Inside the booth... this room is Much Bigger than the outdoors he sees through the window. Night is day outside... day is night inside... and the horizon, made of some sort of dense metal like tungsten or platinum, chemically reacts with both, creating a bubble-zone at their juncture which is Something Else.     They flattened the sands, and built a room for me on stilts, so that I could be in the air when the shuttle returned.