yage equal to rather more than a thousand times
around the equator of the Earth. Artists' 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 CO{2}--in liquid oxygen, and then firing it with a spark. It
exploded splendidly. And its fumes were merely more CO{2} which an
air-apparatus handled easily.

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 absorbedly
for material with which to capture memory. Sattell 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
surface-ward 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 gait one uses in
one-sixth gravity. When he was within half a mile, an air-lock door
opened in the ship's side. But nothing came out of the lock. No
space-suited f