Isaac Asimov - Asimov's Mysteries

He leaned back in comfort and watched the bright pattern of star light move as the ship rotated slowly. A bright star came into view, a really bright one. It didn't seem more than a couple of light-years away and his pilot's sense told him it was a hot one, good and hot. The computer would use that as its base and match the pattern centered about it. Once again he thought: It shouldn't take long.

But it did. The minutes passed. Then an hour. And still the computer clicked busily and its lights flashed. Trent frowned. Why didn't it find the pattern? The pattern had to be there. Brennmeyer had showed him his long years of work. He couldn't have left out a star or recorded it in the wrong place.

Surely stars were born and died and moved through space while in being, but these changes were slow, slow. In a million years the patterns that Brennmeyer had recorded couldn't-- A sudden panic clutched at Trent. No! It couldn't be. The chances for it were even smaller than Jumping into a star's interior.

He waited for the bright star to come into view again and, with trembling hands, brought it into telescopic focus. He put in all the magnification he could, and around the bright speck of light was the telltale fog of turbulent gases caught, as it were, in mid-flight.

It was a nova!

From dim obscurity the star had raised itself to bright luminosity, perhaps only a month ago. It had graduated from a spectral class low enough to be ignored by the com - one that would be most certainly taken into Bat the nova that existed in space didn't exist in the computer's memory store because Brennmeyer had not put it there. It had not existed when Brennmeyer was collecting his data-at least not as a brightly luminous star.

'Don't count it,'shrieked Trent. 'Ignore it!'

But he was shouting at automatic machinery that would match the nova-centered pattern against the Galactic pattern and find it nowhere and continue, nevertheless, to match and match and match for as long as its energy supply held out.

The air supply would run out much sooner. Trent's life would ebb away much sooner.

Helplessly Trent slumped in his chair, watching the mocking pattern of star light and beginning the long and agonized wait for death. If he had only kept the knife…

In recent years, several students in English Literature or in Library Science have taken to writing term papers, or even Masters theses, on my books, and stories. Very flattering, of course, but very scary, too, tor they find out all sorts of things about my literary life that I never knew existed. For instance, there is a certain similarity between 'Star Light' and 'The Singing Bell' that I was not aware of until I went over both stories for this volume. And 'The Dust of Death' resembles 'The Singing Bell' in another 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 makin g 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!'

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 the ship; 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.