But now Earth was receding.
Impossible not to feel a tug of nostalgia at the sight: it had been no fewer than five years since he last stood on Earth, five years since he last witnessed this very sight--only then, Earth and Spacedock had been receding as the Enterprise moved away toward the unknown reaches of space.
Navarth inspected the great blue and white globe and reluc- tantly agreed that the vista was of majestic dimensions "Now Earth recedes," said Gersen "We point ourselves toward Aquarius, we engage the intersplit and suddenly we are insulated from the universe."
Earth and Sol had hours before receded astern.
Earth was two hundred light years away, the puppeteer fleet two light years distant, was receding at nearly lightspeed; and even the half-vaporized Liar had been invisible from the beginning of the flight.
It's always assumed it's the one who's "traveled" - but isn't the crux of Relativity that you could just as well say the Earth receded and then returned?
INT.-JUPITER TWO Don watches as the Earth recedes into a blue marble, flickering orbital billboards growing distant.
As their hours in space lengthened into a full day, the two human passengers occupied themselves alternately resting and moving about inside the glass-and-metal vehicle, watching the Earth recede and the Moon grow ever larger.
When measured from Earth, the periods of moons orbiting a distant planet are shorter when the Earth is approaching the planet than when the Earth is receding from it.