Scrimshaw, Page 2

sometimes Pop wondered if Sattell everthought of the value of the mine's production. If he would kill a womanand two children and think he'd killed a man for no more than a hundreddollars, what enormity would he commit for a three-gallon quantity ofuncut diamonds?

  * * * * *

  But he did not dwell on such speculation. The sun rose very, very slowlyin what by convention was called the east. It took nearly two hours tourge its disk above the horizon, and it burned terribly in emptiness forfourteen times twenty-four hours before sunset. Then there was night,and for three hundred and thirty-six consecutive hours there were onlystars overhead and the sky was a hole so terrible that a man who lookedup into it--what with the nagging sensation of one-sixth gravity--tendedto lose all confidence in the stability of things. Most men immediatelyfound it hysterically necessary to seize hold of something solid to keepfrom 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 Sattellwas here. Near Sattell, he found memories of times when he was a youngman with a young wife who loved him extravagantly. Then pictures of hischildren came out of emptiness and grew sharp and clear. He found thathe loved them very dearly. And when he was near Sattell he literallyrecovered them--in the sense that he came to know new things about themand had new memories of them every day. He hadn't yet remembered thecrime which lost them to him. Until he did--and the fact possessed acertain grisly humor--Pop didn't even hate Sattell. He simply wanted tobe near him because it enabled him to recover new and vivid parts of hisyouth that had been lost.

  Otherwise, he was wholly matter-of-fact--certainly so for the far sideof the Moon. He was a rather fussy housekeeper. The shack above the BigCrack's rim was as tidy as any lighthouse or fur-trapper's cabin. Hetended his air-apparatus with a fine precision. It was perfectly simple.In the shadow of the shack he had an unfailing source of extreme lowtemperature. Air from the shack flowed into a shadow-chilled pipe.Moisture condensed out of it here, and CO{2} froze solidly out of itthere, and on beyond it collected as restless, transparent liquid air.At the same time, liquid air from another tank evaporated to maintainthe proper air pressure in the shack. Every so often Pop tapped the pipewhere the moisture froze, and lumps of water ice clattered out to bereturned to the humidifier. Less often he took out the CO{2} snow, andmeasured it, and dumped an equivalent quantity of pale-blue liquidoxygen into the liquid air that had been purified by cold. The oxygendissolved. Then the apparatus reversed itself and supplied fresh airfrom the now-enriched fluid, while the depleted other tank began to fillup with cold-purified liquid air.

  Outside the shack, jagged stony pinnacles reared in the starlight, andcraters complained of the bombardment from 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 agreat deal. He grew deeply interested. Writing-material was scarce, buthe spent most of the time between two particular rocket-landings gettingdown on paper exactly how a child had looked while sleeping, somefifteen years before. He remembered with astonishment that the child hadreally looked exactly like that! Later he began a sketch of hispartly-remembered wife. In time--he had plenty--it became a reallytruthful likeness.

  The sun rose, and baked the abomination of desolation which was themoonscape. Pop Young meticulously touched up the glittering triangleswhich were landing guides for the Lunar City ships. They glittered fromthe thinnest conceivable layer of magnesium marking-powder. He checkedover the moondozer. He tended the air apparatus. He did everything thathis job and survival required. Ungrudgingly.

  Then he made more sketches. The images to be drawn came back moreclearly when he thought of Sattell, so by keeping Sattell in mind herecovered 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 seeher again. And he speculated about whether Sattell ever thought ofmillions of dollars' worth of new-mined diamonds knocking aboutunguarded in the shack, and he suddenly recollected clearly the way oneof his children had looked while playing with her doll. He made a quicksketch to keep from forgetting that.

  There was no purpose in the sketching, save that he'd lost all his youngmanhood through a senseless crime. He wanted his youth back. He wasrecovering it bit by bit. The occupation made it absurdly easy to liveon the surface of the far side of the Moon, whether anybody else coulddo it or not.

  Sattell had no such device for adjusting to the lunar state of things.Living on the Moon was bad enough anyhow, then, but living one mileunderground from Pop Young was much worse. Sattell clearly rememberedthe crime Pop Young hadn't yet recalled. He considered that Pop had madeno overt attempt to revenge himself because he planned some retaliationso horrible and lingering that it was worth waiting for. He came to hatePop with an insane ferocity. And fear. In his mind the need to escapebecame an obsession on top of the other psychotic states normal to aMoon-colonist.

  But he was helpless. He couldn't leave. There was Pop. He couldn't killPop. He had no chance--and he was afraid. The one absurd, irrelevantthing he could do was write letters back to Earth. He did that. He wrotewith the desperate, impassioned, frantic blend of persuasion andinformation and genius-like invention of a prisoner in a high-securityprison, trying to induce someone to help him escape.

  He had friends, of a sort, but for a long time his letters producednothing. The Moon swung in vast circles about the Earth, and the Earthswung sedately about the Sun. The other planets danced their saraband.The rest of humanity went about its own affairs with fascinatedattention. But then an event occurred which bore directly upon Pop Youngand Sattell and Pop Young's missing years.

  Somebody back on Earth promoted a luxury passenger-line of spaceshipsto ply between Earth and Moon. It looked like a perfect set-up. Threespacecraft capable of the journey came into being with attendant reamsof publicity. They promised a thrill and a new distinction for the rich.Guided tours to Lunar! The most expensive and most thrilling trip inhistory! One hundred thousand dollars for a twelve-day cruise throughspace, with views of the Moon's far side and trips through Lunar Cityand a landing in Aristarchus, plus sound-tapes of the journey and famehitherto reserved for honest explorers!

  It didn't seem to have anything to do with Pop or with Sattell. But itdid.

  There were just two passenger tours. The first was fully booked. But thepassengers who paid so highly, expected to be pleasantly thrilled andshielded from all reasons for alarm. And they couldn't be. Somethinghappens when a self-centered and complacent individual unsuspectinglylooks out of a spaceship port and sees the cosmos unshielded by mists orclouds or other aids to blindness against reality. It is shattering.

  A millionaire cut his throat when he saw Earth dwindled to a mereblue-green ball in vastness. He could not endure his own smallness inthe face of immensity. Not one passenger disembarked even for LunarCity. Most of them cowered in their chairs, hiding their eyes. They werethe simple cases of hysteria. But the richest girl on Earth, who'd hadfive husbands and believed that nothing could move her--she went intocatatonic withdrawal and neither saw nor heard nor moved. Two otherpassengers sobbed in improvised strait jackets. The first shiploadstarted home. Fast.

  The second luxury liner took off with only four passengers and turnedback before reaching the Moon. Space-pilots could take the strain ofspace-flight because they had work to do. Workers for the lunar minescould make the trip under heavy sedation. But it was too early in thedevelopment of space-travel for pleasure-passengers. They weren'tprepared for the more humbling facts of life.

  Pop heard of the quaint commercial enterprise through the micro-tapesput off at the shack for the men down in the mine. Sattell probablylearned of it the same way. Pop didn't even think of it again. It seemedto have nothing to do with him. But Sattell undoubtedly dealt with itfully in his desperate writings back to Earth.

  * * * *
*

  Pop matter-of-factly tended the shack and the landing field and thestores for the Big Crack mine. Between-times he made more drawings inpursuit of his own private objective. Quite accidentally, he developed acertain talent professional artists might have approved. But he was nottrying to communicate, but to discover. Drawing--especially with hismind on Sattell--he found fresh incidents popping up in hisrecollection. Times when he was happy. One day he remembered the puppyhis children had owned and loved. He drew it painstakingly--and it washis again. Thereafter he could remember it any time he chose. He didactually recover a completely vanished past.

  He envisioned a way to increase that recovery. But there was a markedshortage of artists' materials on the Moon. All freight had to be hauledfrom Earth, on a voyage equal to rather more than a thousand timesaround the equator of the Earth. Artists' supplies were not oftenincluded. Pop didn't even ask.

  He began to explore the area outside the shack for possible material noone would think of sending from Earth. He collected stones of varioussorts, but when warmed up in the shack they were useless. He found nostrictly lunar material which would serve for modeling or carvingportraits in the ground. He found minerals which could be pulverized andused as pigments, but nothing suitable for this new adventure in therecovery of lost youth. He even considered blasting, to aid his search.He could. Down in the mine, blasting was done by soaking carbonblack--from CO{2}--in liquid oxygen, and then firing it with a spark. Itexploded splendidly. And its fumes were merely more CO{2} which anair-apparatus handled easily.

  He didn't do any blasting. He didn't find any signs of the sort ofmineral he required. Marble would have been perfect, but there is nomarble on the Moon. Naturally! Yet Pop continued to search absorbedlyfor material with which to capture memory. Sattell still seemednecessary, but--

  Early one lunar morning he was a good two miles from his shack when hesaw rocket-fumes in the sky. It was most unlikely. He wasn't looking foranything of the sort, but out of the corner of his eye he observed thatsomething moved. Which was impossible. He turned his head, and therewere rocket-fumes coming over the horizon, not in the direction of LunarCity. Which was more impossible still.

  He stared. A tiny silver rocket to the westward poured out monstrousmasses of vapor. It decelerated swiftly. It curved downward. The rocketschecked for an instant, and flamed again more violently, and checkedonce more. This was not an expert approach. It was a faulty one. Curvingsurface-ward in a sharply changing parabola, the pilot over-correctedand had to wait to gather down-speed, and then over-corrected again. Itwas an altogether clumsy landing. The ship was not even perfectlyvertical when it settled not quite in the landing-area marked by silverytriangles. One of its tail-fins crumpled slightly. It tilted a littlewhen fully landed.

  Then nothing happened.

  Pop made his way toward it in the skittering, skating gait one uses inone-sixth gravity. When he was within half a mile, an air-lock dooropened in the ship's side. But nothing came out of the lock. Nospace-suited figure. No cargo came drifting down with the singulardeliberation of falling objects on the Moon.

  It was just barely past lunar sunrise on the far side of the Moon.Incredibly long and utterly black shadows stretched across the plain,and half the rocketship was dazzling white and half was blacker thanblackness itself. The sun still hung low indeed in the black,star-speckled sky. Pop waded through moondust, raising a trail of slowlysettling powder. He knew only that the ship didn't come from Lunar City,but from Earth. He couldn't imagine why. He did not even wildly connectit with what--say--Sattell might have written with desperateplausibility about greasy-seeming white crystals out of the mine,knocking about Pop Young's shack in cannisters containing a hundredEarth-pounds weight of richness.

  * * * * *

  Pop reached the rocketship. He approached the big tail-fins. On one ofthem there were welded ladder-rungs going up to the opened air-lockdoor.

  He climbed.

  The air-lock was perfectly normal when he reached it. There was a glassport in the inner door, and he saw eyes looking through it at him. Hepulled the outer door shut and felt the whining vibration of admittedair. His vacuum suit went slack about him. The inner door began to open,and Pop reached up and gave his helmet the practiced twisting jerkwhich removed it.

  Then he blinked. There was a red-headed man in the opened door. Hegrinned savagely at Pop. He held a very nasty hand-weapon trained onPop's middle.

  "Don't come in!" he said mockingly. "And I don't give a damn about howyou are. This isn't social. It's business!"

  Pop simply gaped. He couldn't quite take it in.

  "This," snapped the red-headed man abruptly, "is a stickup!"

  Pop's eyes went through the inner lock-door. He saw that the interior ofthe ship was stripped and bare. But a spiral stairway descended fromsome upper compartment. It had a handrail of pure, transparent,water-clear plastic. The walls were bare insulation, but that trace ofluxury remained. Pop gazed at the plastic, fascinated.

  The red-headed man leaned forward, snarling. He slashed Pop across theface with the barrel of his weapon. It drew blood. It was wanton, savagebrutality.

  "Pay attention!" snarled the red-headed man. "A stickup, I said! Get it?You go get that can of stuff from the mine! The diamonds! Bring themhere! Understand?"

  Pop said numbly: "What the hell?"

  The red-headed man hit him again. He was nerve-racked, and, therefore,he wanted to hurt.

  "Move!" he rasped. "I want the diamonds you've got for the ship fromLunar City! Bring 'em!" Pop licked blood from his lips and the man withthe weapon raged at him. "Then phone down to the mine! Tell Sattell I'mhere and he can come on up! Tell him to bring any more diamonds they'vedug up since the stuff you've got!"

  He leaned forward. His face was only inches from Pop Young's. It wasseamed and hard-bitten and nerve-racked. But any man would be quiveringif he wasn't used to space or the feel of one-sixth gravity on the Moon.He panted:

  "And get it straight! You try any tricks and we take off! We swing overyour shack! The rocket-blast smashes it! We burn you down! Then we swingover the cable down to the mine and the rocket-flame melts it! You dieand everybody in the mine besides! No tricks! We didn't come here fornothing!"

  He twitched all over. Then he struck cruelly again at Pop Young's face.He seemed filled with fury, at least partly hysterical. It was thetension that space-travel--then, at its beginning--produced. It wasmeaningless savagery due to terror. But, of course, Pop was helpless toresent it. There were no weapons on the Moon and the mention ofSattell's name showed the uselessness of bluff. He'd pictured thecomplete set-up by the edge of the Big Crack. Pop could do nothing.

  The red-headed man checked himself, panting. He drew back and slammedthe inner lock-door. There was the sound of pumping.

  Pop put his helmet back on and sealed it. The outer door opened.Outrushing air tugged at Pop. After a second or two he went out andclimbed down the welded-on ladder-bars to the ground.

  He headed back toward his shack. Somehow, the mention of Sattell hadmade his mind work better. It always did. He began painstakingly to putthings together. The red-headed man knew the routine here in everydetail. He knew Sattell. That part was simple. Sattell had planned thismulti-million-dollar coup, as a man in prison might plan his break. Thestripped interior of the ship identified it.

  It was one of the unsuccessful luxury-liners sold for scrap. Or perhapsit was stolen for the journey here. Sattell's associates had had tosteal or somehow get the fuel, and somehow find a pilot. But there werediamonds worth at least five million dollars waiting for them, and thewhole job might not have called for more than two men--with Sattell as athird. According to the economics of crime, it was feasible. Anyhow itwas being done.

  Pop reached the dust-heap which was his shack and went in the air lock.Inside, he went to the vision-phone and called the mine-colony down inthe Crack. He gave the message he'd been told to pass on. Sattell tocome up, with what diamonds
had been dug since the regular cannister wassent up for the Lunar City ship that would be due presently. Otherwisethe ship on the landing strip would destroy shack and Pop and the colonytogether.

  "I'd guess," said Pop painstakingly, "that Sattell figured it out. He'sprobably got some sort of gun to keep you from holding him down there.But he won't know his friends are here--not right 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'em, they'd be chased. But if I'm dead and the shacks smashed and thecable burnt through, they'll be back on Earth long before a new cable'sbeen got and let down to you. So they'll do all they can no matter whatI do." He added, "I wouldn't tell Sattell a thing about it, if I wereyou. It'll save trouble. Just let him keep on waiting for this tohappen. It'll save you trouble."

  Another shaky question.

  "Me?" asked Pop. "Oh, I'm going to raise what hell I can. There's somestuff in that ship I want."

  He switched off the phone. He went over to his air apparatus. He tookdown the cannister of diamonds which were worth five millions or moreback on Earth. He found a bucket. He dumped the diamonds casually intoit. They floated downward with great deliberation and surged from sideto side like a liquid when they stopped. One-sixth gravity.

  Pop regarded his drawings meditatively. A sketch of his wife as he nowremembered her. It was very good to remember. A drawing of his twochildren, playing together. He looked forward to remembering much moreabout them. He grinned.

  "That stair-rail," he said in deep satisfaction.