And one final nitpick. The sentence: "Not Earth's feeble 36 hundred stars... " does break the scene of an universe that doesn't know anything about Earth or the possibility of its existence and makes it a story that is too directly aimed at a audience that does know of it.
I noticed this, too, but this was the first time I caught it. I guess I had to hear it rather than read it. But yeah, we have a nice third person narrative going from the newspaperman's POV, and then all of a sudden, Asimov starts talking to us, the audience. It kind of broke me out of the story a bit, but not enough not to enjoy it.
I add to this something which is almost preaching to those who already know, but I am surprised to find this comment isn't on wikipedia: This final paragraph was not written by Asimov, it was written between submission and publication by Astounding's legendary editor John W. Campbell jr. Asimov was furious that his prose had been tampered with, but was even more furious when this particularly fluid paragraph started being cited as evidence amongst the SF community that Asimov was indeed capable of writing beautiful language. Campbell always had a way with beautiful language that Asimov lacked.
Asimov agreed with you that the mention of Earth broke the tone of the story, and I would like to say "Hurrah" to Steve for posting the original Astounding version as opposed to the Asimov version that has seen print in a few anthologies. Much like a Horace Gold story for Galaxy in the 50s (there is a particularly amusing section about Gold's meddling in Fred Pohl's autobiography The Way The Future Was), a story for JWC was always partly a collaboration - this story was written from an idea given to Asimov by JWC.
Steve,
may you be SF's new JWC.
I am currently away from my library, so excuse me for the lack of citations for this little bit of sf history.
