An Artist’s Life by Felix Boyd [Pseudonym of Harry Harrison] Illustrated by Berwin Dalgreen came back from the Moon to die, and there was only the art he knew worth living for. But then he found Di Costa, who painted as no human could ... and whose secret was too great for any man to know. _A busman’s holiday. A real busman’s holiday. I stay on the moon for a year, I paint pictures there for three hundred and sixty-five days--then the first thing I do back on Earth is go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at more paintings._ Brent smiled to himself. _It had better be worthwhile._ He looked up the immense stretch of granite steps. They shimmered slightly in the intense August sun. He took a deep breath and shifted the cane to his right hand. Slowly he dragged himself up the steps ... they seemed to stretch away into the oven like infinity. * * * * * He was almost there ... a few more steps would do it. The cane caught between two of the steps, shifting his balance, and he was suddenly falling. The woman standing in the shade at the top of the steps screamed. She had watched since he first climbed out of the cab. Brent Dalgreen, the _famous_ painter, everyone recognized the tanned young face under bristly hair burned silver white by the raw radiation of space. The papers had told how his stay on the moon had weakened his muscles from low gravity. He had climbed painfully up the steps and now he was rolling hopelessly down them. She screamed again and again. They carried him into the first aid room. “Gravity weakness,” he told the nurse. “I’ll be all right.” She tested him for broken bones and frowned when her hand touched his skin. She took his temperature, her eyes widened and she glanced at him with a frightened look. “I know,” he said. “It’s much higher than normal. Don’t let it worry you though, the fever isn’t due to the fall; in fact, it’s probably the other way around.” “I’ll have to enter it in my report, just in case there’s any trouble.” “I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t want the fact to leak out that I’m not as well as I should be. If you’ll call Dr. Grayber in the Medical Arts Building you’ll find that this condition is not new. The museum will have no worry about their responsibility as to my health.” It would make wonderful copy for the scandal sheets. “MOON PAINTER DYING ... GIVES LIFE FOR ART.” It wasn’t at all like that. He had known there was danger from radiation sickness; in the beginning he had been very careful to be out in his spacesuit only the prescribed length of time. That was before he ran into the trouble.