hundred pounds was worth millions. Yet here on
the Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister 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 Sattell ever
thought of the value of the mine's production. If he would kill a woman
and two children and think he'd killed a 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 hysterically 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 Sattell
was here. Near Sattell, 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 Sattell 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 Sattell. 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
Crack's rim was as tidy as any lighthouse or fur-trapper's 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 o