Christmas Tree by John Christopher (Astounding, February 1949) opens with an astronaut called Davies arriving on Earth. After his medical (we learn that space crew get one after every flight), he goes to buy a Christmas tree to take back to the Moon. We subsequently learn that a man called Hans has been exiled there for forty years because of a final health warning, which meant it would be suicide to undertake another trip back to Earth (the story’s gimmick is that no-one can predict how long it will be between an astronaut’s first and final warning—there can be several years between them—and many astronauts take the chance of continuing for a period after the first).
At the nursery, the owner shows Davies around:
“Major Davies, I’m delighted to see you. We don’t see many spacemen. Come and see my roses.”
He seemed eager and I let him take me. I wasn’t breaking my neck to get back into town.
He had a glasshouse full of roses. I hesitated in the doorway. Mr. Cliff said: “Well?”
“I’d forgotten they smelled like that,” I told him.
He said proudly, “It’s quite a showing. A week before Christmas and a showing like that. Look at this Frau Karl Druschki.”
It was a white rose, very nicely shaped and scented like spring. The roses had me. I crawled around after Mr. Cliff, seeing roses, feeling roses, breathing roses. I looked at my watch when it began to get dark.
After Davies explains Hans’ situation to the owner (during which he reveals he has had his own first health warning) he gets the tree for free.
When Davies eventually gets back to the Moon (spoiler), he and Louie (the part-time quartermaster who helped him smuggle the tree onboard) go to find Hans, but they find that he has passed away. The pair, along with another man, take Hans out onto the surface to bury him:
Portugese halted the caterpillar on the crest of a rise about midway between Luna City and Kelly’s Crater. It was the usual burial ground; the planet’s surface here was crosshatched in deep grooves by some age-old catastrophe. We clamped down the visors on our suits and got out. Portugese and I carried old Hans easily between us, his frail body fantastically light against lunar gravity. We put him down carefully in a wide, deep cleft, and I turned around toward the truck. Louie walked toward us, carrying the Christmas tree.
There had been moisture on it, which had frozen instantly into sparkling frost. It looked like a centerpiece out of a store window. It had seemed a good idea back in Luna City, but now it didn’t seem appropriate.
We wedged it in with rocks, Portugese read a prayer, and we walked back to the caterpillar, glad to be able to let our visors down again and light up cigarettes. We stayed there while we smoked, looking through the front screen. The tree stood up green and white against the sullen, hunching blackness of Kelly’s Crater. Right overhead was the Earth, glowing with daylight. I could make out Italy, clear and unsmudged, but farther north Hans’s beloved Austria was hidden under blotching December cloud.
The story finishes with Davies going to his delayed medical, where he gets his final warning—he is stuck on the Moon. Later, Davies goes to the observatory, where he looks at Earth and thinks he can smell roses.
The science in this story is a bit dated or just plain wrong in some parts (information about the Moon’s rotation, atmosphere, and body-eating insect life, etc.) but, if you can filter that out, it’s a pretty good piece, and an accomplished debut.
*** (Good). 3,200 words. Story link.