Scrimshaw Page 3

"That'll do it!"

  He tore bed linen from his bunk and worked on the emptied cannister. Itwas a double container with a thermware interior lining. Even on Earthnewly-mined diamonds sometimes fly to pieces from internal stress. Onthe Moon, it was not desirable that diamonds be exposed to repeatedviolent changes of temperature. So a thermware-lined cannister kept themat mine-temperature once they were warmed 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 practicepatience. He took a small emergency-lamp from his spare spacesuit. Hecarefully cracked its bulb, exposing the filament within. He put thelamp on top of the cotton and sprinkled magnesium marking-powder overeverything. Then he went to the air-apparatus and took out a flask ofthe liquid oxygen used to keep his breathing-air in balance. He pouredthe frigid, pale-blue stuff into the cotton. He saturated it.

  All the inside of the shack was foggy when he finished. Then he pushedthe cannister-top down. He breathed a sigh of relief when it was inplace. He'd arranged for it to break a frozen-brittle switch as itdescended. When it came off, the switch would light the lamp with itsbare filament. There was powdered magnesium in contact with it andliquid oxygen all about.

  He went out of the shack by the air lock. On the way, thinking aboutSattell, he suddenly recovered a completely new memory. On their firstwedding anniversary, so long ago, he and his wife had gone out to dinnerto celebrate. He remembered how she looked: the almost-smug joy theyshared that they would be together for always, with one complete yearfor proof.

  Pop reflected hungrily that it was something else to be made permanentand inspected from time to time. But he wanted more than a drawing ofthis! He wanted to make the memory permanent and to extend it--

  If it had not been for his vacuum suit and the cannister he carried, Popwould have rubbed his hands.

  * * * * *

  Tall, jagged crater-walls rose from the lunar plain. Monstrous, extendedinky shadows stretched enormous distances, utterly black. The sun, likea glowing octopod, floated low at the edge of things and seemed to hateall creation.

  Pop reached the rocket. He climbed the welded ladder-rungs to the airlock. He closed the door. Air whined. His suit sagged against his body.He took off his helmet.

  When the red-headed man opened the inner door, the hand-weapon shook andtrembled. Pop said calmly:

  "Now I've got to go handle the hoist, if Sattell's coming up from themine. If I don't do it, he don't come up."

  The red-headed man snarled. But his eyes were on the cannister whosecontents should weigh a hundred pounds on Earth.

  "Any tricks," he rasped, "and you know what happens!"

  "Yeah," said Pop.

  He stolidly put his helmet back on. But his eyes went past thered-headed man to the stair that wound down, inside the ship, from somecompartment above. The stair-rail was pure, 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. He climbedpainstakingly down to the ground. He started back toward the shack.

  There was the most luridly bright of all possible flashes. There was nosound, of course. But something flamed very brightly, and the groundthumped under Pop Young's vacuum boots. He turned.

  The rocketship was still in the act of flying apart. It had been asplendid explosion. Of course cotton sheeting in liquid oxygen is notquite as good an explosive as carbon-black, which they used down inthe mine. Even with magnesium powder to start the flame when a barelight-filament ignited it, the cannister-bomb hadn't equaled--say--T.N.T.But the ship had fuel on board for the trip back to Earth. And it blew,too. It would be minutes before all the fragments of the ship returnedto the Moon's surface. On the Moon, things fall slowly.

  Pop didn't wait. He searched hopefully. Once a mass of steel platingfell only yards from him, but it did not interrupt his search.

  When he went into the shack, he grinned to himself. The call-light ofthe vision-phone flickered wildly. When he took off his helmet the bellclanged incessantly. He answered. A shaking voice from the mining-colonypanted:

  "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 andeverything's all right. I wouldn't even mention it to Sattell if I wereyou."

  He grinned happily down at a section of plastic stair-rail he'd foundnot too far from where the ship exploded. When the man down in the minecut off, Pop got out of his vacuum suit in a hurry. He placed theplastic zestfully on the table where he'd been restricted to drawingpictures of his wife and children in order to recover memories of them.

  He began to plan, gloatingly, the thing he would carve out of afour-inch section of the plastic. When it was carved, he'd paint it.While he worked, he'd think of Sattell, because that was the way to getback the missing portions of his life--the parts Sattell had managed toget 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 Sattellhad committed. He felt, somehow, that he wouldn't get that back untilhe'd recovered all the rest.

  Gloating, it was amusing to remember what people used to call suchart-works as he planned, when carved by other lonely men in otherfaraway places. They called those sculptures scrimshaw.

  But they were a lot more than that!

  THE END