All That Glitters

This is really Commander Vandenburg's story, but he is too many

millions of miles away to tell it. It concerns his geophysicist, Dr.

Paynter, who was generally believed to have gone to the moon to get

away from his wife.

At one time or other, we were all supposed (often by our wives) to have

done just that.

However, in Paynter's case, there was just enough truth to make it

stick.

It was not that he disliked his wife; one could almost say the

contrary. He would do anything for her, but unfortunately the things

that she wanted him to do cost rather too much. She was a lady of

extravagant tastes, and such ladies are advised not to marry scientists

even scientists who go to the moon.

Mrs. Paynter's weakness was for jewelry, particularly diamonds. As

might be expected, this was a weakness that caused her husband a good

deal of worry. Being a conscientious as well as an affectionate

husband, he did not merely worry about it he did something about it. He

became one of the world's leading experts on diamonds, from the

scientific rather than the commercial point of view, and probably knew

more about their composition, origin, and properties than any other man

alive. Unfortunately, you may know a lot about diamonds without ever

possessing any, and her husband's erudition was not something that Mrs.

Paynter could wear around her neck when she went to a party.

Geophysics, as I have mentioned, was Dr.

Paynter's real business; diamonds were merely a sideline. He had

developed many remarkable surveying instruments which could probe the

interior of the Earth by means of electric impulses and magnetic waves,

so giving a kind of X-ray picture of the hidden strata far below. It

was hardly surprising, therefore, that he was one of the men chosen to

pry into the mysterious interior of the moon.

He was quite eager to go, but it seemed to Commander Vandenburg that he

was reluctant to leave Earth at this particular moment. A number of

men had shown such symptoms; sometimes they were due to fears that

could not be eradicated, and an otherwise promising man had to be left

behind.

In Paynter's case, however, the reluctance was quite impersonal. He

was in the middle of a big experiment something he had been working on

all his life and he didn't want to leave Earth until it was finished.

However, the first lunar expedition could not wait for him, so he had

to leave his project in the hands of his assistants. He was

continually exchanging cryptic radio messages with them, to the great

annoyance of the signals section of Space Station Three.

In the wonder of a new world waiting to be explored, Paynter soon

forgot his earthly preoccupations. He would dash hither and yon over

the lunar landscape on one of the neat little electric scooters the

Americans had brought with them, carrying seismographs, magnetometers,

gravity meters, and all the other esoteric tools of the geophysicist's

trade. He was trying to learn, in a few weeks, what it had taken men

hundreds of years to discover about their own planet. It was true that

he had only a small sample of the moon's fourteen million square miles

of territory to explore, but he intended to make a thorough job of

it.

From time to time he continued to get messages from his colleagues back

on Earth, as well as brief but affectionate signals from Mrs. P.

Neither seemed to interest him very much; even when you are not so busy

that you hardly have time to sleep, a quarter of a million miles puts

most of your personal affairs in a different perspective. I think that

on the moon Dr. Paynter was really happy for the first time in his

life; if so, he was not the only one.

Not far from our base there was a rather fine crater pit, a great

blowhole in the lunar surface almost two miles from rim to rim. Though

it was fairly close at hand, it was outside the normal area of our

joint operations, and we had been on the moon for six weeks before

Paynter led a party of three men off in one of the baby tractors to

have a look at it. They disappeared from radio range over the edge of

the moon, but *e weren't worried about that because if they ran into

trouble they could always call Earth and get any message relayed back

to us.

Paynter and his men were gone forty-eight hours, which is about the

maximum for continuous working on the moon, even with booster drugs. At

first their little expedition was quite uneventful and therefore quite

unexciting;

everything went according to plan. They reached the crater, inflated

their pressurised igloo and unpacked their stores, took their

instrument readings, and then set up a portable drill to get core

samples. It was while he was waiting for the drill to bring him up a

nice section of the moon that Paynter made his second great discovery.

He had made his first about ten hours before, but he didn't know it

yet.

Around the lip of the crater, lying where they had been thrown up by

the great explosions that had convulsed the lunar landscape three

hundred million years before, were immense piles of rock which must

have come from many miles down in the moon's interior. Anything he

could do with his little drill, thought Paynter, could hardly compare

with this. Unfortunately, the mountain-sized geological specimens that

lay all around him were not neatly arranged in their correct order;

they had been scattered over the landscape, much farther than the eye

could see, according to the arbitrary violence of the eruptions that

had blasted them into space.

Paynter climbed over these immense slag heaps, taking a swing at likely

samples with his little hammer. Presently his colleagues heard him

yell, and saw him come running back to them carrying what appeared to

be a lump of rather poor quality glass. It was some time before he was

sufficiently coherent to explain what all the fuss was about and some

time later still before the expedition remembered its real job and got

back to work.

Vandenburg watched the returning party as it headed back to the ship.

The four men didn't seem as tired as one would have expected,

considering the fact that they had been on their feet for two days.

Indeed, there was a certain jauntiness about their movements which even

the space suits couldn't wholly conceal. You could see that the

expedition had been a success. In that case, Paynter would have two

causes for congratulation.

The priority message that had just come from Earth was very cryptic,

but it was clear that Paynter's work there whatever it was had finally

reached a triumphant conclusion.

Commander Vandenburg almost forgot the message when he saw what Paynter

was holding in his hand. He knew what a raw diamond looked like, and

this was the second largest that anyone had ever seen. Only the

Cullinan, tipping the scales at 3,026 carats, beat it by a slender

margin.

"We ought to have expected it," he heard Paynter babble happily.

"Diamonds are always found associated with volcanic vents. But somehow

I never thought the analogy would hold here."

Vandenburg suddenly remembered the signal, and handed it over to

Paynter. He read it quickly, and his jaw dropped. Never in his life,

Vandenburg told me, had he seen a man so instantly deflated by a

message of congratulation. The signal read:

WE'VE DONE IT. TEST 541 WITH MODIFIED

PRESSURE CONTAINER COMPLETE

SUCCESS. NO PRACTICAL LIMIT TO SIZE.

COSTS NEGLIGIBLE.

"What's the matter?" said Vandenburg, when he saw the stricken look on

Paynter's face. "it doesn't seem bad news to me, whatever it means."

Paynter gulped two or three times like a stranded fish, then stared

helplessly at the great crystal that almost filled the palm of his

hand. He tossed it into the air, and it Boated back in that

slow-motion way everything has under lunar gravity.

Finally he found his voice.

"My lab's been working for years," he said, "trying to synthesise

diamonds. Yesterday this thing was worth a million dollars. Today

it's worth a couple of hundred. I'm not sure I'll bother to carry it

back to Earth."

Well, he did carry it back; it seemed a pity not to. For about three

months, Mrs. P. had the finest diamond necklace in the world, worth

every bit of a thousand dollars mostly the cost of cutting and

polishing. Then the Paynter Process went into commercial production,

and a month later she got her divorce. The grounds were extreme mental

cruelty; and I suppose you could say it was justified.