Walt finished collecting his equipment and packed it into two carrying cases. Then from a closet, he took electrically warmed clothing, helped Christine into hers, climbed into his own, and then they took the long trek along corridors and up elevators to the cold room. "It's cold even here," said Christine. "The room leaks bad," said Walt. "Wes Farrell's hobby these days is making synthetic elements on the duplicator--he uses a filter to get a mono-atomic pattern and then heterodynes the resulting signal to atomic patterns above the transuranic system. But in all of Wes Farrell's playing at making synthetic transuranic elements, he hasn't come up with anything like a good heat insulator yet. We did toy with the idea of hermetically sealing in a double wall and piping some of the vacuum of interstellar space in there. But it was too vast a project. So we let some heat leak and to hell with it." Christine shuddered. "I've never really appreciated the fact that Venus Equilateral is really just a big steel capsule immersed in the vacuum of interplanetary space," she said. "It's so much like a town on Terra." "Inside, that is," grinned Walt. "There's a nice queasy thrill awaiting you when first you stand in an observation blister made of plastiglass." "Why?" she asked. "Because first you are terrified because you are standing on a bubble that is eminently transparent and looking down beneath your feet, you see the stars in the sky. You know that 'down' to the working and residence section of the station is actually 'out and away' from the axis of the station, since it revolves about the long axis to provide a simulated gravity plus gyroscopic action to stabilize the beam-stage and pointers. Well, when you go down--and again 'Down' is a relative term meaning the direction of gravitic thrust--into one of the blisters, your mind is appalled at the fact that your feet are pressing against something that your eyes have always told you is 'up'. The stars. And then you realize that between you and the awesome void of space in just that thin glass. "You end up," he grinned, "being very careful about banging your heels on the floor of the station for about a week." "Well thanks for the preparation," said Christine. "You'll still go through it," he told her. "But just remember that anybody on the other side of the station, standing in a similar blister a mile 'above' your head, is standing feet 'upward' with respect to you. But he, too, is being thrown out and away by centrifugal force."