I tugged at my helmet, got it off.
“Jim, lad, I was afraid you was a goner!” Pete choked. “You went chasing mirages on the hull. Mirages, Jim!”
My jaw dropped. I stood stock still, staring at him, unable to believe my eyes.
“It’s all my fault!” Pete groaned. “Me and my rantings! Jeebies my foot! Soon as you went out I got to thinkin’. There’s a beastie could do it, a little black, furry beastie called a mirage pup!
“Sired on Pluto, breedin’ on Pluto in the dark an’ the cold! Squattin’ on its haunches, projectin’ thoughts! Makin’ ’em look solid and real! Sounds too, though you don’t hear the sounds with your ears!
“His memories, Jim! Things he’s seen himself, long, long ago! We been makin’ pets of ’em so long we take ’em for granted. All the old skippers had ’em on their ships.”
“Oh, Eternity!” I choked.
“They can make thoughts look as solid as a cake of ice, Jim! Three-dimensional, like! I figured it this way. There was a girl, about a hundred years ago, took a ship—this ship—out to Saturn! And somethin’ happened to the ship. So she went out to fix what was wrong and maybe never came back. Her gravity irons could have slipped—”
“No,” I said quickly. “She let go deliberately because—it was better that way!”
I was staring at the little beast. Take a rabbit, puff it out, paint it black, and give it two huge, spectral, tarsierlike eyes! Give it a purple snout, devilishly long claws. Breed it with a full-blooded Scotch Terrier and you’ll get—a Plutonian mirage pup!
The little beast whined, then yapped and wagged its tail at me. Its ear stood straight up. It nuzzled Pete’s palm.
Mirage pups could coat everything over with evanescent images that looked real. They could change the outside as well as the inside of a ship. They could put Saturn beyond the viewpane, instead of Jupiter. Put a girl in the ship who lived once, engrave an image of that girl on your heart so that getting it off would mean a tearing anguish.
Yes, a mirage pup could do that because it would have a long memory. Mirage pups lived to a ripe old age. Slowed metabolism. The cold and dark of Pluto. Long periods of hibernation on that frigid planet while they dreamed the long, long dreams of their youth. And projected those dreams on awakening. Dreams, memories, buried loyalties.
If a master had been kind they’d never forgot! If a mistress had been kind—
The wetness at the corners of my eyes was making me blink.
So the mirage pup had followed her out on the hull, long ago. Crouched down perhaps, shivering, its paws covering its face. And the electrolube hadn’t touched it! A small body, a small positive charge! No nourishment for an electrolube in a mirage pup!
Then it had crawled back, whining and hopeless and lost, back into the ship. Hibernation in a dark corner! For one hundred years!
“I found him in the tube room!” Pete grunted. “He was hidin’ behind one o’ the atomotors, coiled up like a porcupine. But I knew he was just playin’ possum! I could see his eyes—blazin’ out at me in the dark!”
“Yeah,” I said, gruffly.
“You want to hold him, Jim?”
Pete extended the little beast toward me, but I shied away. I couldn’t bear to touch anything that she had touched! Later, maybe, when I got over the shock.
“Guess we’ll never know how the ship found its way to the graveyard!” Pete said. “Say, do you suppose if we’re patient he’ll project a picture of what happened? Maybe he’ll start fillin’ the tub with mirages again!”
“They only do it when they’re scared!” I told him. “And lonely and miserable! He’s not scared now! He likes us, worse luck!”
“He was homesick, eh?”
“That’s right! For his past, for his mistress.” I looked at Pete. “As for the ship, I can make a pretty good guess. Ship went into an orbit of its own, close to Saturn. It drifted around for about a century. Then a salvage crew found it and towed it to Callisto City to be sold as junk. It has happened before, plenty of times!”
“Never with a mirage pup inside, I bet!”
“Maybe not!”
I turned away, feeling all hollow inside, like one of those caterpillars that pupae wasps sting to death and feast on until they’re nothing but husks. Grave bait, lying in a tunnel deep in the earth.
I knew the only chance I had of crawling out of the tunnel into the sunlight again was to give the little beast a kick. If he got lonely and frightened, he’d see her again! He’d start dreaming about her, and she’d come to life again, as a memory in the brain of a mirage pup!
But I never could be that cruel.
“What’s the matter, Jim?” Pete asked, concerned. “You look sick!”
I wheeled on him. “I didn’t tell you what happened outside. If you open your trap again—I will!”
Pete avoided my eyes. “I didn’t ask you, Jim!”
I knew then that the pup had projected two sets of images, one in the control room for Pete’s benefit and one outside for me to live through. A mirage pup could generate images like an electronic circuit, duplicate them in all directions, pile them up in layers. Automatically without thinking, to ease its own wretchedness.
Pete had been able to follow me as I crawled along the hull. He knew what I was going through.
I moved away from him, sat down on the chronometer and cradled my head in my arms.
Dusk.
Dawn.
Dusk.
Dawn.
You don’t see the sun rise and set inside a spaceship, but that’s how the days seem to pass. Your mind grows a little darker when it’s time for the sun to set on Earth. Lightens when it rises.
Dusk. Dawn. Dusk. Dawn. Three days. Four. But for me it was just dusk. My mind didn’t lighten at all.
How does it feel to
