The Mirage Pup

I crawled out into the void on my hands and knees, clinging to the rough hull, digging with my magnetic irons into the thick coating of meteoric dust and grit and rubble the ship had picked up in deep space.

Brother, it's all yours if you want it! A wind that isn't a wind tearing at you; the stars blazing in a black pit, and a million light years staring you in the face, doing your thinking for you, warning you that forever is too long a time to go somersaulting through space shrouded in a blanket of ice.

You feel your grip slipping, know it can't slip, and dig, dig with your knees. You look up and there's the flame of a rocket jet missing you by inches. You look down and there's nothing to maim or sear you—just utter blackness. Believe me, that's worse!

I stared straight across the hull through a spiraling splotch of blue flame toward the stern rocket jets. The flame whorl came from diffuse matter friction. Tiny particles hit the ship, bounced off and set up an electrical discharge in the ether.

It's cool and it doesn't burn. If you keep your head you can crawl right through it.

I started crawling the instant I saw her. She was clinging to the hull between two flaring rocket jets, her magneto-wrench rising and falling in the unearthly glare.

A swaying figure wrapped in blue light, her face looking pinched and white and faraway through the globe on her shoulders. The helmet itself looked small against the vast backdrop of space. But as I crawled toward her it kept getting larger—like an expanding soap bubble. I had the crazy feeling that there was a big crowd down below, waiting to jeer or cheer!

I threw the illusion off and let my irons carry me back and forth in a crazy kind of jig. The magnetics had to be guided by my muscles and my will. It was twist and turn, go limp and brace hard, relax and edge forward.

Suddenly the ship lurched, giving off a blinding flare. I knew it was just a stress we'd hit—one of those little pockets in space where the diffuse matter of the void is sucked dry by energies that don't show up on the instruments.

Ships pass through stresses fast. But when the flare vanished I was dangling head downwards from the hull, my right knee attached to solid metal, the rest of me hugging empty space.

Furiously I slammed my left knee upward, twisted my body forward, and got a firm grip on the hull again with my wrist irons. It was a contortionist feat which brought the blood rushing to my ears. When my head stopped spinning I was staring into the face of the girl I'd risked my neck to save in an inferno of ice and flame.

We were so close our helmets almost touched. But she wasn't looking at me. Six feet from my swaying knees she was making frantic gestures with her magneto-wrench, her face a twisting mask of horror. Her body was twisting too and she seemed to be fighting off something I couldn't see!

Frantic with alarm, I strained forward and threw my right arm about her.

At least, I thought I did! But my iron-weighted wrist seemed to pass right through her! It whipped through emptiness to strike the hull with an impact that sent a stab of pain darting up my arm to my shoulder. The pain was agonizing for an instant; then it fell away.

At the same instant I saw the light. It was faint at first, a pale spectral glow that haloed her helmet and lapped in concentric waves about her knees. It wasn't a flame whorl. It gave off iridescent glints and grew swiftly brighter, turning from pale blue to dazzling azure. Then it became a weaving funnel of light that spurted from the hull with a low humming sound.

The humming was unearthly. It penetrated my helmet and became a shrill inward keening with a quality hard to define. Imagine a butterfly of sound struggling fiercely to escape from a sonic chrysalis. It was a little like that, a kind of shrill fluttering on the tonal plane.

The light did not remain attached to the hull. It shot up into the void and became a vertical shaft of downsweeping radiance. From its summit pulsing ripples ascended, giving it the aspect of a waterfall. Then it became a prism, flashing with all the colors of the spectrum.

A man may awaken from a nightmare, stare for an instant into the darkness and try to rationalize his fears. But this was no nightmare! As I stared up the iridescence was replaced by a leaf-screen effect shot through with crimson filaments. Shadows appeared amidst the ripples, straight and jagged lines of some tenuous substance that seemed to mold itself into a pattern.

It may have been imagination. But for the barest instant as I stared at the incredible shape of radiance a face seemed to look out at me. A fat face, bloated, toadlike, supported by a shadowy neck that swelled out beneath it like the hood of a rearing cobra!

Suddenly my scalp crawled and my helmet seemed to contract, pressing against my skull with a deadly firmness. An electrolube!

I knew instinctively that the flame shape was an electrolube—a devouring entity of the void which snaked through deep space close to Saturn's orbit, a whiplash shape of pure force with a hellish affinity for life, its negative charge seeking a positive charge with which to unite!

It was itself alive, the ultimate life form, sentient and polarized, an energy eater that sucked nourishment from electrical impulses.

And there was just enough positive electricity in the human body to give the horror the power to destroy by slashing down in swift, flesh-destroying stabs that could cut through a spacesuit like a knife through jelly!

Flesh and blood had no chance against it.

For one awful instant I looked straight into the eyes of a girl I couldn't save, an instant as long as a lifetime to the poor fool who loved her! No, I'm not raving! Do you think I'd have crawled out into the everlasting night of space if I hadn't known there could be no other woman for me?

She didn't wait for the horror to slice down. She jerked her knees, tore her wrists free and shut her eyes. Then she was gone. She didn't even move her lips to say good-by. Space was her bridegroom. It took her and she was gone.

I looked away. Not caring how soon death came, knowing I'd be with her if I just stayed with the ship.

I waited for the anguish to hit me. I waited for a full minute. Two. I shut my eyes as she had done.

When I opened them the electrolube had vanished. And when I looked down, the void had grown brighter. Gone was the great ringed disk of Saturn.

Just little frosty stars glittered far-off, mocking. And another planet that was mottled pink and yellow. A ringless planet, swimming in a murky haze, with eleven little moons spinning around it—eight on one side, three on the other. One of the moons was red.

Jupiter is bigger than Saturn, bigger than a thousand Earths. And I was moving away from it on a droning ship's hull, a tiny fleck of matter of no importance in that awful sweep of space. But when I dragged myself back through the gravity panel into the ship my brain was bursting with a despair so vast it seemed to dwarf the vastness of space.

Pete was standing just inside the panel, holding something furry and black in his arms that squirmed in the cold light. When he saw me he uttered a smothered oath.

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 love a woman a century dead? If you'd asked me, I couldn't have told you. Because she wasn't dead to me. I kept seeing her pale, beautiful face and everywhere I turned time seemed to stretch away into endless vistas. If I'd been on Earth, in New York or Chicago, I could have gone out and lost myself in the crowds and the glitter. But it wouldn't have helped.

I turned and looked at the sleeping mirage pup. He lay on my bunk with his legs coiled up under him, his moist nose resting on his folded forelimbs. He looked like a prize puppy at a pet show, but what a puppy!

In his unfathomable animal mind was that strange capacity for projecting illusions, of making them seem three-dimensional and real. He could blur the viewpane, fill it with unreal star fields, draw shapes of energy from the void.

But he couldn't change his memories by slicklying them over with the pale cast of thought! At bottom he was just a dumb beast. He had the mind of a puppy, a mind that chased fantasms while asleep through a labyrinth of dark alleyways. He twitched and shook while asleep, just like an excitable mutt.

Little agitated noises came from him. His nostrils quivered, his tail vibrated and he rolled over in his sleep and started scratching himself. Thump. Thump. Thump.

What was he thinking about? A girl in a garden with the moonlight in her hair? Stooping to pat him or feeding him yummies? He'd rolled over and was lying with his forelimbs stretched straight out, as though he were reaching for the moon.

But I knew he wasn't seeing the moon. He was reaching for something I couldn't see or hear or touch, something older than the human race maybe.

I was hating him furiously when Pete came into the compartment. He grabbed my arm and started shaking me.

"Jim! Jim, lad! Get a grip on yourself! We'll be hittin' the Heaviside in a minute!"

"What do I care?" I lashed out. "Go away, can't you? Blow!"

"Now, now, son!" he pleaded. "That's no way to act! You can't bring her back! And if you keep eatin' your heart out—"

"Get out!" I shouted, heaving myself from the bunk. "Get out—get out!"

"Don't be a fool, Jim! You've got to get rid of that grievin' look! The skyport Johnnies are funny that way! You walk out of this ship with your eyes burnin' holes in your face, and they'll think you got somethin' to hide!

"Look at yourself in a mirror! Whiskers sproutin' out of your chin, face sooty as a tube fittin' and no fight left in you! You got to get back the look of a fightin' fury, son! A lad who can stand up to a port clearance inspector and say 'Me an' my buddy, here, we're headin' for that gate, and if you want to stay healthy—'"

"What?"

"Jehoshaphat!" Pete groaned. "He don't even hear me!"

I stood up. "Okay, Pete!" I told him. "I heard you! Most of it, anyway. And I'll get myself spruced up. How close are we to the Heaviside?"

He heaved a high sigh of relief. "We'll hit it in half an hour, Jim!"

He grinned. "He's got to have a harness, Jim. I'll rig up a harness for him!"