Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition), April 1944 — page 24: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

v9 remnant of a plane that had somehow shed a part of itself, and then soared off into eternity. If the laws of chance meant any- thing, the plane and its engine would fly on forever through space. But there was still a chance. Pendrake began to walk hurriedly toward the ridge. The slopes of the ridge were steeper than he had estimated; and they were buried in black shadows. Hard to see; he kept sliding back, the loose-packed dust coming down in little rushes. After minutes of effort, he was still only halfway to the top of the two-hundred-foot hill. And it was getting cold. At first the chill hardly touched him, but it swiftly became a biting cold that pressed against his skin, and began to steal inside clammily. Within minutes his whole body was numbed, his teeth chattering. He thought in stark amazement: The suit, the damn- able suit must be so constructed as to dis- tribute evenly the direct and terrible heat of undiffused sunlight, with no allowance at all for cold. He reached the as of the pace: and stood with closed eyes facing into the full blaze of the low-hung sun; sluggishly the warmth began to flow back into his veins; he remembered his hope, and looked around, looked long and with a gathering desperation. But the plane hadn’t merely dropped its wing, and then crashed at some near point. In all his scope of vision, the flat reach of pumice sea was unbroken except for seven craters that reared up bleakly in the far distance, like witches’ mouths sucking at the sky. He had walked for over an hour toward them, the metal plate “shovel” still clutched in his fingers, before it came to Pendrake suddenly that the sun was lower in the sky than it had been. Night was falling. He was one man alone running from crater to crater while a fantastically flaring sun sank lower and lower in a sky that was darker than the midnight heavens of Earth. The extinct volcanoes were all small, the largest only about three hundred yards across. The long shadows from the slanting rays of the sun fell across those crater bottoms; it was only by light reflections from the walls that Pendrake was able to see that here, too, the pumice ocean had spread its silent, enveloping waves of dust. Two—four, five craters; and still there ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION . was no sign of what he was looking for. As with the others, he climbed the sixth from: the sunny side, and then stood sickly peering down in the black shadows of the shallow pit that spread before him. Pumice, ragged edges of lava, protruding piles of rock that were darker than the shadows that engulfed them—it was all such a familiar pattern now that his eyes made automatic assessment and flashed on in a dull dismay. His gaze was a hundred feet past the cave entrance on the far bottom before he realized that he had succeeded in his search. He felt himself on the verge of eternity. The rim of the crater seemed sandwiched between the light-sprinkled blackness of space and the hard protrusions of the dead volcano. He raced on. The sun was:a blob of flame in a velvet sky. It seemed to quiver to his near right, as if balancing for the downward plunge. Its light cast shadows that seemed longer and more intense with each passing mo- ment; every rill, every unevenness had its own bed of darkness. Pendrake avoided the shadows. They were wells of cold that numbed his legs when he bounded into them. He thought finally, with utter desperation: The suit couldn’t be as bad as this, suit- able only for sunlight. It must have some arrangement for heating when there wasn’t any sun. It was made for space, for the Moon where darkness reigned supreme for two solid Earth weeks of every four. Grayson and the scientists hadn’t had spacesuits. It was something the Nazis must have developed—forced by their difficulty to obtain the metal necessary to construct large spaceships, they were putting atomic engines into ordinary planes and the pilots into spacesuits. Clever! But surely to heaven they had installed some kind of power unit in a spacesuit that actually worked in space. No mean feat of invention in itself as any airman knew who had ever worn a war-time stratosphere suit with all its imperfections. There must be something. He could wait till he reached the cave entrance, and then— And then he stood using his flexible metal and plastic arm with its equally flex- ible fingers, searching for some kind of heat switch. . But there was only the flashlight. He turned it on. The sun was a quarter wheel with streamers, an arclike shape of light standing upright on the ground to his left. comiclooks.c©