d 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 strait 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
space-flight 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 mine. Sattell 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 Sattell 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 Sattell--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 any time 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 vo