e they were warmed to touchability.

Pop packed the cotton cloth in the container. He hurried 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 cannister-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 air lock. On the way, thinking about
Sattell, he suddenly recovered a completely new memory. On 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 cannister he carried, Pop
would have rubbed his hands.

* * * * *

Tall, jagged crater-walls rose from the lunar plain. 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 air
lock. He closed the door. Air whined. His suit sagged against his body.
He took off his helmet.

When the red-headed man opened the inner door, the hand-weapon shook and
trembled. Pop said calmly:

"Now I've got to go handle the hoist, if Sattell'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 cannister whose
contents should weigh a hundred pounds on Earth.

"Any tricks," he rasped, "and you know what happen