Robert Crane and two comrades ride "...a giant air tank..." (p. 78) through space. Their purpose will be revealed. (But it is military.)
Poul Anderson inserts a descriptive paragraph which many other sf writers would not have thought to write:
"The stars turned about [Crane] in a cold majestic wheel. Luna was nearly at the full, ashen pale, scored and pocked and filling his helmet with icy luminescence. Earth was an enormous grayness in the sky, a half ring of blinding light from the hidden sun along one side." (ibid.)
Check out the hidden sun in James Elroy Flecker's "The Old Ships."
Also:
"I saw Eternity the other night,
"Like a great ring of pure and endless light..."
-see here.
This passage takes us in one direction into poetry and in another direction into a comic book that I read in the 1950's. Crane is accompanied by Garcia, a Venusian (should be Venerian) with clan markings painted on his spacesuit, and by a Martian named Wolf. In the remembered comic book, an Earthman, fighting in an interplanetary or interstellar war (I would not have known the difference), was accompanied by two faithful companions, natives of Mars and Venus. Across the decades, I salute the author of that short work.
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