s!"

"Yeah," said Pop.

He stolidly put his helmet back on. But his eyes went past the
red-headed man to the stair that wound down, inside the ship, from some
compartment above. The stair-rail was pure, clear, water-white plastic,
not less than three inches thick. There was a lot of it!

The inner door closed. Pop opened the outer. Air rushed out. He climbed
painstakingly down to the ground. He started back toward the shack.

There was the most luridly bright of all possible flashes. There was no
sound, of course. But something flamed very brightly, and the ground
thumped under Pop Young's vacuum boots. He turned.

The rocketship was still in the act of flying apart. It had been a
splendid explosion. Of course cotton sheeting in liquid oxygen is not
quite as good an explosive as carbon-black, which they used down in
the mine. Even with magnesium powder to start the flame when a bare
light-filament ignited it, the cannister-bomb hadn't equaled--say--T.N.T.
But the ship had fuel on board for the trip back to Earth. And it blew,
too. It would be minutes before all the fragments of the ship returned
to the Moon's surface. On the Moon, things fall slowly.

Pop didn't wait. He searched hopefully. Once a mass of steel plating
fell only yards from him, but it did not interrupt his search.

When he went into the shack, he grinned to himself. The call-light of
the vision-phone flickered wildly. When he took off his helmet the bell
clanged incessantly. He answered. A shaking voice from the mining-colony
panted:

"We felt a shock! What happened? What do we do?"

"Don't do a thing," advised Pop. "It's all right. I blew up the ship and
everything's all right. I wouldn't even mention it to Sattell if I were
you."

He grinned happily down at a section of plastic stair-rail he'd found
not too far from where the ship exploded. When the man down in the mine
cut off, Pop got out of his vacuum suit in a hurry. He placed the
plastic zestfully on the table where he'd been restricted to drawing
pictures of his wife and children in order to recover memories of them.

He began to plan, gloatingly, the thing he would carve out of a
four-inch section of the plastic. When it was carved, he'd paint it.
While he worked, he'd think of Sattell, because that was the way to get
back the missing portions of his life--the parts Sattell had managed to
get away from him. He'd get back more than ever, now!

He didn't wonder what he'd do if he ev