Pop reflected hungrily that it was 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 cannister he carried, Pop
would have rubbed his hands.
* * * * *
Tall, jagged crater-walls rose from the lunar plain. Monstrous, extended
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-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 Sattell'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 cannister whose
contents 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 the
red-headed man to the stair that wound down, inside the ship, from some
compartment 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 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 rocketship was still in the act of flying apart. It had been a
splendid explosion. Of course cotton sheeting in liquid oxygen is not
quite as good an 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 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 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 into the shack, he grinned to himself. The call-light of
the vision-phone flickered wildly. When 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 Sattell if I were
you."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account