Time Trap

Somebody waited for old Charley Grimes, plodding across that darkside Luna crater--somebody who couldn't exist.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

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 orang-outang!

"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 with glacial sides and the desolation is so awful you want to sit down on the nearest rock and never get up!"

Charley sat down, crossed his long legs and took a deep, slow puff on his pipe.

"I shouted--just to hear the echoes come rolling back. You can talk to yourself that way and get comfort out of it, because what you'll hear will be the giant in yourself. The valley was so big a soaring eagle would have burst its lungs trying to fly out of it.

"But don't get the idea I climbed down over an icy slope on a rope. I simply sat down and let myself slide. Smooth? There wasn't a crevice or a projection until I reached the bottom and picked myself up."

Charley nodded. "I had to lift off my helmet for a minute, to shake off the ice. That's when I shouted and heard the echoes come rolling back.

"I'd clamped the helmet back on, and was adjusting my oxygen intake when I happened to glance down at my big, square feet."

Charley chuckled.

"I've got outsized feet even when I'm as bare as a baby. But I was wearing heavy moon-shoes, and the prints I'd left in the snow were eight inches across!

"There was a straight line of prints, as big and square as my own, leading out across the valley--prints I couldn't possibly have made. I'd stumbled around a bit, of course. But I hadn't budged two yards from the base of the slope.

"The oddest thing about that single trail of prints was the fact that it started right where I was standing!

"An icy wind seemed to blow through me. On the moon you don't slide down a steep slope and land right where someone else has been standing. Not if you're in your right mind, you don't. The moon isn't that thickly populated.

"I was badly shaken, I can tell you! But I didn't sit down and brood over it. When you go into a huddle with yourself on the moon you're apt to wind up looking like an ice-carved replica of Rodin's Thinker.

"I simply shaded my helmet with my palm, to cut down the starshine, and stared across the valley. The valley was about a mile wide, and as smooth as a skating rink over most of its surface. But about halfway across a big mound of blue-gray sandstone broke the monotony by looming up on the frozen plain like an African termite's nest.