thing. It tries to throw you off, but since you are safely inside of it, all it can do is throw your weight against the floor of the Wheel. Understand?”
The children nodded and smiled, pleased at knowing one more fact about the strange ways of space.
As the ferry neared the big space station, Steve watched the black heavens all around them. The stars were thicker than salt crystals and glittered like precious gems. Close to the Wheel, the ferry had to use its rockets in order to keep up with the spinning of the Wheel. Presently a door in the rim of the Wheel opened. Two men in space suits appeared in the doorway and threw out a line which stuck to the ferry by magnetism. Then the men pulled the little ship inside and closed the doors.
“Here we are!” the ferry pilot called to his passengers. “Everybody out!”