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gave shots to some others who had kidded themselves the same way I had. Mrs. Tarbutton she gave another sort of shot to knock her out entirely. One or two of the hardier souls unstrapped themselves and went to the ports; I decided I was well enough to try it.
    It's not as easy as it looks, this swimming around in free fall. I undid the safety belts and sat up; that's all I meant to do. Then I was scrambling in the air, out of control, trying frantically to grasp at anything.
    I turned over in the air and cracked the back of my head against the underside of the control room deck and saw stars, not the ones out the ports—some of my own. Then the deck with the couches on it was approaching me slowly.
    I managed to grab a safety belt and came to anchor. The couch it belonged to was occupied by a little plump man. I said, “Excuse me.”
    He said, “Don't mention it,” and turned his face away, looking as if he hated me. I couldn't stay there and I couldn't even get back to my own couch without grabbing handholds on other couches that were occupied, too, so I pushed off again, very gently this time, and managed to grab hold when I bumped against the other deck.
    It had handholds and grab lines all over it. I didn't let go again, but pulled myself along, monkey fashion, to one of the ports.
    And there I got my first view of Earth from space.
    I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't what I expected. There it was, looking just like it does in the geography books, or maybe more the way it does in the station announcements of Super-New-York TV station. And yet it was different. I guess I would say it was like the difference between being told about a good hard kick in the rear and actually being kicked.
    Not a transcription. Alive.
    For one thing it wasn't prettily centered in a television screen; it was shouldering into one side of the frame of the port, and the aft end of the ship cut a big chunk out of the Pacific Ocean. And it was moving, shrinking. While I hung there it shrunk to about half the size it was when I first got there and got rounder and rounder. Columbus was right.
    From where I was it was turned sideways; the end of Siberia, then North America, and finally the north half of South America ran across from left to right. There were clouds over Canada and the eastern part of the rest of North America; they were the whitest white I ever saw—whiter than the north pole cap. Right opposite us was the reflection of the Sun on the ocean; it hurt my eyes. The rest of the ocean was almost purple where there weren't clouds.
    It was so beautiful my throat ached and I wanted to reach out and touch it.
    And back of it were stars, even brighter and bigger and more of them than the way they look from Little America.
    Pretty soon there were more people crowding around, trying to see, and kids shoving and their mothers saying, “Now, now, darling!” and making silly remarks themselves. I gave up. I pulled myself back to my couch and put one belt around me so I wouldn't float away and thought about it. It makes you proud to know that you come from a big, fancy planet like that. I got to thinking that I hadn't seen all of it, not by a long sight, in spite of all the geography trips I had made and going to one Scout round-up in Switzerland and the time George and Anne and I went to Siam.
    And now I wasn't going to see any more of it. It made me feel pretty solemn.
    I looked up; there was a boy standing in front of me. He said, “What's the trouble, William, my boy? Dropsick?”
    It was that twerp Jones. You could have knocked me out with a feather. If I had known he was going to emigrate, I would have thought twice about it.
    I asked him where in the world he had come from.
    “The same place you did, naturally. I asked you a question.”
    I informed him that I was not dropsick and asked him whatever gave him that silly notion. He reached out and grabbed my arm and turned it so that the red spot the injection had made showed.