TIME TRAP
By FRANK BELKNAP LONG
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.