The Star by Arthur C. Clarke

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 we 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 congratulations. 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