in with a will.

Seated at the controls once more, he snapped the little switch that
caused the screen to glow with flashing, swirling colors as the
telectroscope apparatus came to life. A thousand tiny points of flame
appeared scattered on a black field with a suddenness that made them
seem to snap suddenly into being. Points, tiny dimensionless points of
light, save one, a tiny disc of blue-white flame, old Sol from a
distance of close to one billion miles, and under slight reverse
magnification. The skillful hands at the controls were turning
adjustments now, and that disc of flame seemed to leap toward him with a
hundred light-speeds, growing to a disc as large as a dime in an
instant, while the myriad points of the stars seemed to scatter like
frightened chickens, fleeing from the growing sun, out of the screen.
Other points, heretofore invisible, appeared, grew, and rushed away.

The sun shifted from the center of the screen, and a smaller
reddish-green disc came into view--a planet, its atmosphere coloring the
light that left it toward the red. It rushed nearer, grew larger. Earth
spread as it took the center of the screen. A world, a portion of a
world, a continent, a fragment of a continent as the magnification
increased, boundlessly it seemed.

Finally, New York spread across the screen; New York seen from the air,
with a strange lack of perspective. The buildings did not seem all to
slant toward some point, but to stand vertical, for, from a distance of
a billion miles, the vision lines were practically parallel. Titanic
shafts of glowing color in the early summer sun appeared; the hot rays
from the sun, now only 82,500,000 miles away, shimmering on the colored
metal walls.

The new Airlines Building, a mile and a half high, supported at various
points by actual spaceship driving units, was a riot of shifting,
rainbow hues. A new trick in construction had been used here, and Evans
smiled at it. Arcot, inventor of the ship that carried him, had
suggested it to Fuller, designer of that ship, and of that building. The
colored berylium metal of the wall had been ruled with 20,000 lines to
the inch, mere scratches, but nevertheless a diffraction grating. The
result was amazingly beautiful. The sunlight, split up to its rainbow
colors, was reflected in millions of shifting tints.

In the air, supported by tiny packs strapped to their backs, thousands
of people were moving, floating where they wished, in any di