fashion. I guess it comes from using the same aging brain for all three stories. I'll bet anyone studying my literary output notices such resemblances at once, but lest they draw unwarranted conclusions, let me assure them that I remain blissfully ignorant of such things until I reread the stories in question in quick succession.
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