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to this.' Then he went over to the familiar radio engineer's routine: 'Testing, One, Two, Three, Four, Five…'
    Around 'Five' his voice began to fade. "When he'd reached 'Nine' I couldn't hear a thing, though his lips were still moving. There was no longer enough air around us to carry sound. The silence was quite uncanny, and I was relieved when the loudspeaker in my suit started to talk.
    'I'm opening the outer door now. Don't make any movements—I'll do all that's necessary.'
    In that eerie silence, the great door slowly opened inwards. I was floating freely now, and I felt a faint 'tug' as the last traces of air puffed out into space. A circle of stars was ahead of me, and I could just glimpse the misty rim of Earth to one side.
    'Ready?' asked Tim.
    'O.K.,' I said, hoping that the microphone wouldn't betray my nervousness. The towing line gave a tug as Tim switched on his jets, and we drifted out of the air-lock. It was a terrifying sensation, yet one I would not have missed for anything. Although, of course, the words 'up' and 'down' had no meaning here, it seemed to me as if I were floating out through a hole in a great metal wall, with the Earth at an immense distance below. My reason told me that I was perfectly safe—but all my instincts shouted, 'You've a five hundred mile fall straight down beneath you!'
    Indeed, when the Earth filled half the sky, it was hard not to think of it as 'down'. "We were in sunlight at the moment, passing across Africa, and I could see Lake Victoria and the great forests of the Congo. What would Livingstone and Stanley have thought, I wondered, if they had known that one day men would flash across the Dark Continent at 18,000 miles an hour? And the day of those great explorers was only two hundred years behind us. It had been a crowded couple of centuries…
    Though it was fascinating to look at Earth, I found it was making me giddy, and so I swivelled round in my suit to concentrate on the Station. Tim had now towed us well clear of it, and we were almost out among the halo of floating ships. I tried to forget about the Earth, and now that I could no longer see it, it seemed natural enough to think of 'down' as towards the Station.
    This is a knack everyone has to learn in space. You're liable to get awfully confused unless you pretend that somewhere is down. The important thing is to choose the most convenient direction, according to whatever you happen to be doing at the moment.
    Tim had given us enough speed to make our little trip in a reasonable time, so he cut the jets and pointed out the sights as we drifted along. This bird's-eye view of the Station completed the picture I'd already got from my tour inside, and I began to feel that I was really learning my way about.
    The outer rim of the Station was simply a flat network of girders trailing off into space. Here and there were large cylinders—pressurized workshops big enough to hold two or three men, and intended for any jobs that couldn't be handled in vacuum.
    A spaceship with most of its plating stripped off was floating near the edge of the Station, secured from drifting away by a couple of cords that would hardly have supported a man on Earth. Several mechanics wearing suits like our own were working on the hull. I wished I could overhear their conversation and find out what they were doing, but we were on a different wavelength.
    'I'm going to leave you here a minute,' said Tim, unfastening the towing cord, and clipping it to the nearest girder. 'Don't do anything until I get back.'
    I felt rather foolish, floating round like a captive balloon, and was glad that no one took any notice of me. While waiting, I experimented with the fingers of my suit and tried, unsuccessfully, to tie a simple knot in my towing cable. I found later that one could do this sort of thing, but it took practice. Certainly the men on the spaceship seemed to be handling their tools without any awkwardness, despite their gloves.
    Suddenly it