“The Earth!” She spoke in awe.
Directly in front of them hung the wrinkled gray face of Luna, the Moon, which they would pass before long. Ted shuddered at its forbidding deep pits and miles of barren, dead plains.
Jill leaned forward eagerly on the window seat on which they were perched, her nose almost touching the clear plastic window. “Ted!” she exclaimed. “What’s that green ball below us?”
Ted looked, then grinned. “Don’t you even know your own planet when you see it?”
“The Earth!” She spoke in awe. “Of course!”
Ted was not surprised that his sister had not recognized the globe, in so far as neither of them had seen it before from this dramatic position. Ever since their fire-off from the Arizona space harbor, the Earth had been out of their view, beneath them.
“Look!” Jill cried. “I can make out the outline of Africa! It looks like it’s buried under fog. I didn’t know before that you could actually see the atmosphere!”
“I knew it,” Ted said, with mock superiority. “I bet you don’t know it’s hundreds of miles deep.”
“You’re not the only one who knows the answers, Ted Kenton, even if you are pretty smart,” she returned. “I know that it’s the lack of atmosphere out here in space that makes everything so crystal clear. That’s why we can see so many thousands more stars out here than we can from Earth under a layer of air.”