on the head. Only—she wasn’t calling him by the name I had given him. She was calling him, “Tow Tow.”
“Oh, I can’t believe it! I can’t, I can’t. Granny’s pup! You’ve come home, Tow Tow—and you are Tow Tow! I’d know you anywhere! You precious darling.”
Then I saw the girl in the painting. She was wearing a space suit a hundred years out of date, and her hand was on the head of a mirage pup too. Only it was a mirage pup in oils! Life-sized, lifelike and unmistakably Tow Tow! The pup in the painting had the same dumb-bright unweaned look about him! Any child brought up with that painting before her would know the real Tow Tow when he came bounding home! He was like no other pup!
The girl who was patting the real Tow Tow raised her head suddenly, and looked at me!
For a full minute we just stood there, staring at each other. I don’t know how she felt, but I knew how I felt! A family resemblance can be a remarkable thing! The contours of a face, the way the eyes look at you, and the trembling of lips shaped in a certain way can—make the universe reel!
Especially when there’s no difference at all between the face of a girl a century dead and a living face you’d never thought to see again!
“Who are you?” she whispered.
I told her.
Her eyes were shining when I stopped telling her about myself. She swayed a little, and I think we both knew then how it was going to be.
She was in my arms before I realized that I didn’t even know her name.
“It’s Barbara!” she whispered, when I got around to asking her. That was quite a few minutes after I’d met her. You can’t kiss a girl and ask her name in the same breath. And there was just a chance she’d be offended and refuse to tell me.
But Barbara was a darned good sport about it!
“I’ve never been kissed by a total stranger before!” she said. “Jim, it was wonderful!”
It sure was. We went back to it again.
It’s been a long time, now. Seven years. And if I haven’t proved you can fall in love with the same woman twice I’ve been living a lie. But I know that it isn’t so. If I was living a lie, Tow Tow would be unhappy, and he’d be filling the house with mirages. But my five-year-old son, Bobby, isn’t a mirage, and neither is the girl I married.
Sometimes, when I see the lights of the skyport through a cornerset window, and winds howl in from the bay, I get to wondering about Pete.
You see, he never came in that night, never joined us! He may have looked in through a window, and realized I’d reached my last “port o’ call,” a quiet harbor in a storm that had died away forever. He may have turned and gone stumbling off into the night!
I’ll never know, of course. Good old Pete! Sometimes I get to thinking. A mirage pup can coil up in an old ship and hibernate for a century. Could a human being do that?
There are strange influences in deep space. Are there discharges in the electromagnetic field that could slow up the metabolism of a tired little character like Pete?
That’s nonsense, of course.
I’ll have to go now. Bobby’s calling me. He’s standing at the head of the stairs, in his pajamas, and he’s waiting for me to tell him a bedtime story about what it’s like out in the mighty dark.
“Pop, you promised! Aw, come on, Pop—”
I’ll have to keep it simple, of course. But maybe tonight I’ll tell him about Pete.
Maybe when he grows up he’ll meet Pete.
Who knows?
Time Trap
Charley Grimes was a big man who had been everywhere in the Solar System and collected trophies which were as strange and shining as the stories he liked to tell.
His face was as gaunt as the jungle mask and, when he lit a pipe and smoked it, you watched to see where the smoke would drift. It wasn’t hard to picture it drifting over the mountains of the moon or across the flat red plains of Mars.
We were sitting around a campfire in the Rockies just as our ancestors must have sat five hundred years in the past. We were swapping yarns to get Charley started, and watching the sun sink to rest on clouds shaped like wild mustangs when the talk drifted to the dark side of the moon.
You know what it’s like on the dark side. The brittle stars shine down and the great craters loom up, but when you’re flying low in a rocket ship about all you can see through the viewpane is a circle of radiance spotlighting a desolation as bleak as the Siberian Steppes.
You miss so many things you don’t dare even think about the earth. If you’re an escapist you cover your bunk with pictures of the lush Venusian jungles and pretend you’re somewhere else. But if you’re a realist you go outside and come to grips with the bleakness in one way or another.
Charley was a realist.
“So I went wandering off just to see what I could find!” Charley said.
We watched him get up, throw another log on the fire and draw his Indian blanket around himself—so tightly he looked like a great swathed mummy swaying in the glare.
“Nothing tremendous ever happens when you go exploring with all the trimmings!” Charley went on. “You’ve got to be devil-may-care about it. So I just made sure my helmet was screwed on tight and went striding away from the ship like a clockwork orangutan!
“If you’ve been on the dark side you know that there’s a sensation of bitter cold at all times—even when you’re bundled up and in motion. You keep looking back and wishing you hadn’t—and before you can count the stars in a square foot of sky you’re at the bottom of a valley
