facing toward the planet Earth
Without that shield above it the air about us would rush forth into the void instantly and leave this far side of the moon as dead and cold and barren as the earthward side!
Strange machines rear themselves starkly against the bleak landscape, and for a brief interval they labor on the lifeless plain—then silently they vanish, part by part, into the ship that spawned them, and the Planeteer lifts his ship and sends it in a wift arc to the Earthward side—and far behind him slips the strange rocket of the Avenger, waiting for the Planeteer to strike...
Quickly Joan set the beam-mechanism which would serve as a tow-rope between her own craft and the Comet, and within five minutes they had cleared Asteroid No. 697 on the Earthward trail.
Future explorers will find a great variety of danger and adventure on this, the smallest world of the solar system. Mercury is only 36,000,000 miles from the sun, closer than any other planet. Because it does not rotate, the sunside is a molten inferno, while the earthward side has eternal night, and is frozen solid.
Dr. James Harwood Garner was the leader of this party of carefully chosen men, and in the name of the United States of America, he claimed the so-called dark half of the moon. Half a world! Millions, tens of millions of square miles of utterly barren surface, surface never seen by Terrestrian eyes, save when, five years before, Capt. Roger Wilson had circumnavigated the moon twice, landing for two brief days on the Earthward side, and had claimed that.
Sure, now more than ever most of the stations and merchant ships in the Rim and beyond supported the peace talks, but the captain’s reticence about divulging details about his past still rankled Hubcentral and those within their immediate reach. Which meant a lot of people on the Earthward side of the Spokes still thought deep spacers were odd and suspicious, and worst of all too independent, and apparently these paranoid Hubcentralists counted more than everyone from the Rim to the Dragons.
antedating 1929
Edmond Hamilton, in Amazing Stories Quarterly
Last modified 2022-01-22 18:01:28
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