The little wheel was able to turn the huge vessel by a very simple law of physics, but in an application not often seen on the earth. The principle was the conservation of momentum, in this case angular momentum or spin. Ice skaters understand the application of this law; some of their fanciest tricks depend on it.
As the little wheel spun rapidly in one direction the big ship spun slowly in the other direction. When the wheel stopped, the ship stopped and just as abruptly.
“Dark glasses, boys!” Cargraves called out belatedly as the ship started to nose over and the stars wheeled past the port. In spite of their wretched nausea they managed to find their goggles, carried on their persons for this event, and get them on.
They needed them very soon. The moon slid away out of sight. The sun and the earth came in to view. The earth was a great shining crescent like a moon, two days past new. At this distance- one-fourth the way to the moon -it appeared sixteen times as wide as the moon does from the earth and many times more magnificent. The horns of the crescent were blue-white from the polar ice caps. Along its length showed the greenish blue of sea and the deep greens and sandy browns of ocean and forest and field . . . for the line of light and dark ran through the heart of Asia and down into the Indian Ocean. This they could plainly see, as easily as if it had been a globe standing across a school room from them. The Indian Ocean was partly obscured by a great cloud bank, stormy to those underneath it perhaps, but blazing white as the polar caps to those who watched from space.
In the arms of the crescent was the nightside of earth, lighted dimly but plainly by the almost full moon behind them. But- and this is never seen on the moon when the new moon holds the old moon in her arms -the faintly lighted dark face was picked out here and there with little jewels of light, the cities of earth, warm and friendly and beckoning!
Halfway from equator to northern horn were three bright ones, not far apart — London, and Paris, and reborn Berlin. Across the dark Atlantic, at the very edge of the disk, was one especially bright and rosy light, the lights of Broadway and all of Greater New York.
All three of the boys were seeing New York for the first time, not to mention most of the rest of the great globe.
But, although it was their home, although they were it from a glorious vantage point new to mankind, their attention was torn away from the earth almost at once. There was a still more breath-taking object in the sky — the sun.
Its apparent width was only one-sixteenth that of the mighty crescent earth, but it brooked no competition. It hung below the earth- below when referred to the attitude of the Galileo, not in the sense of “up” or “down” -and about four times the width of the earth away. It was neither larger nor smaller than it appears from the earth and not appreciably brighter than it is on a clear, dry desert noon. But the sky was black around it in the airless space; its royal corona shone out; its prominences could be seen; its great infernal storms showed on its face.
“Don’t look too directly at it,” Cargraves warned, “even when you have the polarizer turned to maximum interference.” He referred to the double lenses the boys wore, polaroid glass with thick outer lens that were rotatable.
“I gotta have a picture of this!” Art declared, and turned and swam away. He had forgotten that he was space sick.
He was back shortly with his Contax and was busy fitting his longest lens into it. The camera was quite old, being one of the few things his mother had managed to bring out of Germany, and was his proudest possession. The lens in place, he started to take his Weston from its case. Cargraves stopped him.
“Why burn out your light meter?” he cautioned.