 Has anyone here seen Kelly?" by Bryce Walton. The body tanks had to be replenished, and the ship had to be serviced, and the crew was having a lotus-dream in his bed of protoplasm, but Kelly knew how to arouse them. The crew pulsed with contentment, and his communal singing brought a pleasant kind of glow that throbbed gently in the control room. Has anybody here seen Kelly? K-E-L-L-Y? Shut up and dig my thought. Kelly's stubborn will insisted. I'm going on out for a while. The delicate loom of the crew's light pattern increased its frequency a little, and the song stopped. Better not, the crew said. But why not? No need. We could be running into something bad, Kelly thought. No danger now, Kelly. Checking the ship is just a waste of time. How can you waste what you have so damn much of, Kelly thought? Do not leave us again, Kelly. We love you, and you are the most interesting part of the crew when you're with it. The ship ought to be chucked. Our bodies ought to be looked at. We know there is no danger any more, Kelly. Do not go. There are so many interesting experiences we have not even begun to share yet. We are only halfway through your life, and we have not even started to experience your impressions of your colorful and complex earth culture. And we have not even started on the adult lives of Lidjub. Come back with your crew, Kelly. But no one's checked the ship for over a year. Please do not worry about the ship, Kelly. In fifty years nothing has gone wrong. We can trust the ship thoroughly now. It will take care of us. It will take care of us. That's a hell of a way to look at it. There can be no danger now, Kelly. In fifty years we have encountered every conceivable danger, every imaginable kind of world or possible menace. Have we, Kelly thought? Every danger from outside, maybe, and I'm not even sure of that. But how about danger from inside? Inside? Us. How about apathy, for instance? Apathy is a real danger. You talk about the space can like it was a big metal mother. Listen, I'm supposed to see that this tub holds together, at least until we get back somewhere near enough to the solar system, so we'll feel we've been somewhere else. But Kelly, I'm getting out for a while. I tell you. All right, the crew sighed. The light loom faded a bit, down to a self-indulgent glow. Hurry back to us, Kelly. I'll give some thought to it. So Kelly concentrated on the increasingly painful and difficult task of tearing his consciousness free of the big glob of protoplasm in the tank and getting it back into his body that hibernated in the bunk room. As usual the switch was too painful. It stretched and stretched and finally snapped an all too familiar explosion of shocking light. His bones creaked. His skin rustled as he sat up and looked around. There was the old feeling that there was dust over everything when there was no dust. There was all that emptiness sweeping away into the endless silence and he thought again, as he always did, how comforting and cozy it was being part of the crew. But someone had to check the ship. It was only machinery after all, and machinery could wear out sooner or later. And he wasn't at all sure, as he kept insisting, that they had encountered all the possible dangers. It might seem that in fifty years you could run into everything, but fifty years was no time at all out here where time had no real meaning any more. His body squeaked as he took a few tentative steps about the bunk room. One did not actually forget how to walk. It was just awkward as the devil. And the blood, the entire autonomic system, tended to slow down. It seemed reluctant to step up general metabolism. Apathy. Sure, it was a danger. This time Kelly decided I'll do something about it. He was the engineer and he had signed on the great odyssey to keep the ship going. But the crew was part of the ship. Was not there an obligation even greater to keep the crew going? The four others lived, but almost imperceptibly in some very low state of slowed metabolism, there in the bunk room, and Kelly looked at them. The faithful and the wonderful ones. The ones with whom he had shared so many dangers and awful silences that the five of them had been able to evolve the idea of the protoplasm in the tank and merge their consciousness in it. Q. the Venusian in her bowl of sulfur-knowing nitrate. Lakrit, from a Jovian satellite, a fluorine fellow of distinction inside a sphere of gaseous sulfur. A crystalline character with a sense of humor named Iledjab, whose form gave off a paled glint as if nourished itself on silicates. And a highly intelligent but humble six-foot-long sponge labeled Erdaz stuck in a foundation of chemical sediment at the bottom of a tank of reprocessing salt water. Each with their own special kind of appendages and sensitivities, each able to move his special closed system about through the ship by means of clever types of mobility. But basically, in outward form, they were too alien to have much in common. Only as intelligences, as life-forces, could they share a common bed. And it had evolved to that in fifty years—a bed of protoplasm and a shock-absorbent tank. Really looked at them warmly and thought about how it had worked out. The strange thing was that it did have a lot of good things to recommend it, or had had them. It had solved the problem of intimate communication and driven back the tides of loneliness. It had lessened the dangers of mental and physical illnesses in the material bodies and assured a prolongation of the life of each body, which was important in itself. For this trip had proven to be a lot longer than even the most pessimistic had anticipated. The crew, pulsing in its tank, Kelly thought oddly, is a new life-form—one that had evolved to meet the exigencies of deep space, which had proven to be alien to any adaptability common to any world that rotated through it. But maybe they were too damn happy, Kelly thought. Too contented. If they ran into a real emergency now, the ship would be finished. The crew and the tank was, itself, incapable of action of any overt kind. It could not manipulate anything. It could only be happy. And the bodies here in the bunk-room could not rally fast enough to meet a sudden crisis. And they had agreed that the first law was survival. But to survive this way might well mean destruction in another. So Kelly walked and thought about it, and weighed the precarious balance. He slipped through the silent ship and to the control-room. He peered into the view-scope. Some galaxy or other spun its giant pinwheel outward toward some destiny of its own. The high noon of the endlessness had been unfamiliar for years. He checked the ship's instruments. The crew and the big tank simmered and throbbed in its introspective bliss utterly oblivious to Kelly now. Kelly saw the red dwarf a few hundred million kilos away. Three planets ground their familiar path around it. The second in distance had a breathable oxygen, according to the scopes, but little else to recommend it. Kelly straightened up. He had no idea when the plan had really started forming, but now it was formed. When Kelly made up his mind to a thing, there was no other course but to conclude it. He knew what he had to do. Somehow, even as a part of the crew, some part of Kelly had been able to keep that forming plan a secret. Which was a lucky miracle, for if the crew had known his intentions it would certainly not have let him out this time. Even if you wanted out, Kelly reasoned, the crew would keep you in, and maybe after long enough you did not care to get out. But once out, he wondered, could it keep you out if it decided to blackball a man for one reason or another, like wrecking the ship? In the chrome strip above the control panel, Kelly saw his face, grinning strangely back at him, a bearded, hallowed, paled face with an unfamiliar glitter in the eyes. Every time he had left the crew to enter and reactivate his own body, that body had seemed a little less familiar. This time it seemed to be almost entirely someone else. He stared at the face in the chrome, then whispered the hell with that, and he flipped the controls over to manual. He sat down. Behind him the crew whispered in its tank, protoplasm developed in the labs and quivering now with some unified sensation that was purely subjective and blissfully unconcerned with what happened outside itself. It's sick, Kelly concluded, with an emphatic clamp of his jaws. It's not right. True, sharing the intimate sensations of alien life-forms like Q, the female Venusian, had been exciting. Especially the sex experiences which, and a flower of Q's type, was certainly something. There were interesting things to being a part of the crew all right, but the main purpose, survival, had been forgotten. Now being the crew was an end in itself. Kelly could imagine the crew business going on and on until finally even the material bodies in the bunk room would be forgotten entirely and allowed to rot away to dust about which the crew would no longer care. And that was very bad. It should not have worked out that way. But it was not too late to do something. Take them out of the lotus dream. He checked the scopes again. Now the second planet revealed plenty of breathable atmosphere settled in the lower valleys. He headed straight for it. The crew was soon going to get one devil of a jolt. He put the ship into a close orbit around the planet. It seemed nothing but a fearsome forest of oxidized spikes rising in corrosive silence with here and there a lean slash of valley. There was no indication of life, no vegetation visible or revealed by the scopes. One of the valleys had a thin mouth of water stretching down the length of its face. Kelly set the speed and the controls and ran for the bunk room and the shock-absorbent cushions. He strapped himself in and waited. It was done. As long as the thing had gone so far, Kelly decided, the truth should never be revealed because that would lessen the therapeutic value of his action. He would wreck the ship not too badly, not so badly, that all of the bodies, distinct, separate, individual bodies, again, couldn't put the ship back together as in the old days. And that would keep them in their bodies gladly for a while where they belonged, where the good Lord had intended for them to stay. They would not be rocked away to apathy in a phony metal mother womb, thinking the ship was going to take care of them. The more Kelly thought about it, the better he felt. He stretched inside the straps. He felt his slightly atrophied muscles luxuriate over the tissues and bones of his big frame. Any body, no matter what its shape, should be proud of itself. That was Kelly's belief, and this thing that had happened seemed somewhat blasphemous. Without bodies and their complex sensory recording apparatus, the rich consciousness enjoyed by the crew could not exist, would never have been created at all. The crew was living off the largesse of experience built up by their bodies. The crew was just narcotized enough that it did not realize that the body-bags had to be replenished. Metal shrieked. Kelly yelled feebly. He fought. He grappled with the threatening blackout like a man fighting with an invisible opponent on an endless flight of stairs. The grinding, rolling terror of the sound, the ripping, twisting, tearing scream of it, cried on and on. Kelly knew one thing then. He had not figured it right. His calculations were off. The ship had hit too damn hard. Later when he managed to get the straps off and tried to move, he fell painfully onto the tilted deck. One of his eyes felt sticky. He rubbed it, and his hand was smeared with blood. He shuffled around in a stumbling circle. Minor damages could have been repaired. But this. The ship was peeled open in glaring strips like a breakfast canister, a cold wind moaned through the ship that was now nothing but a metal sieve. A hazy light filtered down and ran off the metal like cold flour rust. Kelly fell to his knees. Q! he whispered, lecham, er das, lacrete. The Venusian flower lady was sliced on the metal like a cabbage, and the nitrate bowl was shattered, and Q! was dead in a pool of fading green blood. Smashed into the bulkhead was Lacrete's Sulfuric bathtub, and his atmosphere had already filtered away with the wind to wherever it was going. The jub's pale glow was out for good, and his crystalline heart was as opaque as a dead eye. Only a few pieces of er das tank were visible, and er das himself had already turned to a powdery food that the wind ate slowly in long trailing streamers. Q! what! What in the name of God have I done? Kelly whispered. Q! all dead. Q! no! He slammed at the bulkhead until the warped metal gave, and he ran to the control room. Q! the crew! The crew! He stared at the tank. Through a jagged opening in the ship's walls the wind whined and plucked at Kelly's red hair. The wind was colder now. He kept on looking at the tank. He reached out and touched the big transparent curve of it, and then jerked his hand back with a whimper in his breath. There was nothing in the tank, nothing but a blob of slowly drying slime. He pressed his nose to the tank. Q! he whispered. There was no life in the slime. When he pounded on the tank the stuff collapsed in upon itself in withering flatness. Kelly yelled. The cold wind froze at his teeth. It sucked at his breath and dried at the interior of his mouth. He ran and climbed. The jagged periphery of the opening sliced at his flesh. But he did not feel it, and he fell twenty feet without feeling that, either, down the side of the ship. He started crawling over the hard naked belly of the rock. He got to his feet. He ran stumbling down an incline of shale worn round and shiny by the wind that had blown here just as it blew now, and would blow for God alone, possibly new, how long. He fell and rolled to the edge of the water. He looked into it. He felt of it. He jerked his hand away. The stuff was icy. But it was worse than icy. It was dead. It was dead water. It was without any bottom and without any life in it anywhere. You could tell by looking into it. The wind moved over the top of it as though the water were glass, and the water was the color of a slightly transparent naked blue steel. There was no life here. Maybe there had been once. Who knew when? Who could guess how long ago? But there was none now, and even the water had forgotten it. Kelly cried out as he stood up. What have I done? He raised his arms at the hazy red sun, lying over the spires of towering stone and metal, like a bloated balloon scraping precariously over rusty spikes. God, what have I done? The cry echoed tenally on the rocks and fled on the wind. Kelly ran for a long way, falling and stumbling and getting up again. Kelly had always had one primary drive, and that was to keep going, no matter what. So now he tried to keep going. But there was no life on this planet. He had known that before. Some strange kinds of intelligence could tolerate some unpleasant worlds, but nothing would live here. Nothing could live here. That's your fate, Kelly thought. He sat down and stared at the walls of rock and metal all around. Your fate, Kelly, your punishment, your well-deserved hell. That was what it was—retribution. And knowing that, he tried not to care. He tried to be glad and face what he deserved. If that were not the answer, then why had only Kelly been spared to face emptiness and silence and no life, all alone? The irony of it was that he would go on as long as possible, keeping himself alive in his own hell. There was food aplenty in the ship, enough to last as long as hell cared to have him. He turned and started walking back toward the ship that seemed some five miles away. At that instant the ship disappeared in an abrupt explosion that twisted the rocks and a mushroom cloud flowered gently above the lake as Kelly fell trembling on his belly and hugged the ground and pushed his face into the shale. While the wind tore and screamed about him, and particles of flint ripped his clothes and slashed at his flesh. He did not bother walking much farther toward where the ship had been. There was only a crater there now which would offer him nothing in the way of sustaining his very personal and thoroughly private hell. He walked. The effort became more difficult, and finally he was on his hands and knees, crawling. The wind sucked at his ripped clothes and felt like cold sharp stale in his raw wounds. But slowly and deliberately he continued to crawl. Kelly had always had the idea that a man should keep going, and so now he kept on going. Even if there was no place to go, and you could not remember particularly where you had been, you kept on moving and fighting and slugging along until you could no longer move. Kelly there looking up at the hazy rust of the sky with the naked spires pointing up into it for no reason at all, because there was nothing up there. He had been there, and he knew. Nothing up there but space, black and without a beginning or end. He had not even checked the records of the ship, so that now, lying here, he did not even know how far away from earth he was. At the speed they had traveled a ship went a long way in fifty years, but the ship, the records, everything was lost. And no one would ever know now how far they had come. Or gone. What was the difference anyway? But Kelly had no difficulty in remembering why they had come. They had come into space because that was how it was with those who fought their way up to being the dominant life-form of whatever world they had lived on and grown and died on. If you were the kind who went into space, you went because space was there. Who needed a better reason than that? Q. he whispered. La Crete. La Chope. Or does. Listen now. I thought I was doing the right thing. Maybe my idea was right, but I just made a mistake in the calculations. I just made a hell of a mistake. The wind sighed over the naked rock, and the rusted metal, and the rock, and the dead blue water. He turned and pushed his head against the rock, and his body curled up against the bitter wind. You've got to forgive me, he said. Has anybody here seen Kelly? K-E-L-L-Y. He shivered and kept his eyes closed. It was part of the wind. He did not want to go out that way, hearing crazy voices in the wind. Has anybody here seen Kelly? He raised his head, and blinked, and the wind drove tears down his cheeks. Am I just hearing something that's going crazy inside my head? He peered around. There was nothing. Nothing anywhere, of course. Nothing where nothing had ever been, and nothing else but nothing could ever be. You're wrong, Kelly. Your crew's here. Kelly raised himself painfully to an elbow. Where? Where? Right here, Kelly. We had a difficult time locating you. Sure, we forgive you. You were trying to do what was right. We know that. There's nothing. Nothing, Kelly said. You're wrong, the crew's here, and we're waiting. He stared at the rock. He put his face against it and pushed his hands to it. There was a kind of dull glow in it, a faint hint of warmth in the rock. How can this be, Kelly said? This is the life here, Kelly. Perhaps there is life everywhere in the most impossible-saming places. And where life is, Kelly, we can live with it and be welcomed by it. Here the rock is life, and it has taken us in. It has been here a long time, and it will be here for a much longer time. Rock, Kelly said. But hurry and come back. But no one will ever know. How long? How long can we wait? Who can answer that, Kelly? But maybe they will find the crew some day. Kelly looked up once at the completely unfamiliar distances growing darker. Sometimes, he thought, they'll come from wherever Earth is and find the crew of the ship. Find a rock here, waiting the ages out. Hurry, Kelly. His head dropped against the rock. His hands slid down it, and a smile moved over his lips and froze there as the wind whispered over it. And of, as anyone here, seen Kelly, by Bryce Walton, under the pseudonym Kenneth O'Hara. If you've got enough head start, are alert and persistent so long as he limits himself to acting like a good man. It was 047-63-10 when he opened the door. Before his superior could chew him for pre-punctuality, Huvane said as the chief looked up and opened his mouth to start, Sorry, but you should know, Tara is at it again. Huvane's jaw snapped shut. He passed a hand over his face and asked in a tone of pure exasperation. The same, and as Huvane nodded, Cheelynn went on, Why can't they make a mistake and blow themselves out of our hair? How far did they get this time? All the way. And out, Huvane sat down shaking his head slowly. Not yet, but they're over the hump, you know, Huvane's face brightened ever so slightly. I can't be criticized for not counting them, chief, but I'll estimate that there must be at least a couple of hundred atoms of 109 already. And you know that nobody could make 109 if they hadn't already evolved methods of measuring the properties of individual atoms. So as soon as they find that their boom sample doesn't behave like the standard mess out of a bombardment chamber, they won't rest until they find out why. They'll find out, and then it will be 109, 109, 109, until we're forced to clobber them again. Bitterly, Cheelynn looked up. I don't think I need the lecture. I admire their tenacity. I admire their ambition. I admire their blasphemous, consignatory, obscenity attitude of acting as if the great creator had concocted the whole glorious universe for their own playground. Yes, said the chief, wearily. Singly they aren't bad traits, boiled down into the self-esteem of a single race. I don't admire them anymore. I'm simply scared. Yeah, well, we've got time. Not much. What's their space potential this time? Still scragged on the mass inertia relativity barrier. Tailburners, her chemical reaction engines, manned and unmanned orbital flights, half a dozen landings on their sister planet. No, said Huvane, as he saw the chief's puzzlement. I don't mean number two, the one they call Venus this time. I mean their co-orbital companion, the moon. They still call it that. The chief looked up wonderingly. Do you suppose, he asked solemnly, that there is really something called a racial memory? It's against all the theory, objected Huvane. But there seems to be his voice trailed off absently. It returned after some thought. I've tried to sort it out, just as if I were one of them. The recurrence of their names of antiquity, as they call them, seem to recur and recur. Their planet, too, now called Venus, was called a startate last time. And before that, it was Ishtar. Other way around. No matter, the names are still being used, and, according to their belief, merely parallel names called out of local pagan religious beliefs. The chief nodded. That's only part of the parallelism. The big thing is the way they follow the same pattern. Savage, agrarian, urban, right on up the ladder, according to the rules of civic science, but squabbling and battling all the way right on up and out into space. Hell, Huvane. Warfare and conflict, I can both understand and cope with. But not the Terran flavor. They don't come out bent on conquest or stellar colonialism. They come out with their little private fight still going on, and each side lines up its volume of influence, and pits one against the other until the whole section of that spiral arm is glittering like a sputtering spark along the train of black powder. I wish, he said savagely, that we could cut off that arm and fling it deep into extragalactic space. Huvane shook his head and leave the problem for our children to solve? They'll have one to solve, I think. In another 20,000 years, the Terrans will be right back doing business at the same old stand, unless we can solve it once and for all right now. Huvane looked around as if he were seeking another door to the chief's office. How, he asked sarcastically, the first time we greeted them and they took both our welcome and us for everything they could before we pulled the rug out from under them. The second time, we boxed them off and they broke out after converting the isolation screen into an offensive weapon. The third time, we tried to avoid them and they ran wild, exploiting less ambitious races. The fourth time, we missed the boat and they were chewing at our back door before we knew about them. Containing them was almost a nova job. The fifth time, we went in and tried to understand them. They traded us two for one, two things they didn't want for one they did. Huvane's lips curled and I'm not sure that they didn't trade us the other way around. Two they needed for one they declared useless. Sixth, that was the last time and they just came out shooting as if the whole galaxy automatically objected. This time, who knows. Huvane sat down again and put his hands between his knees. They don't operate like people. Sensible folks settle their own problems, then look for more. Terra, one half the globe is against the other half of the globe. Fighting one another tooth and nail, they still find time to advent and cross space to other planets and continue their fight on unknown territory. Maybe we'd better just admit that we don't know the solution. Then we can clobber Terra back to the swamp, juggle the place into another ice age, put the details down in history, and hope that our remote progeny will be smarter than we. Like maybe we're smarter than our remote ancestors, jeered Huvane. Got a better idea? Maybe, has anybody taken a couple of them and analyzed them? It's inhumane. I agree, but get me a healthy, well balanced specimen of somewhat better than average education and training. Can do? Can do. But how are you going to keep him? I don't intend to study him like I'd study a bug under a microscope. This one won't get away. Make it in 14 versades, Huvane. Make it in 10 plus or minus a radite or two. So long. The beast at Cape Canaveral stood 315 feet tall, dwarfing her creators into microscopic proportions. Swarming up and down the gantry, bug-sized humans crawled in and out of check ports with instrument checks, hauling hoses, cables, lines. Some thousand feet away, a puff bomb of red smoke billowed out and a habit-flattened voice announced. At the mark, X minus 15 minutes. Mark, X minus 15 minutes. Jerry Markham said, that's me. He looked up at the lofty porthole and almost lost his balance over backwards, citing it. He was a healthy specimen, about 24 and full of life. He had spent the day going through two routines that were sometimes simultaneous and at other times, serially. One restating his instructions letter by letter, including the various alternatives and contingencies that involved his making decisions if the conditions on Venus were according to this theory or that. The other a rigorous medical checkup. Neither of them showed that Jerry Markham had spent the previous night in activities not recommended by his superiors, but nothing that would bounce him if they knew. He could hardly be broken for living it up at a party. He shook hands with the boss and stepped into the elevator. It was not his idea of a proper send-off. There should be bands playing and girls throwing paper tape, flowers, and a few drinks. Sally should send him off with a proud smooch of lipstick and a tearful promise to wait. Instead, it was all very military and strict and serious. Which is why he'd whooped it up the night before. He had his good night and goodbye with Sally Foreman. And now 18 hours later, he was fit and raring for a return match. Jerry's mind was by no means concerned with this next half hour, which would be the most perilous part of his flight. Tomorrow would take care of itself. The possibility that 30 minutes from now he might be dead in a flaming pyre did not cross his mind. The chance that an hour from now he could be told that his bird was off course and his fate starvation if it obtained an untrue orbit or abrupt destruction if it didn't orbit at all. Nothing bothered him. He sat there chanting the countdown with the official timer and braced himself when the call came. Zero, fire. Inwardly, Jerry Markham's mind said, we're off. And he began to look forward to his landing on Venus. Not the problems of landing, but what he would find there when he sort down through the clouds. Determined to hold up through the high G, even though nobody watched, he went on and on and up and up. His radio voiced the progress tinally. Shock followed roaring pressure. Release followed shock. Orientation was lost. Only logic and intellect told him where he was and which way he was going. Then he was free, free to eat and drink and read and to smoke one cigarette every three hours and, in essence, behave in about the same way as a prisoner confined in solitary. The similarity did not bother Jerry Markham. For this was an honor, not punishment. Huvane collected him with the ease of a fisherman landing a netted crab. Easily, painlessly, shockingly, for the crab doesn't exactly take to the net with docility. Huvane collected the whole shebang, man and machinery. Then opened the spacecraft with the same attitude as a man peeling the lid from a can of sardines. He could have breached the airlock, but he wanted the Terran to understand the power behind the act. Jerry Markham came out blinking, very mildly wondering about the air. It was good. Without considering the rather high probability that nobody spoke the language, he blurted. What gives? He was not very much surprised when one of them in uniform said curtly, this way and make it snappy, Terran. No, he was not surprised. He was too stunned to permit anything as simple as surprise. And through the shock and the stun, his months of training came through. Jerry Markham worried his first worry. How was he going to get the word back home? Confinement in the metal cell of his top stage hadn't bothered him. The concept of landing on a planet that couldn't come closer to home than some 27 million miles was mere peanuts. Isolation for a year was no more than a hiatus, a period of adventure that would be rewarded many fold. Sally? So she might not wait, but there were others. He'd envisioned himself fighting them off with the club after his successful return. Hell, that swarmed him before his takeoff, starting with the moment his number came up as a possible candidate. No, the meeting with competence in space did not shock him greatly. What bothered him was his lack of control over the situation. Had he seen them and passed on about his business, he recounted the incident. As it was, his desire to tell someone about it was cut off. As he sat alone and helpless, it occurred to him that he did not mind so much the dying if that was to be his lot. What mattered was the unmarked grave. The mourning did not move him. The physical concept of grave and its fill of moldering organic substances was nothing. It was a mere symbol. So long as people knew how and where, it made little difference to Jerry Markham whether he was planted in a deridium casket guaranteed to preserve the dead flesh for a thousand years, or whether he went out in a bright, swift flame that glinted in its tongues of the color traces of incandescent elements of human organic chemistry. So long as people knew where and how, vague, vague, mass-volumized concept, granite tomb was one idea, here was a place. A spread-fingered hand in a waving sweep across the sky that encompasses the plain of the ecliptic and say, it is there. And another place is identified. Lost on Venus is no more than a phrase. From teraehoit, or time square, Venus is a tiny point in the sky smaller to the vision than the granite of Grant's tomb. Imagination breeds irritation. Would they call it pilot error, or equipment unreliability? Dying he could face. Goofing would be a disgrace that he would have to meet in fact or in symbol. Hardware crack-up was a matter of the laws of probability. Not only his duty demanded that he report, his essence cried out for a voice to let them know. Anybody. Just the chance to tell one other human soul. Chealin asked, who are you, your name and rank? He said sullenly, go to hell. We have ways and means. He said use them. If we said that we mean you no harm, if we asked what could we do to prove it, what would be your reply? Take me back and let me go. Who are you? Will you identify yourself? No. Stubborn Terran? I know my rights. We are not at war. I'll tell you nothing. Why did you capture me? We'll ask the questions, Terran. You'll get no answers. He sneered at them angrily, torture me, and then wonder whether my screamings tell the truth. Dope me and wonder whether what I truly believe is fact or fantasy. Please, said Chealin, we only want to understand your kind, to know what makes you tick. Then why didn't you ask? We've tried and we get no answers. Terran, the universe is a vastness beyond comprehension. Cooperate and give us what we want to know, and a piece of it is yours. Nuts. Terran, you have friends. Who doesn't? Why can't we be your friends? Angrily, resentfully, your way isn't friendly enough to convince me. Chealin shook his head. Take him away, he directed in his own tongue. Where and how should we keep him? To the place we've prepared and keep him safe. Huvane asked, safe? Who knows what is safe? One bribed his guards. One seduced her guards. One dug his way out, scratch by scratch. Disappeared, died, dead, gone. Mingled off with the myriad of worlds. Did one get home, perhaps, to start their legend of the gods in the sky? The legend that never dies through the rise and fall of culture from savagery to element 109? Chealin looked at Jerry Markham. The Terran looked back defiantly as if he were guest instead of captive. Cooperate, breathed Chealin. I'll tell you nothing. Force me, I can't stop that. Chealin shook his head sorrowfully. Extracting what you know would be less than the play of a child, he said. No, Terran. We can know what you know in the turn of a dial. What we need is that which you do not know. Laugh? Or is that a sneer? No matter. What you know is worthless. Your problems and your ambitions, both racial and personal, are minor. We know them already. The pattern is repetitive. Only some of the names are changed. But why? Ah, that we must know. Why are you what you are? Seven times in history, Terra has come up from the mud. Seven times along the same route. Seven times a history of 10,000 years from savage to savant. From beast to brilliance and always with the same will to do. To do what? To die for what? To fight for what? Chealin waved Huvane to take the Terran away. Huvane said he's locked in airtight with guards who can be trusted. Now what do we do with him? He will cooperate. By force? No, Huvane, by depriving him of the one thing that life cannot exist without. Food? Safety? Chealin shook his head. More primitive than these. He lowered his voice. He suffers now from being cut off from his kind. Life starts complaining about the treatment it receives during the miracle of birth and crying for its first breath of air. Life departs gasping for air, with someone listening for the last words. The last message from the dying. Communication, Huvane, is the primary drive of all life. From plant to animal to man, and if such exists, superman. Through communication life goes on. Communication is the prime requisite to procreation. The firefly signals his mate by night. The human male entices his woman with honeyed words and is not the gift of a jewel, a crystalline endearing statement of his undying affection. Chealin dropped his flowery manner and went on in a more casual vein. Huvane, boil it down to the least attractive form of simplification. No life stands alone, and no viable life goes on without communication. I shall shut off the Terran's communication. Then he will go stark, raving mad. No, for I shall offer him the alternative. Cooperate, or molder in utter blankness. Huvane shrugged. It seems to me that any Terran locked in a durle himself so far from home the distance means nothing is already cut off from communication. Deeper, deeper, Huvane, the brain lies prisoner within a cell of bone. Its contact with the outside world lies along five channels of sensory communication. Everything that the brain believes about the universe is the product of sensory information carried inward by sight, touch, sound, taste, and smell. From five basic bits of information, knowledge of the great truth is formed through logic and self-argument. Everything. But… Oh, now stop. I am not expressing my own singular opinion. I believe a rather great proportion of the things that I was taught, and I was taught through the self-same five-sensory channel. Um… Good. Just plain um. Now we shall shut off the Terran's channels of communication until he consents as an alternative. This, Huvane, hasn't been tried before. It may bring us the final important bit of information. Slowly the lights went out. Jerry Markham was prepared for dark isolation. He could do nothing about it, so he accepted it by the simple process of assuring himself that things were going to get worse before they got better. The darkness became absolute, utter, complete. Not even the dots and whorls and specs that are technically called visual noise occurred. A level of mental alertness niggled at him. For nearly twenty-four years it had been a busy little chunk of his mind. It was that section that inspected the data for important program material and decided which was trivial and which was worthy of the big boy's attention. Now it was out of a job because there wasn't even a faint background count of plateau noise to occupy its attention. The silence grew, vast. Huvane said that the solid walls were no more than ten feet from him. Ears said that he was in the precise middle of absolutely nowhere. Feeling said that the floor was under his feet. Ears said that the upward pressure touched his soles. Deeper grew the deadening of his ears, and orientation was lost. Feeling remained and he felt his heart beating in a hunting rhythm because the sound feedback through the ear was gone, and the Hortitor had lost his audible beat. Feeling died and he knew not whether he stood or sat or floated a skew. Feeling died and with it went the delicate motor control that directs the position of muscle and limb and enables a man to place his little finger on the tip of his nose with his eyes closed. Aside from the presence of foreign matter, the taste of a clean mouth is tasteless. The term is relative. Jerry Markham learned what real tastelessness was. It was flat and blank and nothingness. Chemists tell us that air is tasteless, colorless and odorless, but when sense is gone abruptly, one realizes that the air does indeed have its aroma. In an unemployed body, the primitive sensors of the mind had nothing to do. And like a man trained to busyness, loafing was their hardest task. Gone was every sensory stimulus, his heart pumped from habit, not controlled by the feedback of sound or feeling. He breathed, but he did not hear the inrush of air. Brain told him to be careful of his mouth. The sharp teeth could bite the dead tongue and he could bleed to death, never feeling pain or even the swift flow of salty warmth. Habit trained nerves caused a false tickle in his throat. He never knew whether he coughed or whether he thought he coughed. The sense of time deserted him when the metronome of heartbeat died. And Brain compromised by assuming that crude time could be kept by the function of hunger, elimination, weariness. Logical Brain pointed out that he could starve to death and feel nothing. Elimination was a sensory thing, no more. Wearingness was of the body that brought no information anyway. And what, indeed, was sleep. Brain considered this question. Brain said, I am Jerry Markham, but is it true that no brain can think of nothing? Is it possible that sleep is the condition that obtains when the body stops conveying reliable information to the brain, and then says to hell with everything and decides to stop thinking? The brain, called Jerry Markham, did not stop thinking. It lost its time sense, but not completely. A period of time passed, a whirlwind of thoughts and dream-like actions went on, and then calmness came for a while. Dreams? Now ponder the big question. Was the brain dream the dream as a sensory experience, or is a dream no more than a sequence of assorted memories? Would a dying brain expire in pleasure during the pleasant dream, or is the enjoyment of a pleasant dream only available to the after-awakened brain? What is man but his memories? In one very odd manner, the brain of Jerry Markham retained its intellectual orientation, and realized that its physical orientation was uncontrollable and undetectable, and therefore of no importance. Like the lighthouse keeper who could not sleep when the diaphone did not rene-hra for five seconds of each and every minute, Jerry Markham's brain was filled with a mild concern about the total lack of unimportant but habitual data. There was no speckle of light to classify and ignore, no caesaris of air molecules raining against the eardrum, blindness replaced the smell and taste and their absence was as disturbing as a pungence or a poison, and, of course, one should feel something if it is no more than the tonus of muscle against the mobile bones. Communication is the prime drive of life, cut off from external communication entirely. Section A, Basics, Tier 9, Row 13, haulered over to Box Q, Line 23, Isle F, and wanted to know what was going on. The gang on the upper deck hailed the boiler room, and the crew in the bleach receipts reported that the folks in charge of CIC, Communication Information Center, were sitting on their hands because they didn't have anything to do. One collection of board brain cells stirred. They hadn't been called upon since Jerry Markham sent Adiste Fidelis in Memorized Latin some 15 years earlier, and so they started the clack. Like an auditorium full of people impatient because the curtain had not gone up on time, Bedlam broke loose. Bedlam is subject to the laws of periodicity, stochastic analysis, and with some rather brilliant manipulation it can be reduced to a Fourier series. Fourier says that Maxwell is right and goes on to define exactly when, in a series of combined periodicities of apparently random motion, all the little particles will be moving in the same direction. Stochastic analysis says that if the letter U follows the letter Q in most cases, words beginning with Q will have a U for a second letter. Jerry Markham began to think, isolated and alone, prisoner in the cell of bone, with absolutely nothing to distract him, the brain, by common consent, pounded a gavel, held a conference, appointed a chairman, and settled down to do the one job that the brain was assembled to do. In unison, ten to the sixteenth storage cells turned butterside up at the single wave of a mental flag. He thought of his father and his mother, of his sally, he thought of his commanding officer and of the fellows he liked and disliked. The primitive urge to communicate was upon him. Because he must first establish communication, before he could rise from the stony mineral stage to the exalted level of a vegetable, the rift of his normal senses, undistracted by trivia such as noise and pain, and the inestimable vastness of information bits that must be considered and evaluated, his brain caught upon his memory and provided the background details. The measured tread of a company of marching soldiers can wreck a bridge. The cadence of ten to the sixteenth brain cells, undivided by the distraction of incoming information, broke down a mental barrier. As vividly as the living truth, Jerry Markham envisioned himself sauntering down the sidewalk. The breeze was on his face, and the pavement was beneath his feet, the air was laden with its myriad of smells, and the flavor of a cigarette was on his tongue. His eyes saw Sally running toward him. Her cry of greeting was a welcome sound, and the pressure of her hug was strong and physical as the taste of her lips. Real. She hugged his arm and said, your folks are waiting. Jerry laughed, let the general wait a bit longer, he said. I've got a lot to tell him. Huvane said, gone, and the sound of his voice re-echoed back and forth across the empty cell. Gone, repeated Cheelynn, utterly incomprehensible, but nonetheless a fact. But how? Isolated, alone, imprisoned, cut off from all communication, all communication. I'll get another specimen chief. Cheelynn shook his head, seven times we've slapped them down, seven times we've watched their rise and wondered how they did it. Seven times they would have surpassed us if we hadn't blocked them. Let them rise. Let them run the universe. They're determined to do that anyway, and now I think it's time for us to stop annoying our betters. I'd hate to face them if they were angry. But chief, he was cut off from all communication. Obviously, said Cheelynn, not. End of Instinct by George O. Smith. Next. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Swahi. Next. By Lawrence M. Jennifer. Perhaps it was just as well that I did not tell them what I was. What they called me, that was what started it. I'm as good an American as the next fellow, and maybe a little better than men like that. Big men drinking in a bar who can't find anything better to do than to spit on a man and call him Max, as if a Mexican is something to hide or to be shamed of. We have our own heroes and our own strength, and we don't have to bend down to men like that, or any other men. And when they called me that, I saw red, and called them names back. Max Kidd, one of the men said, a big red-haired bully with his sleeves rolled back and muscles like ropes on the big hairy arms. Snod knows little Max Brat. I called him a name. He only laughed back at me and turned his back, waving a hand for the bartender. Maybe in a big city in the north it would be different, and probably it would not. This toleration we hear about is no more good than an open fight. There must be understanding instead. But here near the border, just on the American side of the border, a Mexican is called fear a game, and a 17 year old like me is less than nothing to them, to the white ones who go to the big bars. I thought carefully about what to do, and finally when I had made my mind up, I went for him and tried to hit him. But other men held me back, and I was kicking and shouting with my legs off the ground. When I stopped they put me down. So I started for the big red-haired man again, and they had to stop me again. The red-haired man was laughing all this time. I wanted to run, back to my own family in their little house, and yet running would have been wrong. I was too angry to run, so I stayed. My sister, I said, my sister is a witch and I will get her to put a curse on you. I was very angry, you must understand this. And of course they had no idea that my sister is a real witch, and her curses are real. And only last year Manuel Valdes had died from the effects of her curse. Of all people, sometimes I wish I were my sister most of all, to curse people and see them shrivel and sicken and choke and die. Go ahead half-plaint, one of the other men yelled. Get your sister to put a curse on me. I bet she knows who I am. I've been with every masked girl this side of the border. Curse made me see red. My sister is pure and must be pure, since she is a witch, and she is not like some of the others even aside from that. I've heard her talk about them, and I know. I called him a name and ran up to him and hit him. My fist against his solid side felt good, but some other men pulled me off again. Yet it was impossible to leave. This was wrong for me, and I had to make it right. I shall get my father to fight you, since he is a giant ten feet tall. The men laughed at me, not knowing, of course, that my father is a giant ten feet tall in truth, and my mother a sweet siren like those in the books, the old books, with spells in her eyes and a strange power. They did not know I was not a day-dreaming child, but a man who told truth. When they left, I grew angry again and told them many things, calling them names in Spanish which they did not understand. That only made them laugh the more. Finally, I left. It was necessary for me to leave, since I was not wanted. But it was necessary, too, for me to make things right. Nice later they were dead for what they had said and done. For I tell the truth always, and I had told them about my sister and my father and my mother. But one thing I had not told them. I am sorry they could never know I was the wing thing that frightened and killed them, one by one. End of next by Lawrence M. Jennifer, recording by Swalhe. The Nothing Equation by Tom Godwin. The cruiser vanished back into hyperspace and he was alone in the observation bubble, ten thousand light-years beyond the galaxy's outermost sun. He looked out the windows at the gigantic sea of emptiness around him and wondered again what the danger had been that had so terrified the men before him. Of one thing he was already certain. He would find that nothing was waiting outside the bubble to kill him. The first bubble attendant had committed suicide and the second was a mindless maniac on the earthbound cruiser. But it must have been something inside the bubble that had caused it, or else they had imagined it all. He went across the small room, his magnetized soles loud on the thin metal floor in the bubble silence. He sat down in the single chair, his weight very slight in the feeble artificial gravity, and reviewed the known facts. The bubble was a project of the Earth's Galactic Observation Bureau, positioned there to gather data from observations that could not be made from within the galaxy. Since metallic mass affected the hypersensitive instruments, the bubble had been made as small and light as possible. It was for that reason that it could accommodate only one attendant. The bureau had selected Horn as the bubble's first attendant and the cruiser left him there for his six-months period of duty. When it made its scheduled return with his replacement he was found dead from a tremendous overdose of sleeping pills. On the table was his daily report log and his last entry, made three months before. I haven't attended to the instruments for a long time because it hates us and it doesn't want us here. It hates me the most of all and keeps trying to get into the bubble to kill me. I can hear it whenever I stop and listen and I know it won't be long. I'm afraid of it and I want to be asleep when it comes, but I'll have to make it soon because I have only twenty sleeping pills left and if... The sentence was never finished. According to the temperature recording instruments in the bubble, his body ceased radiating heat that same night. The bubble was cleaned, fumigated and inspected inside and out. No sign of any inimical entity or force could be found. Silverman was Horn's replacement. When the cruiser returned six months later bringing him, Green, to be Silverman's replacement, Silverman was completely insane. He babbled about something that had been waiting outside the bubble to kill him, but his nearest to a rational statement was to say once when asked for the hundredth time what he had seen. Nothing. You can't really see it, but you feel it watching you and you hear it trying to get in to kill you. One time I bumped the wall and, for God's sake, take me away from it! Take me back to earth!" Then he had tried to hide under the captain's desk and the ship's doctor had led him away. The bubble was minutely examined again and the cruiser employed every detector device it possessed to search surrounding space for light years in all directions. Nothing was found. When it was time for the new replacement to be transferred to the bubble, he reported to Captain McDowell. Everything is ready, Green, McDowell said. You are the next one. The shaggy gray eyebrows met in a scowl. It would be better if they would let me select the replacement instead of them. He flushed with a touch of resentment and said, The bureau found my intelligence and initiative of thought satisfactory. I know the characteristics you don't need. What they ought to have is somebody like one of my engine room roused abouts, too ignorant to get scared and too dumb to go nuts. Then we could get a sane report six months from now instead of the ravings of a maniac. I suggest, he said stiffly, that you reserve judgment until that time comes, sir." And that was all he knew about the danger, real or imaginary, that had driven two men into insanity. He would have six months in which to find the answer. Six months minus, he looked at the chronometer and saw that twenty minutes had passed since he left the cruiser. Somehow it seemed much longer. He moved a light of cigarette and his metal soul scraped the floor with the same startling loudness he had noticed before. The bubble was as silent as a tomb. It was not much larger than a tomb. A sphere eighteen feet in diameter, made of thin sheet metal and criss-crossed outside with narrow reinforcing girders to keep the internal air pressure from rupturing it. The floor under him was six feet up from the sphere's bottom and the space beneath held the air regenerator and waste converter units, the storage batteries and the food cabinets. The compartment in which he sat contained chair, table, a narrow cot, banks of dials, a remote control panel for operating the instruments mounted outside the hull, a microfilm projector and a pair of exercises springs attached to one wall. That was all. There was no means of communication since a hyperspace communicator would have affected the delicate instruments with its radiations. But there was a small microfilm library to go with the projector so that he should be able to pass away the time pleasantly enough. But it was not the fear of boredom that was behind the apprehension he could already feel touching at his mind. It had not been boredom that had turned horn into a suicide and silverman into... Something cracked sharply behind him, like a gunshot in the stillness, and he leaped to his feet whirling to face it. It was only a metal reel of data-tape that had dropped out of the spectrum analyzer into the storage tray. His heart was thumping fast, and his attempt to laugh at his nervousness sounded hollow and mirthless. Something inside or outside the bubble had driven two men insane with its threat, and now that he was irrevocably exiled in the bubble himself he could no longer dismiss their fear as products of their imagination. Both of them had been rational, intelligent men, as carefully selected by the Observation Bureau as he had been. He set in to search the bubble, overlooking nothing. When he crawled down into the lower compartment he hesitated, then opened the longest blade of his knife before searching among the dark recesses down there. He found nothing, not even a speck of dust. Back in his chair again he began to doubt his first conviction. Perhaps there really had been some kind of an invisible force or entity outside the bubble. Both Horn and Silverman had said that it had tried to get in to kill them. They had been very definite about that part. There were six windows around the bubble's walls, set there to enable the attendant to see all the outside mountain instruments and dials. He went to them to look out, one by one, and from all of them he saw the same vast emptiness that surrounded him. The galaxy, his galaxy, was so far away that its stars were like dust. In the other directions the empty gulf was so wide that galaxies and clusters of galaxies were tiny, feeble specks of light shining across it. All around him was a void so huge that galaxies were only specks in it. Who could know what forces or dangers might be waiting out there? A light blinked, reminding him it was time to attend to his duties. The job required an hour, and he was nervous and not yet hungry when he had finished. He went to the exercise springs on the wall and performed a work out that left him tired and sweating, but which at least gave him a small appetite. The day passed and the next. He made another search of the bubble's interior with the same results as before. He felt almost sure then that there was nothing in the bubble with him. He established a routine of work, pastime and sleep that made the first week pass fairly comfortably, but for the gnawing worry in his mind that something invisible was lurking just outside the windows. Then one day he accidentally kicked the wall with his metal shoe tip. It made a sound like that from kicking a tight-stretched section of tin, and it seemed to him it gave a little from the impact as tin would do. He realized for the first time how thin it was, how deadly, dangerously thin. According to the specifications he had read it was only one-sixteenth of an inch thick. It was as thin as cardboard. He sat down with pencil and paper and began calculating. The bubble had a surface area of 146,500 square inches, and the internal air pressure was 14 pounds to the square inch, which meant that the thin metal skin contained a total pressure of 2,051,000 pounds. Two million pounds. The bubble in which he sat was a bomb waiting to explode the instant any section of the thin metal weakened. It was supposed to be an alloy so extremely strong that it had a high safety factor, but he could not believe that any metal so thin could be so strong. It was all right for engineers sitting safely on the earth to speak up high safety factors, but his life depended upon the fragile wall not cracking. It made a lot of difference. The next day he thought he felt the hook to which the exerciser spring was attached crack loose from where it was welded to the wall. He inspected the base of the hook closely, and there seemed to be a fine, hairline fracture appearing around it. He held his ear to it, listening for any sound of a leak. It was not leaking yet, but it could commence doing so at any time. He looked out the windows at the illimitable void that was waiting to absorb his pitiful little supply of air, and he thought of the days he had hauled and jerked at the springs with all his strength, not realizing the damage he was doing. There was a sick feeling in his stomach for the rest of the day, and he returned again and again to examine the hairline around the hook. The next day he discovered an even more serious threat. The thin skin of the bubble had been spot welded to the outside reinforcing girders. Such welding often created hard brittle spots that would soon crystallize from continued movement, and there was a slight temperature difference in the bubble between his working and sleeping hours that would daily produce a contraction and expansion of the skin, especially when he used the little cooking burner. He quit using the burner for any purpose and began a daily inspection of every square inch of the bubble's walls, marking with a white chalk all the welding spots that appeared to be definitely weakened. Each day he found more to mark, and soon the little white circles were scattered across the walls wherever he looked. When he was not working at examining the walls, he could feel the windows watching him, like staring eyes. Outside of self-defense he would have to go to them and stare back at the emptiness. Space was alien, coldly deadly alien. He was a tiny spark of life in a hostile sea of nothing, and there was no one to help him. The nothing outside was waiting day and night for the most infinitesimal leak or crack in the walls. The nothing that had been waiting out there since time without beginning and would wait for time without end. Sometimes he would touch his finger to the wall and think, Death is out there, only one sixteenth of an inch away. His first fears became a black and terrible conviction. The bubble could not continue to resist the attack for long. It had already lasted longer than it should have. Two million pounds of pressure wanted out, and all that sucking nothing of intergalactic space wanted in. And only a thin skin of metal, rotten with brittle welding spots, stood between them. It wanted in. The nothing wanted in. He knew then that horn and silverman had not been insane. It wanted in, and some day it would get in. When it did it would explode him and jerk out his guts and lungs. Not until that happened, not until the nothing filled the bubble and enclosed his hideous, turned inside out body would it ever be content. He had long since quit wearing the magnetized shoes, afraid the vibration of them would weaken the bubble still more. He began noticing sections where the bubble did not seem to be perfectly concave, as though the rolling mill had pressed the metal too thin in places and it was swelling out like an over-inflated balloon. He could not remember when he had last attended to the instruments. Nothing was important but the danger that surrounded him. He knew the danger was rapidly increasing because whenever he pressed his ear to the wall he could hear the almost inaudible tickings and vibrations as the bubble's skin contracted or expanded, and the nothing tapped and searched with its empty fingers for a flaw or crack that it could tear into a leak. But the windows were far the worst, with nothing staring in at him day and night. There was no escape from it. He could feel it watching him, malignant and gloating, even when he hid his eyes in his hands. The time came when he could stand it no longer. The cot had a blanket and he used that together with all his spare clothes to make a tent stretching from the table to the first instrument panel. When he crawled under it he found that the lower half of one window could still see him. He used the clothes he was wearing to finish the job and it was much better then, hiding there in the concealing darkness where the nothing could not see him. He did not mind going naked. The temperature regulators in the bubble never let it get too cold. He had no conception of time from then on. He emerged only when necessary to bring more food into his tent. He could still hear the nothing tapping and sucking in its ceaseless search for a flaw, and he made such emergencies as brief as possible, wishing that he did not have to come out at all. Maybe if he could hide in his tent for a long time and never make a sound it would get tired and go away. Sometimes he thought of the cruiser and wished they would come for him, but most of the time he thought of the thing that was outside trying to get in to kill him. When the strain became too great he would draw himself up in the position he had once occupied in his mother's womb and pretend he had never left earth. It was easier there. But always, before very long, the bubble would tick or whisper, and he would freeze in terror thinking, this time it's coming in. Then one day suddenly two men were peering under his tent at him. One of them said, my God, again! And he wondered what he meant. But they were very nice to him and helped him put on his clothes. Later in the cruiser everything was hazy and they kept asking him what he was afraid of. What was it? What did you find? He tried hard to think so he could explain it. It was... it was... nothing. What were you and Horne and Silverman afraid of? What was it? The voice demanded insistently. I told you, he said, nothing. They stared at him and the haziness cleared a little as he saw they did not understand. He wanted them to believe him because what he told them was so very true. It wanted to kill us. Please, can't you believe me? It was waiting outside the bubble to kill us! But they kept staring and he knew they didn't believe him. They didn't want to believe him. Everything turned hazy again and he started to cry. He was glad when the doctor took his hand to lead him away. The bubble was carefully inspected, inside and out, and nothing was found. When it was time for Green's replacement to be transferred to it, Larkin reported to Captain McDowell. Everything is ready, Larkin, McDowell said. You're the next one. I wish we knew what the danger is. He scowled. I still think one of my roused abouts from the engine room might give us a sane report six months from now, instead of the babblings we'll get from you. He felt his face flush and he said stiffly, I suggest, sir, that you not jump to conclusions until that time comes. The cruiser vanished back into hyperspace and he was alone inside the observation bubble, ten thousand light years beyond the galaxy's outermost sun. He looked out the windows at the gigantic sea of emptiness around him and wondered again what the danger had been that had so terrified the men before him. Of one thing he was already certain, he would find that nothing was waiting outside the bubble to kill him. The end of The Nothing Equation by Tom Godwin. Scrimshaw by Mary Leinster. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Nothing Equation by Greg Marguerite. Scrimshaw by Mary Leinster. The old man just wanted to get back to his memory and the methods he used were gently hellish from the viewpoint of the others. Pop Young was the one known man who could stand life on the surface of the moon's far side and therefore he occupied the shack on the big cracks edge above the mining colony there. Some people said that no normal man could do it and mentioned the scar of a ghastly head wound to explain his ability. One man partly guessed the secret but only partly. His name was Satel and he had reason not to talk. Pop Young alone knew the whole truth and he kept his mouth shut too. It wasn't anybody else's business. The shack and the job he filled were located in the medieval notion of the physical appearance of hell. By day the environment was heat and torment. By night, lunar night of course and lunar day, it was frigidity and horror. Once in two weeks' earth time a rocket ship came around the horizon from Lunar City with stores for the colony deep underground. Pop received the stores and took care of them. He handed over the product of the mine to be forwarded to earth. The rocket went away again. Come nightfall Pop lowered the supplies down the long cable into the big crack to the colony far down inside and freshened up the landing field marks with magnesium marking powder if a rocket blast had blurred them. That was fundamentally all he had to do, but without him the mine down in the crack would have had to shut down. The crack of course was that gaping rocky fault which stretches nine hundred miles jaggedly over the side of the moon that earth never sees. There is one stretch where it is a yawning gulf a full half-mile wide and unguessibly deep. When Pop Young's shack stood it was only a hundred yards, but the colony was a full mile down in the wall. There's nothing like it on earth, of course. When it was first found scientists descended into it to examine the exposed rock strata and learned the history of the moon before its craters were made. But they found more than history. They found the reason for the colony and the rocket 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 like a dust heap thirty feet high, and it was. The outside was surface moondust piled over a tiny dome to be insulation against the cold of night 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 missing portions of his life that Sattel had managed to take away from him. He thought often of Sattel, down in the colony underground. There were galleries and tunnels and living quarters down there. There were airtight bulkheads for safety and a hydroponic garden to keep the air fresh and all sorts of things to make life possible for men on the moon. But it wasn't fun. Even underground in the moon's slight gravity a man is really adjusted to existence when he has a well-developed case of agoraphobia. With such an aid a man can get into a tiny coffin-like cubby-hole and feel solidity above and below and around him and happily tell himself that it feels delicious. Sometimes it does. But Sattel couldn't comfort himself so easily. He knew about Pop up on the surface. He'd shipped out whimpering to the moon to get far away from Pop. And Pop was just about a mile overhead and there was no way to get around him. It was difficult to get away from the mine anyhow. It doesn't take too long for the low gravity to tear a man's nerves to shreds. He has to develop kinks in his head to survive and those kinks. The first men to leave the colony had to be knocked cold and shipped out unconscious. They'd been underground and in low gravity long enough to be utterly unable to face the idea of open spaces. Even now there were some who had to be carried, but there were some tougher ones who were able to walk to the rocket ship if Pop put a tarpel in over their head so they didn't have to see the sky. In any case, Pop was essential, either for carrying or guidance. Sattel got the shakes when he thought of Pop, and Pop rather probably knew it. Of course, by the time he took the job tending the shack, he was pretty certain about Sattel. The facts spoke for themselves. Pop had come back to consciousness in a hospital with a great wound in his 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 the doctors told him who he was, and as gently as possible what had happened to his wife and children. They'd been murdered after he was seemingly killed defending them, but he didn't remember a thing. Not then. It was something of a blessing. But when he was physically recovered he set about trying to pick up the threads of the life he could no longer remember. He met Sattel quite by accident. Sattel looked familiar. Pop eagerly tried to ask him questions, and Sattel turned gray and frantically denied that he'd ever seen Pop before. All of which happened back on earth and a long time ago. It seemed to Pop that the sight of Sattel had brought back some vague and cloudy memories. They were not sharp, though, and he hunted up Sattel again to find out if he was right, and Sattel went into a panic when he returned. Nowadays, by the big crack, Pop wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattel, but he was deeply concerned with the recovery of the memories that Sattel helped bring back. Pop was a highly conscientious man. He took good care of his job. There was a warning bell in the shack, and when a rocket ship from Lunar City got above the horizon and could send a tight beam, the gong clanged loudly, and Pop got into a vacuum suit and went out of the airlock. He usually reached the moondoser about the time the ship began to break for landing, and he watched it come in. He saw the silver needle in the sky fighting momentum above a line of jagged crater walls. It slowed and slowed and curved down as it drew nearer. The pilot killed all forward motion just above the field and came steadily and smoothly down to land between the silvery triangles that marked the landing place. Instantly the rockets cut off, drums of fuel and air and food came out of the cargo hatch, and Pop swept forward with the dozer. It was a miniature tractor with a gigantic scoop in front. He pushed a great mound of talc-fine dust before him to cover up the cargo. It was necessary. With freight costing what it did, fuel and air and food came frozen solid in containers barely thicker than foil. While they stayed at space shadow temperature, the foil would hold anything, and a cover of insulating moondust with vacuum between the grains kept even air frozen solid, though in sunlight. At such times Pop hardly thought of Cetel. He knew he had plenty of time for that. He'd started to follow Cetel knowing what had happened to his wife and children, but it was hearsay only. He had no memory of them at all, but Cetel stirred the lost memories. At first Pop followed absorbedly from city to city to recover the years that had been wiped out by an ax blow. He did recover a good deal. When Cetel fled to another continent Pop followed because he had some distinct memories of his wife and the way he'd felt about her, and some fugitive mental images of his children. When Cetel frenziedly tried to deny knowledge of the murder in Tangier, Pop had come to remember both his children and some of the happiness of his married life. Even when Cetel whimpering signed up for Lunar City, Pop tracked him. By that time he was quite sure that Cetel was the man who'd killed his family. If so, Cetel had profited by less than two days' pay for wiping out everything that Pop possessed. But Pop wanted it back. He couldn't prove Cetel's guilt. There was no evidence. In any case he didn't really want Cetel to die. If he did there'd be no way to recover more lost memories. Sometimes in the shack on the far side of the moon Pop Young had odd fancies about Cetel. There was the mine, for example. In each two earth weeks of working the mine colony nearly filled up a three-gallon canister with greasy-seeming white crystals shaped like two pyramids base to base. The filled canister would weigh a hundred pounds on earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But on earth its contents would be computed in carats. And a hundred pounds was worth millions. Yet here on the moon Pop kept a weighting canister on a shelf in his tiny dome behind the air apparatus. It rattled if he shook it. And it was worth no more than so many pebbles. But sometimes Pop wondered if Cetel ever thought of the value of the mine's production. If he would kill a woman and two children and think he'd kill the man for no more than a hundred dollars, what enormity would he commit for a three-gallon quantity of uncut diamonds? But he did not dwell on such speculation. The sun rose very, very slowly in what by convention was called the east. It took nearly two hours to urge its disk above the horizon, and it burned terribly in emptiness for fourteen times twenty-four hours before sunset. Then there was night. And for three hundred and thirty-six consecutive hours there were only stars overhead. And the sky was a hole so terrible that a man who looked up into it, what with the nagging sensation of one-sixth gravity, tended to lose all confidence in the stability of things. Most men immediately found it historically necessary to seize hold of something solid to keep from 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 Setel was here. Near Setel he found memories of times when he was a young man with a young wife who loved him extravagantly. Then pictures of his children came out of emptiness and grew sharp and clear. He found that he loved them very dearly, and when he was near Setel he literally recovered them, in the sense that he came to know new things about them and had new memories of them every day. He hadn't yet remembered the crime which lost them to him, until he did, and the fact possessed a certain grisly humor. Pop didn't even hate Setel. He simply wanted to be near him because it enabled him to recover new and vivid parts of his youth that had been lost. Otherwise he was wholly matter of fact, certainly so for the far side of the moon. He was a rather fussy housekeeper. The shack above the big cracks rim was as tidy as any lighthouse or fur trappers cabin. He tended his air apparatus with a fine precision. It was perfectly simple. In the shadow of the shack he had an unfailing source of extreme low temperature. Air from the shack flowed into a shadow chilled pipe. Moisture condensed out of it here and CO2 froze solidly out of it there. And on beyond it collected as restless transparent liquid air. At the same time liquid air from another tank evaporated to maintain the proper air pressure in the shack. Every so often Pop tapped the pipe where the moisture froze and lumps of water ice clattered out to be returned to the humidifier. Less often he took out the CO2 snow and measured it and dumped an equivalent quantity of pale blue liquid oxygen into the liquid air that had been purified by cold. The oxygen dissolved. Then the apparatus reversed itself and supplied fresh air from the now enriched fluid while the depleted other tank began to fill up with cold purified liquid air. Outside the shack jagged stony pinnacles reared in the starlight and craters 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 a great deal. He grew deeply interested. Writing material was scarce but he spent most of the time between two particular rocket landings getting down on paper exactly how a child had looked while sleeping, some 15 years before. He remembered with astonishment that the child had really looked exactly like that. Later he began a sketch of his partly remembered wife. In time he had plenty. It became a really truthful likeness. The sun rose and baked the abomination of desolation which was the moonscape. Pop Young meticulously touched up the glittering triangles which were landing guides for the lunar city ships. They glittered from the thinnest conceivable layer of magnesium marking powder. He checked over the moon doser. He tended the air apparatus. He did everything that his job and survival required, ungrudgingly. Then he made more sketches. The images to be drawn came back more clearly when he thought of Satel. So by keeping Satel in mind he recovered 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 see her again. And he speculated about whether Satel ever thought of millions of dollars worth of new mind diamonds knocking about unguarded in the shack. And he suddenly recollected clearly the way one of his children had looked while playing with her doll. He made a quick sketch to keep from forgetting that. There was no purpose in the sketching, save that he lost all his young manhood through a senseless crime. He wanted his youth back. He was recovering it bit by bit. The occupation made it absurdly easy to live on the surface of the far side of the moon whether anybody else could do it or not. Satel had no such device for adjusting to the lunar state of things. Living on the moon was bad enough anyhow. Then, but living one mile underground from Pop Young was much worse. Satel clearly remembered the crime Pop Young hadn't yet recalled. He considered that Pop had made no overt attempt to revenge himself because he planned some retaliation so horrible and lingering that it was worth waiting for. He came to hate Pop with an intense ferocity and fear. In his mind, the need to escape became an obsession on top of the other psychotic states normal to a moon colonist. But he was helpless. He couldn't leave. There was Pop. He couldn't kill Pop. He had no chance. And he was afraid. The one absurd, irrelevant thing he could do was write letters back to Earth. He did that. He wrote with the desperate impassioned frantic blend of persuasion and information and genius-like invention of a prisoner in a high security prison. Trying to induce someone to help him to escape. He had friends, of a sort, but for a long time his letters produced nothing. The moon swung in vast circles about the Earth and the Earth swung sedately about the sun. The other planets danced their Saraband. The rest of humanity went about its own affairs with fascinated attention. But then an event occurred which bore directly upon Pop Young and Satel and Pop Young's missing years. Somebody back on Earth promoted a luxury passenger line of spaceships to ply between Earth and moon. It looked like a perfect setup. Three spacecraft capable of the journey came into being with attendant reams of publicity. They promised a thrill and a new distinction for the rich. Guided tours to Lunar. The most expensive and most thrilling trip in history. $100,000 for a 12-day cruise through space with views of the moon's far side and trips through Lunar City and a landing in Aristarchus. Plus sound tapes of the journey and fame hitherto reserved for honest explorers. It didn't seem to have anything to do with Pop or Satel, but it did. There were just two passenger tours. The first was fully booked, but the passengers who paid so highly expected to be pleasantly thrilled and shielded from all reasons for alarm. And they couldn't be. Something happens when a self-centered and complacent individual unsuspectingly looks out of a spaceship port and sees the cosmos unshielded by mists or clouds or other aids to blindness against reality. It is shattering. A millionaire cut his throat when he saw Earth dwindled to a mere blue-green ball in vastness. He could not endure his own smallness in the face of immensity. Not one passenger disembarked, even for Lunar City. Most of them cowered in their chairs, hiding their eyes. They were the simple cases of hysteria. But the richest girl on Earth who'd had five husbands and believed that nothing could move her, she went into catatonic withdrawal and neither saw nor heard nor moved. Two other passengers sobbed in improvised straight jackets. The first shipload started home, fast. The second luxury liner took off with only four passengers and turned back before reaching the moon. Space pilots could take the strain of spaceflight because they had work to do. Workers for the lunar mines could make the trip under heavy sedation. But it was too early in the development of space travel for pleasure passengers. They weren't prepared for the more humbling facts of life. Pop heard of the quaint commercial enterprise through the micro tapes put off at the shack for the men down in the mines. Satel probably learned of it the same way. Pop didn't even think of it again. It seemed to have nothing to do with him. But Satel undoubtedly dealt with it fully in his desperate writings back to Earth. Pop matter-of-factly tended the shack and the landing field and the stores for the big crack mine. Between times he made more drawings in pursuit of his own private objective. Quite accidentally he developed a certain talent professional artists might have approved. But he was not trying to communicate but to discover. Drawing, especially with his mind on Satel, he found fresh incidents popping up in his recollection. Times when he was happy. One day he remembered the puppy his children had owned and loved. He drew it painstakingly and it was his again. Thereafter he could remember it anytime he chose. He did actually recover a completely vanished past. He envisioned a way to increase that recovery but there was a marked shortage of artists materials on the moon. All freight had to be hauled from Earth on a voyage equal to rather more than a thousand times around the equator of the Earth. Artist supplies were not often included. Pop didn't even ask. He began to explore the area outside the shack for possible material no one would think of sending from Earth. He collected stones of various sorts but when warmed up in the shack they were useless. He found no strictly lunar material which would serve for modeling or carving portraits in the ground. He found minerals which could be pulverized and used as pigments but nothing suitable for this new adventure in the recovery of lost youth. He even considered blasting to aid his search. He could down in the mine. Blasting was done by soaking carbon black from CO2 in liquid oxygen and then firing it with a spark. It exploded splendidly and its fumes were merely more CO2 which an air apparatus handled easily. But he didn't do any blasting. He didn't find any signs of the sort of mineral he required. Marble would have been perfect but there is no marble on the moon, naturally. Yet Pop continued to search absorbitly for material with which to capture memory. Satel still seemed necessary but early one lunar morning he was a good two miles from his shack when he saw rocket fumes in the sky. It was most unlikely. He wasn't looking for anything of the sort but out of the corner of his eye he observed that something moved which was impossible. He turned his head and there were rocket fumes coming over the horizon, not in the direction of lunar city which was more impossible still. He stared. A tiny silver rocket to the westward poured out monstrous masses of vapor. It decelerated swiftly, it curved downward. The rockets checked for an instant and flamed again more violently and checked once more. This was not an expert approach. It was a faulty one. Curving surfaceward in a sharply changing parabola the pilot over corrected and had to wait to gather down speed and then over corrected again. It was an altogether clumsy landing. The ship was not even perfectly vertical when it settled not quite in the landing area marked by silvery triangles. One of its tail fins crumpled slightly. It tilted a little when fully landed. Then nothing happened. Pop made his way toward it in the skittering skating gate one uses in one-sixth gravity. When he was within half a mile an airlock door opened in the ship's side but nothing came out of the lock. No space-suited figure, no cargo came drifting down with the singular deliberation 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 plane and half the rocket ship was dazzling white and half was blacker than blackness itself. The sun still hung low indeed in the black star-speckled sky. Pop waded through moon dust raising a trail of slowly settling 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 connect it with what, say, Cetel might have written with desperate plausibility about greasy-seeming white crystals out of the mine knocking about Pop Young's shack in canisters containing a hundred earth-pounds weight of riches. Pop reached the rocket ship. He approached the big tail fins. On one of them there were welded ladder rungs going up to the opened airlock door. He climbed. The airlock was perfectly normal when he reached it. There was a glass port in the inner door and he saw eyes looking through at him. He pulled the outer door shut and felt the whining vibration of admitted air. His vacuum suit went slack about him. The inner door began to open and Pop reached up and gave his helmet the practiced twisting jerk which removed it. Then he blinked. There was a red-headed man in the open door. He grinned savagely at Pop. He held a very nasty hand-weapon trained on Pop's middle. Don't come in, he said mockingly, and I don't give a damn about how you 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 stick-up. Pop's eyes went through the inner lock door. He saw that the interior of the ship was stripped and bare, but a spiral stairway descended from some upper compartment. It had a handrail of pure transparent water-clear plastic. The walls were bare insulation, but that trace of luxury remained. Pop gazed at the plastic, fascinated. The red-headed man leaned forward snarling. He slashed Pop across the face with the barrel of his weapon. It drew blood. It was wanton, savage brutality. Pay attention, snarled the red-headed man, a stick-up, I said, get it? You go and get that can of stuff from the mine, the diamonds, bring them here, understand? Pop said, numbly, what the hell? The red-headed man hit him again. He was nerve-wracked, and therefore he wanted to hurt. Move, he rasped. I want the diamonds you've got for the ship from Lunar City. Bring them. Pop licked blood from his lips and the man with the weapon raged at him. Then phoned down to the mine, tell Satel I'm here and he can come on up. Tell him to bring any more diamonds they've dug up since the stuff you've got. He leaned forward. His face was only inches from Pop Young's. It was seemed and hard-bitten and nerve-wracked, but any man would be quivering if 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 over your shack. The rocket blast smashes it. We burn you down. Then we swing over the cable down to the mine and the rocket flame melts it. You die and everybody in the mine dies. No tricks. We didn't come here for nothing. 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 the tension that space-travel then at its beginning produced. It was meaningless savagery due to terror. But of course Pop was helpless to resent it. There were no weapons on the moon and the mention of Satel's name showed the uselessness of bluff. He pictured the complete setup by the edge of the big crack. Pop could do nothing. The red-headed man checked himself, panting. He drew back and slammed the inner locked door. There was the sound of pumping. Pop put his helmet back on and sealed it. The outer door opened. Out rushing air tugged at Pop. After a second or two he went out and climbed down the welded-on ladder bars to the ground. He headed back towards his shack. Somehow the mention of Satel had made his mind work better. It always did. He began painstakingly to put things together. The red-headed man knew the routine here in every detail. He knew Satel. That part was simple. Satel had planned this multi-million dollar coup as a man in prison might plan his break. The stripped interior of the ship identified it. It was one of the unsuccessful luxury liners sold for scrap or perhaps it was stolen for the journey here. Satel's associates had had to steal or somehow get the fuel and somehow find a pilot. But there were diamonds worth at least five million dollars waiting for them. And the whole job might not have called for more than two men, with Satel as a third. According to the economics of crime it was feasible. Anyhow it was being done. Pop reached the dust heap which was his shack and went in the airlock. Inside he went to the vision phone and called the mine colony down in the crack. He gave the message he'd been told to pass on. It was possible to come up with what diamonds had been dug since the regular canister was sent up for the Lunar City ship that would be due presently. Otherwise the ship on the landing strip would destroy shack and pop and the colony together. I guess, said Pop painstakingly, that Satel figured it out. He's probably 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 them they'd be chased. But if I'm dead and the shack smashed and the cable burned through they'll be back on earth long before a new cable's been got and let down to you. So they'll do all they can no matter what I do. He added, I wouldn't tell Satel a thing about it if I were you. It'll save trouble. Just let him keep on waiting for this to happen. It'll save you trouble. Another shaky question. Me? Asked Pop. Oh, I'm going to raise what hell I can. There's some stuff in that ship I want. He switched off the phone. He went over to his air apparatus. He took down the canister of diamonds which were worth five millions or more back on earth. He found a bucket. He dumped the diamonds casually into it. They floated downward with great deliberation and surged from side to side like a liquid when they stopped. One sixth gravity. Pop regarded his drawings meditatively. A sketch of his wife as he now remembered her. It was very good to remember. A drawing of his two children playing together. He looked forward to remembering much more about them. He grinned. That's stair rail, he said in deep satisfaction. That'll do it. He tore bed linen from his bunk and worked on the emptied canister. It was a double container with a thermal wear interior lining. Even on earth newly mined diamonds sometimes fly to pieces from internal stress. On the moon it was not desirable that diamonds be exposed to repeated violent changes of temperature. So a thermal wear lined canister kept them at mined temperature once they were warm to touch ability. Pop packed the cotton cloth in the container. He harried a little because the men in the rocket were shaky and might not practice patience. He took a small emergency lamp from his spare spacesuit. He carefully cracked its bulb exposing the filament within. He put the lamp on top of the cotton and sprinkled magnesium marking powder over everything. Then he went to the air apparatus and took out a flask of the liquid oxygen used to keep his breathing air in balance. He poured the frigid pale blue stuff into the cotton. He saturated it. All the inside of the shack was foggy when he finished. Then he pushed the canister top down. He breathed a sigh of relief when it was in place. He'd arranged for it to break a frozen brittle switch as it descended. When it came off the switch would light the lamp with its bare filament. There was powdered magnesium in contact with it and liquid oxygen all about. He went out of the shack by the airlock. On the way, thinking about Sattel, he suddenly recovered a completely new memory. From their first wedding anniversary so long ago he and his wife had gone out to dinner to celebrate. He remembered how she looked, the almost smug joy they shared that they would be together for always with one complete year for proof. 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 canister he carried, Pop would have rubbed his hands. Tall jagged crater walls rose from the lunar plane. 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 airlock. He closed the door. Air wind. His suit sagged against his body. He took off his helmet. When the red-headed man opened the inner door the hand weapons shook and trembled. Pop said calmly, Now, I've got to go handle the hoist, if Cetel'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 canister whose contents should weigh a hundred pounds on earth. Any tricks he grasped and you'd 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 loridly 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 rocket ship 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 and 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 canister bomb hadn't equaled, say, TNT. 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 on the yards from him, but it did not interrupt his search. When he went back 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 Cetel if I were you. He grinned happily down at the section of plastic stair-rail he'd found not too far from where the ship exploded. When the man down in the mine cut off, Pop got out of his vacuum suit in a hurry. He placed the plastic zestfully on the table where he'd been restricted to drawing pictures of his wife and children in order to recover memories of them. He began to plan, gloatingly, the thing he would carve out of a four-inch section of the plastic. When it was carved, he'd paint it. While he worked, he'd think of Cetel because that was the way to get back the missing portions of his life. The parts Cetel had managed to get 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 Cetel had committed. He felt somehow that he wouldn't get that back until he'd recovered all the rest. Gloting it was amusing to remember what people used to call such artworks as he planned. When carved by other lonely men in other faraway places, they called those sculptures Scrimshaw, but they were a lot more than that. And of Scrimshaw by Mary Leinster.