The last twinges of orange light reproduced with frightening exactitude the winter sun setting through the black tangle of leafless trees a quarter mile west of the Minnesota farmhouse where Don Merriam had spent his childhood.

Twisting his head toward the righthand mini-console, he tongued a key to cut polarization. ("The airless planets will be pioneered by men with long, active tongues,” Commander Gompert had summed it up. “Frogmen?” Dufresne had suggested.)

The stars sprang out in their multitudes — a desert night squared, a night with sequins. The pearly shock of Sol’s corona blended with the Milky Way.

Earth was ringed by a ruddy glow — sunlight bent by the planet’s thick atmosphere — and would remain so throughout the eclipse. The ring was brightest near the planet’s crust, fading out a quarter diameter away, and brightest of all along the lefthand rim behind which the sun had just vanished.

Don noted without surprise that the central bulk of Earth was the blackest he had ever seen it. Because of the eclipse, it was no longer brushed with the ghostly glow of moonlight.

He had been half crouched in his suit, leaning back and supporting himself on one arm to get an easy view of Earth, which was halfway to his zenith. Now with a wrist-flick nicely gauged to the moon’s dreamy gravitation, he came fully to his feet and looked around him.

Starlight and ring-glow tinged with bronze the dark gray plain of dust, mouse-soft, a mixture of powdered pumice and magnetic iron oxide.

Back when Cromwell’s New Model Army ruled England, Hevelius had named this crater the Great Black Lake. But even in bright sunlight Don could not have seen the walls of Plato. That near-mile-high, circular rampart, thirty miles away from him moon-east, north, south, and west, was hidden by the curve of the moon’s surface, sharper than the earth’s.