This article is a translation by Chongzi Youge of the short story "Time Pussy" by Isaac Asimov. The original text is from the collection "The Early Asimov" published in 1972, but this story was first published in 1942 and is one of the earliest stories in the "Probability Zero" short story series. It is worth mentioning that Asimov used the pen name George E. Dale when publishing this story, making it one of the few stories he published under a pen name. The header image was generated by Stable Diffusion.
Old Mike told me this story a long time ago. He lived in a small house on the mountain opposite my old house. During the mining boom in 37, he was a mining prospector working on those asteroids; now, he spends most of his time feeding his seven cats.
"Why do you like cats so much, Old Mike?" I asked him at the time.
The old miner stared at me, scratching his chin. "Well," he said, "they remind me of my little pets on Pallas. They're a bit like cats - same kind of heads, more or less - and they're the smartest little guys I've ever seen. All dead!"
I felt sorry and apologized. Mike sighed heavily. "The smartest little guys," he repeated, "they're four-dimensional cats."
"Four-dimensional, Mr. Mike? But the fourth dimension is time." I had learned that the previous year when I was in the third grade.
"So you know a thing or two, huh?" He took off his pipe and slowly filled it. "Indeed, the fourth dimension is time. These cats are about a foot long, six inches high, four inches wide, and they extend all the way to the middle of next week. That's four dimensions, right? Well, if you touch their heads, they won't wag their tails until the next day, maybe. Some of the bigger ones won't wag their tails until the day after tomorrow. True story!"
I looked skeptical but didn't say anything.
Mike continued, "They're also the best watchdogs, better than anything else. They sure are. Why, if they find a thief or any suspicious character, they'll scream like banshees. And if one sees a thief today, it'll scream yesterday, so we get notified twenty-four hours in advance every time."
I opened my mouth wide. "Really?"
"I swear! Do you want to know how we used to feed them back then? We would wait until they fell asleep, take a look, and then we would know they were busy digesting their food. Those time kittens always took exactly three hours to digest before eating because their stomachs extended that far in time. So when they fell asleep, we got used to checking the time, preparing their food, and feeding them exactly three hours later."
He had lit his pipe now and was puffing away. He shook his head sadly. "But one time, I made a mistake. Poor little time kitten. Its name was Joey, and it was my favorite. One morning, it went to sleep at nine o'clock, but somehow, I thought it was eight o'clock. Naturally, I brought its food at eleven o'clock. I looked everywhere for it, but I couldn't find it."
"What happened, Mr. Mike?"
"Well, you can't expect a time kitten to eat its food just two hours before it finishes digesting it. That's asking too much. I finally found it under the shed's toolbox. It had crawled there an hour earlier and died of indigestion. Poor little guy! After that, I always set an alarm, so I never made that mistake again."
There was a brief silence filled with sadness. I continued in a humble tone, "You said earlier that they all died. Did they all die like that?"
Mike shook his head solemnly. "No! They often caught colds from us guys and died within a week to ten days before catching the cold. There weren't many of them to begin with; a year after the miners came to Pallas, there were only about ten left, and they were all sick and weak. There was another problem with these little guys - when they died, they turned into pieces and rotted quickly. This was especially because of the little four-dimensional jumps in their brains, which caused that behavior. We lost millions because of this."
"Why did that happen, Mr. Mike?"
"You know, some scientists on Earth heard about our time kittens, and they knew they would die before they arrived here at the next conjunction. So they paid us to keep the time kittens for them, one million dollars each."
"Did you do it?"
"Well, we tried, but we couldn't keep them. They were no good once they died, so we had to bury them. We tried freezing them in ice, but we could only preserve the outside. The inside was a mess, and those scientists wanted the inside."
"Naturally, if we lose one time kitten, we lose a million dollars, so we definitely don't want that to happen. One of us came up with an idea: if we put it in hot water when the time kitten is about to die, the water would soak it. Then, when it died, we could freeze the water, and it would just be a solid block of ice, preserving it."
I gasped. "Does that work?"
"We tried and tried, kid, but we couldn't freeze the water fast enough. By the time we froze all the water, the four-dimensional jumps in the time kitten's brain had already decayed. We froze the water faster and faster, but it just didn't work. In the end, we had only one time kitten left, and it was dying too. We were desperate - then a guy came up with an idea. He made a complicated device that could freeze all the water in an instant."
"We caught the last little guy, put it in hot water, and then turned on the machine. This little guy looked at us one last time, made a funny little sound, and died. We pressed the button, and everything froze into a solid block of ice in about half a half-second." Here, Mike let out a sigh as heavy as an iceberg. "But it didn't work. That time kitten decayed completely within fifteen minutes, and we lost the last million."
I held my breath. "But Mr. Mike, you just said that you froze the time kitten in half a half-second. It didn't have time to decay."
"That's right, kid," he said heavily, "we did it too damn fast. The time kitten couldn't be preserved because we froze the hot water so damn fast that the ice was still warm!"