SCRIMSHAW
The old man just wanted to get back hismemory—and the methods he used weregently hellish, from the viewpoint of theothers....
BY MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrated by Freas
Pop Young was the one knownman who could stand life on thesurface of the Moon's far side, and,therefore, he occupied the shack onthe Big Crack's edge, above themining colony there. Some peoplesaid that no normal man could doit, and mentioned the scar of aghastly head-wound to explain hisability. One man partly guessed thesecret, but only partly. His name wasSattell and he had reason not totalk. Pop Young alone knew thewhole truth, and he kept his mouthshut, too. It wasn't anybody else'sbusiness.
The shack and the job he filledwere located in the medieval notionof the physical appearance of hell.By day the environment was heat andtorment. By night—lunar night, ofcourse, and lunar day—it was frigidityand horror. Once in two weeksEarth-time a rocketship came aroundthe horizon from Lunar City withstores for the colony deep underground.Pop received the stores andtook care of them. He handed overthe product of the mine, to be forwardedto Earth. The rocket wentaway again. Come nightfall Poplowered the supplies down the longcable into the Big Crack to the colonyfar down inside, and freshened upthe landing field marks with magnesiummarking-powder if a rocket-blasthad blurred them. That wasfundamentally all he had to do. Butwithout him the mine down in theCrack would have had to shutdown.
The Crack, of course, was thatgaping rocky fault which stretchesnine hundred miles, jaggedly, overthe side of the Moon that Earthnever sees. There is one stretch whereit is a yawning gulf a full half-milewide and unguessably deep. WherePop Young's shack stood it was onlya hundred yards, but the colony wasa full mile down, in one wall. Thereis nothing like it on Earth, of course.When it was first found, scientistsdescended into it to examine the exposedrock-strata and learn the historyof the Moon before its craterswere made. But they found morethan history. They found the reasonfor the colony and the rocket landingfield and the shack.
The reason for Pop was somethingelse.
The shack stood a hundred feetfrom the Big Crack's edge. It lookedlike a dust-heap thirty feet high, andit was. The outside was surfacemoondust, piled over a tiny dome tobe insulation against the cold ofnight and shadow and the furnaceheat of day. Pop lived in it all alone,and in his spare time he workedindustriously at recovering somemissing portions of his life that Sattellhad managed to take away fromhim.
He thought often of Sattell, downin the colony underground. Therewere galleries and tunnels and living-quartersdown there. There wereair-tight bulkheads for safety, and ahydroponic garden to keep the airfresh, and all sorts of things to makelife possible for men under if noton the Moon.
But it wasn't fun, even underground.In the Moon's slight gravity,a man is really adjusted to existencewhen he has a well-developed caseof agoraphobia. With such an aid, aman can get into a tiny, coffinlikecubbyhole, and feel solidity aboveand below and around him, andhappily tell himself that it feels delicious.Sometimes it does.
But Sattell couldn't comfort himselfso easily. He knew about Pop,up on the surface. He'd shipped out,whimpering, to the Moon to get faraway from Pop, and Pop was justabout a mile overhead and there wasno way to get around him. It wasdifficult to get awa