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