Scrimshaw - Murray Leinster

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Scrimshaw by Mary Leinster. The old man just wanted to
get back to his memory, and the methods he used
were gently hellish from the viewpoint of the others. Pop
Young was the one known man who could stand life

(00:23):
on the surface of the moon's far side, and therefore
he occupied the shack on the big crack's edge above
the mining colony. There. Some people said that no normal
man could do it, and mentioned the scar of a
ghastly head wound to explain his ability. One man partly
guessed the secret, but only partly. His name was Setel,

(00:43):
and he had reason not to talk. Pop Young alone
knew the whole truth, and he kept his mouth shut too.
It wasn't anybody else's business. The shack and the job
he filled were located in the medieval notion of the
physical appearance of hell. By day, the vironment was heat
and torment by night lunar night, of course, and lunar

(01:04):
day it was frigidity and horror. Once in two weeks
earth time, a rocket ship came around the horizon from
Lunar City with stores for the colony deep underground. Pop
received the stores and took care of them. He handed
over the product of the mine to be forwarded to Earth.
The rocket went away again. Come nightfall, Pop lowered the

(01:26):
supplies down the long cable into the big crack, to
the colony far down inside, and freshened up the landing
field marks with magnesium marking powder if a rocket blast
had blurred them. That was fundamentally all he had to do.
But without him, the mine down in the crack would
have had to shut down. The crack, of course, was
that gaping rocky fault, which stretches nine hundred miles jaggedly

(01:50):
over the side of the Moon that Earth never sees.
There is one stretch where it is a yawning gulf
a full half mile wide and unguessably deep. Where Pop
Young's shack stood, it was only a hundred yards, but
the colony was a full mile down in the wall.
There's nothing like it on Earth. Of course, when it
was first found, scientists descended into it to examine the

(02:13):
exposed rock strata and learned the history of the Moon
before its craters were made. But they found more than history.
They found the reason for the colony and the rocket
landing field and the shack. The reason for pop was
something else. The shacks stood a hundred feet from the
big crack's edge. It looked like a dust heap thirty

(02:33):
feet high, and it was. The outside was surface moondust,
piled over a tiny dome to be insulation against the
cold of night and shadow and the furnace heat of day.
Pop lived in it all alone, and in his spare
time he worked industriously at recovering some missing portions of
his life that Setl had managed to take away from him.

(02:54):
He thought often of Seatel down in the colony underground.
There were galleries and tunnels living quarters down there. There
were air tight bulkheads for safety, and a hydroponic garden
to keep the air fresh, and all sorts of things
to make life possible for men on the moon. But
it wasn't fun even under ground. In the Moon's slight gravity,

(03:14):
a man is really adjusted to existence when he has
a well developed case of agoraphobia. With such an aid,
a man can get into a tiny coffin like cubby
hole and feel solidity above and below and around him,
and happily tell himself that it feels delicious. Sometimes it does,
But Seatel couldn't comfort himself so easily. He knew about

(03:36):
Pop up on the surface. He'd shipped out whimpering to
the moon to get far away from Pop, and Pop
was just about a mile overhead, and there was no
way to get around him. It was difficult to get
away from the mine anyhow. It doesn't take too long
for the low gravity to tear a man's nerves to shreds.
He has to develop kinks in his head to survive,

(03:56):
and those kinks. The first men to leave the colony
had to be knocked cold and shipped out unconscious. They'd
been underground and in low gravity long enough to be
utterly unable to face the idea of open spaces even now.
There were some who had to be carried, but there
were some tougher ones who were able to walk to
the rocket ship if Pop put a tarpaulin over their

(04:18):
head so they didn't have to see the sky. In
any case, Pop was essential, either for carrying or guidance.
Satel got the shakes when he thought of Pop, and
Pop rather probably knew it. Of course, by the time
he took the job tending the shack, he was pretty
certain about Satel. The facts spoke for themselves. Pop had

(04:38):
come back to consciousness in a hospital with a great
wound in his head and no memory of anything that
had happened before that moment. It was not that his
identity was in question. When he was stronger, the doctors
told him who he was, and as gently as possible,
what had happened to his wife and children. They'd been
murdered after he was seemingly killed defending them, but he

(04:59):
didn't remember a thing. Not then. It was something of
a blessing. But when he was physically recovered, he set
about trying to pick up the threads of the life
he could no longer remember. He met Satel quite by accident.
Satel looked familiar. Pop eagerly tried to ask him questions,
and Satel turned gray and frantically denied that he'd ever

(05:20):
seen Pop before, all of which happened back on Earth
and a long time ago. It seemed to Pop that
the sight of Satel had brought back some vague and
cloudy memories. They were not sharp, though, and he hunted
up Satel again to find out if he was right,
and Seatel went into a panic when he returned. Nowadays,

(05:40):
by the Big Crack, Pop wasn't so insistent on seeing Seatel,
but he was deeply concerned with the recovery of the
memories that Satel helped bring back. Pop was a highly
conscientious man. He took good care of his job. There
was a warning bell in the shack, and when a
rocket ship from Lunar City got above the horizon and
could send a tight beam, the gong clanged loudly, and

(06:02):
Pop got into a vacuum suit and went out of
the airlock. He usually reached the moondozer about the time
the ship began to break for landing, and he watched
it come in. He saw the silver needle in the
sky fighting momentum above a line of jagged crater walls.
It slowed and slowed and curved down as it drew nearer.

(06:23):
The pilot killed all forward motion just above the field
and came steadily and smoothly down to land between the
silvery triangles that marked the landing place. Instantly the rockets
cut off drums of fuel and air and food came
out of the cargo hatch, and Pop swept forward with
the dozer. It was a miniature tractor with a gigantic
scoop in front. He pushed a great mound of talc

(06:46):
fine dust before him to cover up the cargo. It
was necessary, with freight costing what it did. Fuel and
air and food came frozen solid in containers barely thicker
than foil while they stayed at space shadow temperature. The
foil would hold anything, and a cover of insulating moondust
with vacuum between the grains, kept even air frozen solid.

(07:07):
Though in sunlight. At such times, Pop hardly thought of Satel.
He knew he had plenty of time for that. He'd
started to follow Satel knowing what had happened to his
wife and children, but it was hearsay only. He had
no memory of them at all, But Seatel stirred the
lost memories. At first, Pop followed absorbedly from city to

(07:27):
city to recover the years that had been wiped out
by an axe blow. He did recover a good deal.
When Satel fled to another continent, Pop followed because he
had some distinct memories of his wife and the way
he'd felt about her, and some fugitive mental images of
his children. When Satel frenziedly tried to deny knowledge of
the murder in Tangier, Pop had come to remember both

(07:49):
his children and some of the happiness of his married life.
Even when Satel, whimpering signed up for Lunar City, Pop
tracked him. By that time he was quite sure that
set Tell was the man who'd killed his family. If so,
Catel had profited by less than two days pay for
wiping out everything that Pop possessed. But Pop wanted it back.

(08:10):
He couldn't prove Cetel's guilt. There was no evidence. In
any case, He didn't really want Setel to die. If
he did, there'd be no way to recover more lost memories. Sometimes,
in the shack on the far side of the moon,
Pop Young had odd fancies about Setl. There was the mine.
For example, In each two Earth weeks of working the mine,

(08:31):
colony nearly filled up a three gallon canister with greasy
seeming white crystals shaped like two pyramids base to base.
The filled canister would weigh a hundred pounds on Earth,
here it weighed eighteen. But on Earth its contents would
be computed in carrots, and a hundred pounds was worth millions.
Yet here on the Moon, Pop kept a weighing canister

(08:52):
on a shelf in his tiny dome behind the air apparatus.
It rattled if he shook it and it was worth
no more than so pebbles. But sometimes Pop wondered if
Seatel ever thought of the value of the mine's production.
If he would kill a woman and two children and
think he'd killed a man for no more than a
hundred dollars, what enormity would he commit for a three

(09:14):
gallon quantity of uncut diamonds. But he did not dwell
on such speculation. The sun rose very very slowly, and
what by convention was called the east. It took nearly
two hours to urge its disk above the horizon, and
it burned terribly in emptiness for fourteen times twenty four
hours before sunset. Then there was night, and for three

(09:37):
hundred and thirty six consecutive hours there were only stars overhead,
and the sky was a hole so terrible that a
man who looked up into it, what with the nagging
sensation of one sixth gravity, tended to lose all confidence
in the stability of things. Most men immediately found it
hysterically necessary to seize hold of something solid to keep

(09:57):
from falling upward. But nothing felt solid. Everything fell too,
Wherefore most men tended to scream, but not Pop. He'd
come to the moon in the first place, because Setel
was here near Seatel, he found memories of times when
he was a young man with a young wife who
loved him extravagantly. Then pictures of his children came out

(10:20):
of emptiness and grew sharp and clear. He found that
he loved them very dearly, and when he was near
Setel he literally recovered them, in this sense that he
came to know new things about them and had new
memories of them every day. He hadn't yet remembered the
crime which lost them to him until he did, and
the fact possessed a certain grisly humor. Pop didn't even

(10:43):
hate Setl. He simply wanted to be near him because
it enabled him to recover new and vivid parts of
his youth that had been lost. Otherwise, he was wholly
matter of fact. Certainly so for the far sight of
the moon. He was a rather fussy housekeeper. The shack
above the big Crack's rim was as tidy as any
lighthouse or fur trapper's cabin. He tended his air apparatus

(11:06):
with a fine precision. It was perfectly simple. In the
shadow of the shack, he had an unfailing source of
extreme low temperature air from the shack flowed into a
shadow chilled pipe. Moisture condensed out of it here, and
CO two froze solidly out of it there and on
beyond it collected as restless, transparent liquid air. At the

(11:29):
same time, liquid air from another tank evaporated to maintain
the proper air pressure in the shack. Every so often
Pop tapped the pipe where the moisture froze, and lumps
of water ice clattered out to be returned to the humidifier.
Less often, he took out the CO two snow and
measured it and dumped an equivalent quantity of pale blue
liquid oxygen into the liquid air that had been purified

(11:52):
by cold. The oxygen dissolved, then the apparatus reversed itself
and supplied fresh air from the now enriched fluid, while
the depleted other tank began to fill up with cold,
purified liquid air. Outside the shack, jagged stony pinnacles reared
in the starlight, and craters complained of the bombardment from

(12:12):
space that had made them. But outside, nothing ever happened.
Inside it was quite different. Working on his memories, one day,
Pop made a little sketch. It helped a great deal.
He grew deeply interested. Writing material was scarce, but he
spent most of the time between two particular rocket landings,
getting down on paper exactly how a child had looked

(12:35):
while sleeping some fifteen years before. He remembered with astonishment
that the child had really looked exactly like that. Later
he began as sketch of his partly remembered wife. In
time he had plenty. It became a really truthful likeness.
The sun rose and baked the abomination of desolation which

(12:56):
was the moonscape. Pop Young meticulously touched up the glittering
triangles which were landing guides for the lunar city ships.
They glittered from the thinnest conceivable layer of magnesium marking powder.
He checked over the moondozer, He tended the air apparatus.
He did everything that his job and survival required, ungrudgingly.

(13:18):
Then he made more sketches. The images to be drawn
came back more clearly when he thought of Setel, So
by keeping Setl in mind, he recovered the memory of
a chair that had been in his forgotten home. Then
he drew his wife sitting in it, reading it felt
very good to see her again, and he speculated about
whether Setel ever thought of millions of dollars worth of

(13:40):
new mind diamonds knocking about unguarded in the shack, And
he suddenly recollected clearly the way one of his children
had looked while playing with her doll. He made a
quick sketch to keep from forgetting that there was no
purpose in the sketching save that he'd lost all his
young manhood through a senseless crime. He wanted his youth back.

(14:01):
He was recovering it bit by bit. The occupation made
it absurdly easy to live on the surface of the
far side of the Moon, whether anybody else could do
it or not, Setel had no such device for adjusting
to the lunar state of things. Living on the moon
was bad enough anyhow, then, but living one mile underground
from Pop Young was much worse. Setel clearly remembered the

(14:25):
crime Pop Young hadn't yet recalled. He considered that Pop
had made no overt attempt to revenge himself, because he
planned some retaliation so horrible and lingering that it was
worth waiting for. He came to hate Pop with an
intense ferocity, and fear in his mind. The need to
escape became an obsession on top of the other psychotic

(14:47):
states normal to a Moon colonist. But he was helpless.
He couldn't leave. There was Pop. He couldn't kill Pop.
He had no chance, and he was afraid. The one absurd,
irrelevant thing he could do was write letters back to Earth.
He did that. He wrote with the desperate, impassioned, frantic
blend of persuasion and information and genius, like invention of

(15:10):
a prisoner in a high security prison trying to induce
someone to help him to escape. He had friends of
a sort, but for a long time his letters produced nothing.
The Moon swung in vast circles about the Earth, and
the Earth swung sedately about the Sun. The other planets
danced there saraband. The rest of humanity went about its

(15:32):
own affairs with fascinated attention. But then an event occurred
which bore directly upon Pop Young and Seatel and Pop
Young's missing years. Somebody back on Earth promoted a luxury
passenger line of spaceships to ply between Earth and Moon.
It looked like a perfect set up. Three spacecraft capable

(15:53):
of the journey came into being with attendant reams of publicity.
They promised a thrill and a new distinction for their
rich guided tours to Lunar, the most expensive and most
thrilling trip in history. One hundred thousand dollars for a
twelve day cruise through space with views of the Moon's
far side and trips through Lunar City and a landing

(16:13):
in Aristarchus, plus sound tapes of the journey and fame
hitherto reserved for honest explorers. It didn't seem to have
anything to do with pop or Setel, but it did.
There were just two passenger tours. The first was fully booked,
but the passengers who paid so highly expected to be
pleasantly thrilled and shielded from all reasons for alarm, and

(16:36):
they couldn't be. Something happens when a self centered and
complacent individual unsuspectingly looks out of a space ship port
and sees the cosmos unshielded by mists or clouds or
other aids to blindness against reality. It is shattering. A
millionaire cut his throat when he saw Earth dwindled to
a mere blue, green ball in vastness. He could not

(16:58):
endure his own smallness in the face of immensity. Not
one passenger disembarked, even for Lunar City. Most of them
cowered in their chairs, hiding their eyes. They were these
simple cases of hysteria. But the richest girl on Earth,
who'd had five husbands and believed that nothing could move her,
she went into catatonic withdrawal and neither saw, nor heard

(17:18):
nor moved. Two other passengers sobbed in improvised strait jackets.
The first shiploads started home fast. The second luxury liner
took off with only four passengers and turned back before
reaching the Moon. Space pilots could take the strain of
space flight because they had work to do. Workers for
the lunar mines could make the trip under heavy sedation,

(17:42):
but it was too early in the development of space
travel for pleasure passengers. They weren't prepared for the more
humbling facts of life. Pop heard of the quaint commercial
enterprise through the micro tapes put off at the shack
for the men down in the mines. Satel probably learned
of it the same way. Pop didn't even think of
it again. It seemed to have nothing to do with him,

(18:04):
but Setl undoubtedly dealt with it fully in his desperate
writings back to Earth. Pop matter of factly tended the
shack in the landing field and the stores for the
big crack mine. Between times, he made more drawings in
pursuit of his own private objective. Quite accidentally, he developed
a certain talent. Professional artists might have approved, but he

(18:25):
was not trying to communicate, but to discover drawing, especially
with his mind. On settel, he found fresh incidents popping
up in his recollection times when he was happy. One
day he remembered the puppy his children had owned and loved.
He drew it painstakingly, and it was his again. Thereafter
he could remember it any time he chose. He did

(18:48):
actually recovery completely vanished past. He envisioned a way to
increase that recovery, but there was a marked shortage of
artist's materials on the Moon. All freight had to be
hauled from Earth on a voyage equal to rather more
than a thousand times around the equator of the Earth.
Artist's supplies were not often included. Pop didn't even ask.

(19:11):
He began to explore the area outside the shack for
possible material no one would think of sending from Earth.
He collected stones of various sorts, but when warmed up
in the shack, they were useless. He found no strictly
lunar material which would serve for modeling or carving portraits.
In the ground, he found minerals which could be pulverized

(19:31):
and used as pigments, but nothing suitable for this new
adventure in the recovery of lost youth. He even considered
blasting to aid his search he could down in the mine.
Blasting was done by soaking carbon black from CO two
in liquid oxygen and then firing it with a spark.
It exploded splendidly, and its fumes were merely more CO two,

(19:53):
which an air apparatus handled easily, But he didn't do
any blasting. He didn't find any signs of the sort
of mineral he required. Marble would have been perfect, but
there is no marble on the moon naturally. Yet, Pop
continued to search absorbedly for material with which to capture memory.
Seatel still seemed necessary, but early one lunar morning, he

(20:17):
was a good two miles from his shack when he
saw rocket fumes in the sky. It was most unlikely
he wasn't looking for anything of the sort, but out
of the corner of his eye. He observed that something moved,
which was impossible. He turned his head and there were
rocket fumes coming over the horizon, not in the direction
of Lunar City, which was more impossible. Still, He stared

(20:41):
a tiny silver rocket to the westward, poured out monstrous
masses of vapor. It decelerated swiftly. It curved downward. The
rockets checked for an instant and flamed again, more violently,
and checked once more. This was not an expert approach.
It was a faulty one curving surfaceward in a sharply
changing parabola. The pilot overcorrected and had to wait to

(21:04):
gather down speed and then overcorrect it again. It was
an altogether clumsy landing. The ship was not even perfectly
vertical when it settled, not quite. In the landing area
marked by silvery triangles, one of its tail fins crumpled slightly.
It tilted a little when fully landed. Then nothing happened.

(21:24):
Pop made his way toward it in the skittering skating
gate one uses in one sixth gravity. When he was
within half a mile, an air lock door opened in
the ship's side, but nothing came out of the lock.
No space suited figure, no cargo came drifting down with
the singular deliberation of falling objects on the Moon. It
was just barely past lunar sunrise on the far side

(21:47):
of the Moon. Incredibly long and utterly black shadows stretched
across the plane, and half the rocket ship was dazzling white,
and half was blacker than blackness itself. The sun still
hung low in the black star speckled sky. Pop waded
through moondust, raising a trail of slowly settling powder. He
knew only that the ship didn't come from Lunar City,

(22:10):
but from Earth. He couldn't imagine why he did not
even wildly connect it with what say Setel might have
written with desperate plausibility about greasy seeming white crystals out
of the mine, knocking about Pop Young's shack, and canisters
containing a hundred earth pounds weight of riches. Pop reached
the rocket ship. He approached the big tail fins. On

(22:34):
one of them, there were welded ladder rungs going up
to the opened airlock door. He climbed. The airlock was
perfectly normal. When he reached it. There was a glass
port in the inner door, and he saw eyes looking
through at him. He pulled the outer door shut and
felt the whining vibration of admitted air. His vacuum suit
went slack about him. The inner door began to open,

(22:58):
and Pop reached up and gave his helmet the practiced
twisting jerk, which removed it. Then he blinked. There was
a red headed man in the open door. He grinned
savagely at Pop. He held a very nasty hand weapon
trained on Pop's middle. Don't come in, he said, mockingly.
And I don't give a damn about how you are.
This isn't social, it's business. Pop simply gaped. He couldn't

(23:23):
quite take it in. This snapped the red headed man abruptly,
is a stick up. Pop's eyes went through the inner
locked door. He saw that the interior of the ship
was stripped and bare, but a spiral stairway descended from
some upper compartment. It had a handrail of pure transparent
water clear plastic. The walls were bare insulation, but that

(23:46):
trace of luxury remained. Pop gazed at the plastic, fascinated.
The red headed man leaned forward, snarling. He slashed Pop
across the face with the barrel of his weapon. It
drew blood. It was Wanton's savage brutality. Pay attention, snarled
the red headed man a stick up, I said, get it.
You go and get that can of stuff from the mine,

(24:08):
the diamonds, bring them here, understand, Pop said, numbly, what
the hell? The red headed man hit him again. He
was nerve wracked, and therefore he wanted to hurt move.
He rasped, I want the diamonds you've got for the
ship from Lunar City. Bring them. Pop licked blood from
his lips, and the man with the weapon raged at him.

(24:30):
Then phone down to the mine, tell Satel I'm here
and he can come on up. Tell him to bring
any more diamonds. They've dug up since the stuff you've got.
He leaned forward. His face was only inches from Pop Young's.
It was seemed and heart bitten and nerve wrecked. But
any man would be quivering if he wasn't used to
space or the feel of one sixth gravity on the moon,

(24:51):
he panted, And get it straight. You try any tricks
and we take off. We swing over your shack. The
rocket blast smashes it. We burn you down. Then we
swing over the cable down to the mine and the
rocket flame melts it. You die, and everybody in the
mind dies. No tricks. We didn't come here for nothing.
He twitched all over. Then he struck cruelly again at

(25:15):
Pop Young's face. He seemed filled with fury, at least
partly hysterical. It was the tension that space travel, then
at its beginning produced. It was meaningless savagery due to terror,
but of course Pop was helpless to resent it. There
were no weapons on the moon, and the mention of
Setel's name showed the uselessness of bluff he'd pictured the

(25:36):
complete setup by the edge of the big crack, Pop
could do nothing. The red headed man checked himself, Panting,
he drew back and slammed the inner locked door. There
was the sound of pumping. Pop put his helmet back
on and sealed it. The outer door opened out rushing
air tugged at Pop. After a second or two, he
went out and climbed down the welded on ladder bars

(25:59):
to the ground. He headed back towards his shack. Somehow
the mention of Seatel had made his mind work better
it always did. He began painstakingly to put things together.
The red headed man knew the routine here in every
detail he knew Setl. That part was simple. Satel had
planned this multimillion dollar coup as a man in prison

(26:22):
might plan his break. The stripped interior of the ship
identified it. It was one of the unsuccessful luxury liners
sold for scrap, or perhaps it was stolen for the journey.
Here Satel's associates had had to steal or somehow get
the fuel and somehow find a pilot. But there were
diamonds worth at least five million dollars waiting for them,

(26:42):
and the whole job might not have called for more
than two men, with Setl as a third. According to
the economics of crime, it was feasible. Anyhow, it was
being done. Pop reached the dust heap which was his shack,
and went in the airlock. Inside he went to the
vision phone and called the mind colony. Down in the crack,

(27:03):
he gave the message he'd been told to pass on
Seatel to come up with what diamonds had been dug.
Since the regular canister was sent up for the Lunar
City ship that would be due presently. Otherwise the ship
on the landing strip would destroy Shack and Pop and
the colony together. I'd guess, said Pop, painstakingly, that Satel

(27:24):
figured it out. He's probably got some sort of gun
to keep you from holding him down there, but he
won't know his friends are here. Not write this minute,
he won't. A shaking voice asked questions from the vision phone. No,
said Pop. They'll do it anyhow. If we were able
to tell about them, they'd be chased. But if I'm
dead and the shack smashed and the cable burnt through,

(27:47):
they'll be back on Earth long before a new cable's
been got and let down to you. So they'll do
all they can, no matter what I do. He added,
I wouldn't tell seatella thing about it if I were you.
It'll save trouble. Just let him keep on waiting for
this to happen. It'll save you trouble. Another shaky question me,

(28:08):
asked Pop. Oh, I'm going to raise what hell I can.
There's some stuff in that ship I want. He switched
off the phone. He went over to his air apparatus.
He took down the canister of diamonds, which were worth
five millions or more back on Earth. He found a bucket.
He dumped the diamonds casually into it. They floated downward
with great deliberation, and surged from side to side like

(28:31):
a liquid. When they stopped one sixth gravity. Pop regarded
his drawings meditatively, a sketch of his wife as he
now remembered her. It was very good to remember a
drawing of his two children playing together. He looked forward
to remembering much more about them. He grinned. That's stair rail,

(28:51):
he said, in deep satisfaction. That'll do it. He tore
bed linen from his bunk and worked on the emptied canister.
It was a double container with a thermal ware interior lining.
Even on Earth, newly mined diamonds sometimes flight to pieces
from internal stress. On the Moon, it was not desirable
that diamonds be exposed to repeated violent changes of temperature,

(29:14):
so a thermaware lined canister kept them at mind temperature.
Once they were warm to touchability, Pop packed the cotton
cloth in the container. He hurried a little because the
men in the rocket were shaky and might not practice patients.
He took a small emergency lamp from his spare spacesuit.
He carefully cracked its bulb, exposing the filament within. He

(29:36):
put the lamp on top of the cotton and sprinkled
magnesium marking powder over everything. Then he went to the
air apparatus and took out a flask of the liquid
oxygen used to keep his breathing air in balance. He
poured the frigid, pale blue stuff into the cotton. He
saturated it all. The inside of the shack was foggy

(29:56):
when he finished. Then he pushed the canister top down.
He breathed a sigh of relief when it was in place.
He'd arranged for it to break a frozen brittle switch
as it descended. When it came off, the switch would
light the lamp with its bare filament. There was powdered
magnesium in contact with it and liquid oxygen all about.
He went out of the shack by the air lock.

(30:19):
On the way, thinking about Seatel, he suddenly recovered a
completely new memory. On their first wedding anniversary so long ago,
he and his wife had gone out to dinner to celebrate.
He remembered how she looked, the almost smug joy they
shared that they would be together for always, with one
complete year for proof. Pop reflected hungrily that it was

(30:41):
something else to be made permanent. And inspected from time
to time. But he wanted more than a drawing of this.
He wanted to make the memory permanent, and to extend it.
If it had not been for his vacuum suit and
the canister he carried, Pop would have rubbed his hands. Tall,
jagged crater walls rose from the lunar plane, Monstrous, extended

(31:02):
inky shadows stretched enormous distances, utterly black. The sun, like
a glowing octopod, floated low at the edge of things,
and seemed to hate all creation. Pop reached the rocket.
He climbed the welded ladder, rungs to the air lock.
He closed the door, air whined, His suit sagged against
his body. He took off his helmet. When the red

(31:24):
headed man opened the inner door, the hand weapon shook
and trembled. Pop said, calmly, now I've got to go
handle the hoist. If Satel's coming up from the mine.
If I don't do it, he don't come up. The
red headed man snarled, but his eyes were on the canister,
whose contents should weigh a hundred pounds on earth. Any tricks,
he rasped, and you'd know what happens. Yeah, said Pop.

(31:49):
He stolidly put his helmet back on, but his eyes
went past the red headed man to the stair that
wound down inside the ship from some compartment above the
stair rail was usure, clear water white plastic, not less
than three inches thick. There was a lot of it.
The inner door closed, Pop opened, the outer air rushed out.

(32:10):
He climbed painstakingly down to the ground. He started back
toward the shack. There was the most luridly bright of
all possible flashes. There was no sound, of course, but
something flamed very brightly, and the ground thumped under Pop
Young's vacuum boots. He turned. The rocket ship was still
in the act of flying apart. It had been a

(32:32):
splendid explosion. Of course, cotton sheeting in liquid oxygen is
not quite as good and explosive as carbon black, which
they used down in the mine, even with magnesium powder
to start the flame. When a bare light filament ignited it,
the canister bomb hadn't equalled, say TNT, but the ship
had fuel on board for the trip back to Earth,
and it blew too. It would be minutes before all

(32:54):
the fragments of the ship returned to the Moon's surface.
On the moon, things fall slowly. Pop didn't wait. He
searched hopefully. Once a mass of steel plating fell only
yards from him, but it did not interrupt his search.
When he went back into the shack, he grinned to himself.
The call light of the vision phone flickered wildly. When

(33:15):
he took off his helmet, the bell clanged incessantly. He
answered a shaking voice from the mining colony. Panted, we
felt a shock. What happened? What do we do? Don't
do a thing, advised Pop. It's all right. I blew
up the ship and everything's all right. I wouldn't even
mention it to Stel if I were you. He grinned
happily down at the section of plastic stair rail he'd

(33:37):
found not too far from where the ship exploded. When
the man down in the mine cut off, Pop got
out of his vacuum suit in a hurry. He placed
the plastic zestfully on the table where he'd been restricted
to drawing pictures of his wife and children in order
to recover memories of them. He began to plan gloatingly
the thing he would carve out of a four inch
section of the plastic. When it was carved, he'd painted.

(34:01):
While he worked, he'd think of Setel because that was
the way to get back the missing portions of his life,
the parts Setel had managed to get away from him.
He'd get back more than ever. Now. He didn't wonder
what he'd do if he ever remembered the crime Setel
had committed. He felt somehow that he wouldn't get that
back until he'd recovered all the rest. Gloating, it was

(34:24):
amusing to remember what people used to call such artworks
as he planned, when carved by other lonely men in
other faraway places. They called those sculptures scrimshaw, but they
were a lot more than that. And of scrimshaw by

(34:45):
Mary Leinster