Scrimshaw

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from _Astounding Science Fiction_ September 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. Subscript characters are shown within {braces}.

 

  SCRIMSHAW

  _The old man just wanted to get back his memory--and the methods he used were gently hellish, from the viewpoint of the others...._

  BY MURRAY LEINSTER

  Illustrated by Freas

  Pop Young was the one known man who could stand life on the surface ofthe Moon's far side, and, therefore, he occupied the shack on the BigCrack's edge, above the mining colony there. Some people said that nonormal man could do it, and mentioned the scar of a ghastly head-woundto explain his ability. One man partly guessed the secret, but onlypartly. His name was Sattell and he had reason not to talk. Pop Youngalone knew the whole truth, and he kept his mouth shut, too. It wasn'tanybody else's business.

  The shack and the job he filled were located in the medieval notion ofthe physical appearance of hell. By day the environment was heat andtorment. By night--lunar night, of course, and lunar day--it wasfrigidity and horror. Once in two weeks Earth-time a rocketship camearound the horizon from Lunar City with stores for the colony deepunderground. Pop received the stores and took care of them. He handedover the product of the mine, to be forwarded to Earth. The rocket wentaway again. Come nightfall Pop lowered the supplies down the long cableinto the Big Crack to the colony far down inside, and freshened up thelanding field marks with magnesium marking-powder if a rocket-blast hadblurred them. That was fundamentally all he had to do. But without himthe mine down in the Crack would have had to shut down.

  The Crack, of course, was that gaping rocky fault which stretches ninehundred miles, jaggedly, over the side of the Moon that Earth neversees. There is one stretch where it is a yawning gulf a full half-milewide and unguessably deep. Where Pop Young's shack stood it was only ahundred yards, but the colony was a full mile down, in one wall. Thereis nothing like it on Earth, of course. When it was first found,scientists descended into it to examine the exposed rock-strata andlearn the history of the Moon before its craters were made. But theyfound more than history. They found the reason for the colony and therocket landing field and the shack.

  The reason for Pop was something else.

  The shack stood a hundred feet from the Big Crack's edge. It looked likea dust-heap thirty feet high, and it was. The outside was surfacemoondust, piled over a tiny dome to be insulation against the cold ofnight 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 missingportions of his life that Sattell had managed to take away from him.

  He thought often of Sattell, down in the colony underground. There weregalleries and tunnels and living-quarters down there. There wereair-tight bulkheads for safety, and a hydroponic garden to keep the airfresh, and all sorts of things to make life possible for men under ifnot on the Moon.

  But it wasn't fun, even underground. In the Moon's slight gravity, a manis really adjusted to existence when he has a well-developed case ofagoraphobia. With such an aid, a man can get into a tiny, coffinlikecubbyhole, and feel solidity above and below and around him, and happilytell himself that it feels delicious. Sometimes it does.

  But Sattell couldn't comfort himself so easily. He knew about Pop, up onthe surface. He'd shipped out, whimpering, to the Moon to get far awayfrom Pop, and Pop was just about a mile overhead and there was no way toget around him. It was difficult to get away from the mine, anyhow. Itdoesn't take too long for the low gravity to tear a man's nerves toshreds. He has to develop kinks in his head to survive. And thosekinks--

  The first men to leave the colony had to be knocked cold and shippedout unconscious. They'd been underground--and in low gravity--longenough to be utterly unable to face the idea of open spaces. Even nowthere were some who had to be carried, but there were some tougher oneswho were able to walk to the rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin overtheir heads so they didn't have to see the sky. In any case Pop wasessential, either for carrying or guidance.

  * * * * *

  Sattell got the shakes when he thought of Pop, and Pop rather probablyknew it. Of course, by the time he took the job tending the shack, hewas pretty certain about Sattell. The facts spoke for themselves.

  Pop had come back to consciousness in a hospital with a great wound inhis 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, thedoctors told him who he was, and as gently as possible what had happenedto his wife and children. They'd been murdered after he was seeminglykilled defending them. But he didn't remember a thing. Not then. It wassomething of a blessing.

  But when he was physically recovered he set about trying to pick up thethreads of the life he could no longer remember. He met Sattell quite byaccident. Sattell looked familiar. Pop eagerly tried to ask himquestions. And Sattell turned gray and frantically denied that he'd everseen Pop before.

  All of which happened back on Earth and a long time ago. It seemed toPop that the sight of Sattell had brought back some vague and cloudymemories. They were not sharp, though, and he hunted up Sattell again tofind out if he was right. And Sattell went into panic when he returned.

  Nowadays, by the Big Crack, Pop wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattell,but he was deeply concerned with the recovery of the memories thatSattell helped bring back. Pop was a highly conscientious man. He tookgood care of his job. There was a warning-bell in the shack, and when arocketship from Lunar City got above the horizon and could send a tightbeam, the gong clanged loudly, and Pop got into a vacuum-suit and wentout the air lock. He usually reached the moondozer about the time theship began to brake for landing, and he watched it come in.

  He saw the silver needle in the sky fighting momentum above a line ofjagged crater-walls. It slowed, and slowed, and curved down as it drewnearer. The pilot killed all forward motion just above the field andcame steadily and smoothly down to land between the silvery trianglesthat marked the landing place.

  Instantly the rockets cut off, drums of fuel and air and food came outof the cargo-hatch and Pop swept forward with the dozer. It was aminiature tractor with a gigantic scoop in front. He pushed a greatmound of talc-fine dust before him to cover up the cargo. It wasnecessary. With freight costing what it did, fuel and air and food camefrozen solid, in containers barely thicker than foil. While they stayedat space-shadow temperature, the foil would hold anything. And a coverof insulating moondust with vacuum between the grains kept even airfrozen solid, though in sunlight.

  At such times Pop hardly thought of Sattell. He knew he had plenty oftime for that. He'd started to follow Sattell knowing what had happenedto his wife and children, but it was hearsay only. He had no memory ofthem at all. But Sattell stirred the lost memories. At first Popfollowed absorbedly from city to city, to recover the years that hadbeen wiped out by an axe-blow. He did recover a good deal. When Sattellfled to another continent, Pop followed because he had some distinctmemories of his wife--and the way he'd felt about her--and some fugitivemental images of his children. When Sattell frenziedly tried to denyknowledge of the murder in Tangier, Pop had come to remember both hischildren and some of the happiness of his married life.

  Even when Sattell--whimpering--signed up for Lunar City, Pop track
edhim. By that time he was quite sure that Sattell was the man who'dkilled his family. If so, Sattell had profited by less than two days'pay for wiping out everything that Pop possessed. But Pop wanted itback. He couldn't prove Sattell's guilt. There was no evidence. In anycase, he didn't really want Sattell to die. If he did, there'd be no wayto recover more lost memories.

  Sometimes, in the shack on the far side of the Moon, Pop Young had oddfancies about Sattell. There was the mine, for example. In each twoEarth-weeks of working, the mine-colony nearly filled up a three-galloncannister with greasy-seeming white crystals shaped like two pyramidsbase to base. The filled cannister would weigh a hundred pounds onEarth. Here it weighed eighteen. But on Earth its contents would becomputed in carats, and a hundred pounds was worth millions. Yet here onthe Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister on a shelf in his tiny dome,behind the air-apparatus. It rattled if he shook it, and it was worth nomore than so many pebbles. But