"And what does that mean?" he asked, knowing exactly what it meant and challenging her to use Mikel as a weapon against him. They were standing on the edge of a precipice and the ground was breaking away beneath their feet, but the big drop might still be avoided if only she held back from using Mikel.

"This touching concern for strange kids," Cona said. "It seems slightly out of place in a man who is about to jaunt off to Earth and leave his own son."

"I…"Am not going Dallen prompted himself. Say it right now — I’m not going to Earth. He strove to force the crucial words into being, but all human warmth had fled his soul. He turned away from his wife, sick with disappointment, locked in combat with the chill, haughty, inflexible side of his own nature, and knowing in advance that it was a battle he could never win.

Three hours later Dallen was on the observation gallery of the passenger ship Runcorn as it detached from the docking cradle and climbed away from the humbling and inconceivable vastness of the Orbitsville shell.

The ship was moving very slowly in the early stages of the flight, its magnetic scoop fields unable to gather much reaction mass in a region of space that had been well scoured by other vessels. As a consequence, the one-kilometre aperture around which Beachhead City was built remained visible for some thirty minutes, only gradually narrowing to become a bright ellipse and then a line of light which shortened and finally vanished. But even when the Runcorn was several thousand kilometres into space the inexperienced traveller could have been forgiven for thinking the ship had come to rest only a short distance "above" the shell. At that range Orbitsville was still only half of the visible universe, a seemingly flat surface which occupied a full 180° of the field of vision, the closest approximation in reality to the imagined infinite plane of the geometer.