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!"