This story was written under extremely pleasant circumstances. Joseph W. Ferman and Edward L. Ferman, father and son, and also publisher and editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, wanted to put out a special issue in my honor. I pretended to be overcome by modesty, but, in actual fact, the appeal to my vanity was absolutely overpowering. When they said they wanted a new story especially written for the issue, I agreed at once. So I sat down and wrote a fourth Wendell Urth story, fully ten years after I had written the third. It was so nice to be back in harness, and so nice to see the special issue when it appeared. Ed Emshwiller, s.f. artist without peer, succeeded in drawing my portrait for the cover and in performing that incredible tour de force of making it look, at one and the same time, like me and yet handsome. Now if I could have persuaded my publishers to run that portrait on the jacket of this book, you would have seen for yourself. Incidentally, in preparing this volume I saw that the level of technology on Earth and Moon in this story is tar behind that described in 'The Singing Bell.' To which I shout, 'Emerson!'
The Key
Karl Jennings knew he was going to die. He had a matter of hours to live and much to do.
There was no reprieve from the death sentence, not hereon the Moon, not with no communications in operation.
Even on Earth there were a few fugitive patches where, without radio handy, a man might die without the hand of his fellow man to help him, without the heart of his fellow man to pity him, without even the eye of his fellow man to discover the corpse. Here on the Moon, there were few spots that were otherwise.
Earthmen knew he was on the Moon, of course. He had been part of a geological expedition-no, selenological expedition! Odd, how his Earth-centered mind insisted on the 'geo-.'
Wearily he drove himself to think, even as he worked. Dying though he was, he still felt that artificially imposed clarity of thought. Anxiously he looked about. There was nothing to see He was in the dark of the eternal shadow of the northern interior of the wall of the crater, a blackness relieved only by the intermittent blink of his flash. He kept that intermittent, partly because he dared not consume its power source before he was through and partly because he dared not take more than the minimum chance that it be seen.
On his left hand, toward the south along the nearby horizon of the Moon, was a crescent of bright white Sunlight. Beyond the horizon, and invisible, was the opposite lip of the crater. The Sun never peered high enough over the lip of his own edge of the crater to illuminate the floor immediately beneath his feet. He was safe from radiation- from that at least.
He dug carefully but clumsily, swathed as he was in his spacesuit. His side ached abominably.
The dust and broken rock did not take up the 'fairy castle' appearance characteristic of those portions of the Moon's surface exposed to the alternation of light and dark, heat and cold. Here, in eternal cold, the slow crumbling of the crater wall had simply piled fine rubble in a heterogeneous mass. It would not be easy to tell there had been digging going on.
He misjudged the unevenness of the dark surface for a moment and spilled a cupped handful of dusty fragments. The particles dropped with the slowness characteristic of the Moon and yet with the appearance of a blinding speed, for there was no air resistance to slow them further still and spread them out into a dusty haze.
Jennings' flash brightened for a moment, and he kicked a jagged rock out of the way. He hadn't much time. He dug deeper into the dust.
A little deeper and he could push the Device into the depression and begin covering it. Strauss must not find it.
Strauss!
The other member of the team. Half-share in the discovery. Half-share in the renown.
If it were merely the whole share of the credit that Strauss had wanted, Jennings might have allowed it. The discovery was more important than any individual credit that might go with it. But what Strauss wanted was something far more, something Jennings would fight to prevent.
One of the few things Jennings was willing to die to prevent. And he was dying.
They had found it together. Actually, Strauss had found the ship or, better, the remains of theship; or, better still, what just conceivably might havebeen the remains of something analogous to a ship.
'Metal,' said Strauss, as he picked up something ragged and nearly amorphous. His eyes and face could just barely be seen through the thick lead glass of the visor, but his rather harsh voice sounded clearly enough through the suit radio.
Jennings came drifting over from his own position half a mile away. He said, 'Odd! There is no free metal on the Moon.'
There shouldn't be. But you know well enough they haven't explored more than one per cent of the
Moon's surface. Who knows what can be found on it?'
Jennings grunted assent and reached out his gauntlet to take the object.
It was true enough that almost anything might be found on the Moon for all anyone really knew. Theirs was the first privately financed selenographic expedition ever to land on the Moon. 'I'll l then, there had been only government-conducted shotgun affairs, with half a dozen ends in view. It was a sign of the advancing space age that the Geological Society could afford to send two men to the Moon for selenological studies only.
Strauss said, 'It looks as though it once had a polished surface.'
'You're right,' said Jennings. 'Maybe there's more about.'
They found three more pieces, two of trifling size and one a jagged object that showed traces of a seam.
'Let's take them to the ship,' said Strauss.
They took the small skim boat back to the mother ship.
They shucked their suits once on board, something Jennings at least was always glad to do. He scratched vigorously at his ribs and rubbed his cheeks till his light skin reddened into welts.
Strauss eschewed such weakness and got to work. The laser beam pock-marked the metal and the vapor recorded itself on the spectrograph. Titanium-steel, essentially, with a hint of cobalt and molybdenum.
That's artificial, all right,' said Strauss. His broad-boned face was as dour and as hard as ever. He showed no elation, although Jennings could feel his own heart begin to race.
It may have been the excitement that trapped Jennings into beginning, 'This is a development against which we must steel ourselves-' with a faint stress on 'steel' to indicate the play on words.
Strauss, however, looked at Jennings with an icy distaste, and the attempted set of puns was choked off. Jennings sighed. He could never swing it, somehow. Never could! He remembered at the University-
Well, never mind. The discovery they had made was worth a far better-pun than any he could construct for all Strauss's calmness.
Jennings wondered if Strauss could possibly miss the significance.
He knew very little about Strauss, as a matter of fact, except by selenological reputation. That is, he had read Strauss's papers and he presumed Strauss had read his. Although their ships might well have passed by night in their University days, they had never happened to meet until after both had volunteered for this expedition and had been accepted.