 What is the role of humor in the story?
The most dangerous of weapons is the one you don't know is loaded. Illustrated by Schoenherr The wind howled out of the northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. It screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long furrow plowed ruler-straight through streamlined hummocks of snow. The sun glinted on black rock glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and bridges of ice. It lit the snow slope to a frozen glare, penciled black shadow down the long furrow, and flashed at the furrow's end on a thing of metal and plastics, an artifact thrown down in the dead wilderness. When the movements stopped, there was a click and a strange sound began. It's well on the cards that I'm all in one piece and not broken up at all, though I don't see how it could happen. If I were ten years older, it would have been an honor, being picked for the first long jump in the first starship ever. We got lined up between Earth and Mars, you'll remember, and James pushed the button marked 'Jump'. Two months later your time, one second later by us. Whoever you are who finds this tape, you're made. You'll find you can name your price and don't take any wooden nickels. Walking, talking natives on a blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere at fifteen p.s.i. We were able to show them our sun, in their telescopes.
 It showed that things amusing to some can be dangerous for others
 Dark humor was a favorite of Matt's and defined his storytelling  It showed that things amusing to some can be dangerous for others  It was a set-up to a complicated joke  Jokes are the only thing that kept the crew life