This was told me long ago by old Mac, who lived in a shack just over the hill from my old house. He had been a mining prospector out in the Asteroids during the Rush of ‘37, and spent most of his time now in feeding his seven cats.

“What makes you like cats So much, Mr. Mac?” I asked him.

The old miner looked at me and scratched his chin. “Well,” he said, “they reminds me o’ my leetle pets on Pallas. They was something like cats-same kind of head, sort o’-and the cleverest leetle fellers y’ ever saw. All dead!”

I felt sorry and said so. Mac heaved a sigh. “Cleverest leetle fellers,” he repeated. “They was four-dimensional pussies.”

“Four-dimensional, Mr. Mac? But the fourth dimension is time.” I had learned that the year before, in the third grade.

“So you’ve had a leetle schooling, hey?” He took out his pipe and filled it slowly. “Sure, the fourth dimension is time. These pussies was about a foot long and six inches high and four inches wide and stretched somewheres into middle o’ next week. That’s four dimensions, ain’t it? Why, if you petted their heads, they wouldn’t wag their tails till next day, mebbe. Some 0 the big ones wouldn’t wag till day after. Fact!”

I looked dubious, but didn’t say anything.

Mac went on: “They was the best leetle watchdogs in all creation, too. They had to be. Why, if they spotted a burglar or any suspicious character, they’d shriek like a banshee. And when one saw a burglar today, he’d shriek yesterday, so we had twenty-four hours’ notice every time.”

My mouth opened. “Honest?”

“Cross my heart! Y’ want to know how we used to feed them? We’ d wait for them to go to sleep, see, and then we’d know they was busy digesting their meals. These leetle time pussies, they always digested their meals exactly three hours before they ate it, on account their stomachs stretched that far back in time. So when they went to sleep, we used to look at the time, get their dinner ready and feed it to them exactly three hours later.”

He had lit his pipe now and was puffing away. He shook his head sadly. “Once, though, I made a mistake. Poor leetle time pussy. His name was Joe, and he was just about my favorite, too. He went to sleep one morning at nine and somehow I got the idea it was eight. Naturally, I brought him his feed at eleven. I looked allover for him, but I couldn’t find him.”

“What had happened, Mr. Mac?”

“Well, no time pussy’s insides could be expected to handle his breakfast only two hours after digesting it. Its too much to expect. I found him finally under the tool kit in the outer shed. He had crawled there and died of indigestion an hour before. Poor leetle feller! After that, I always set an alarm, so I never made that mistake again.”

There was a short, mournful silence after that, and I resumed in a respectful whisper: “You said they all died, before. Were they all killed like that?”

Mac shook his head solemnly. “No! They used to catch colds from us fellers and just die anywhere from a week to ten days before they caught them. They wasn’t too many to start with, and a year after the miners hit Pallas they wasn’t but about ten left and them ten sort o’ weak and sickly. The trouble was, leetle feller, that when they died, they went all to pieces; just rotted away fast. Especially the little four-dimensional jigger they had in their brains which made them act the way they did. It cost us all millions o’ dollars.”

“How was that, Mr. Mac?”

“Y’ see, some scientists back on Earth got wind of our leetle time pussies, and they knew they’d all be dead before they could get out there next conjunction. So they offered us all a million dollars for each time pussy we preserved for them.”

“And did you?”

“Well, we tried, but they wouldn’t keep. After they died, they were just no good any more, and we had to bury them. We tried packing them in ice, but that only kept the outside all right. The inside was a nasty mess, and it was the inside the scientists wanted.

“Natur’lly, with each dead time pussy costing us a million dollars, we didn’t want that to happen. One of us figured out that if we put a time pussy into hot water when it was about to die, the water would soak all through it. Then, after it died, we could freeze the water so it would just be one solid chunk o’ ice, and then it would keep.”

My lower jaw was sagging. “Did it work?”

“We tried and we tried, son, but we just couldn’t freeze the water fast enough. By the time we had it all iced, the four-dimensional jigger in the time pussy’s brain had just corrupted away. We froze the water faster and faster but it was no go. Finally, we had only one time pussy left, and he was just fixing to die, too. We was desperate-and then one of the fellers thought o’ something. He figured out a complicated contraption that would freeze all the water just like that -in a split second.

“We picked up the last leetle feller and put him into the hot water and hooked on the machine. The leetle feller gave us a last look and made a funny leetle sound and died. We pressed the button and iced the whole thing into a solid block in about a quarter of a second.” Here Mac heaved a sigh that must have weighed a ton. “But it was no use. The time pussy spoiled inside 0’ fifteen minutes and we lost the last million dollars.”

I caught my breath. “But Mr. Mac, you just said you iced the time pussy in a quarter of a second. It didn’t have time to spoil.”

“That’s just it, leetle feller,” he said heavily. “We did it too doggoned fast. The time pussy didn’t keep because we froze that hot water so derned fast that the ice was still warm!”

 The most unusual thing about this small item is that it was not published under my own name. Campbell wanted one item in that first “Probability Zero” to appear to be by a non-professional, just to encourage the newcomers he hoped would try to break in. He had three entries in that first department and the other two were by L. Sprague de Camp and Malcolm Jameson. Both were longer-established and (despite “Nightfall”) more renowned than I. As low man, it was up to me to use a pseudonym and pretend to be a newcomer.

 I saw Campbell’s point and, just a little sullenly, agreed. I used the name George E. Dale. It is the only time I ever used a pseudonym in the magazines. In later years I used the pseudonym Paul French on a series of six teen-age science fiction novels for reasons that are another story altogether. That was a special case, and in 1971 and 1972 those six novels appeared as paperbacks under my own name. Now “Time Pussy” appears here under my own name, and the record is at last absolutely clean.

 There followed a two-month period during which I wrote nothing.

 The reasons were twofold. In the first place, Pearl Harbor put the United States in the war the day I wrote “Time Pussy,” and those first two months after the debacle were too disastrous and heartbreaking to allow much in the way of fiction composing.

 If that in itself weren’t enough, the time had come to try, once again, the qualifying examinations that would, or would not, grant me permission to do research. I very much felt myself to be dangling over the abyss. A second failure to pass would probably mean an end for me at Columbia. Consequently, during those hours when I wasn’t working in my father’s candy store or hanging over the radio, I had to be studying. There was time for nothing else at all.

 Hedging my bets rather desperately, I registered for graduate work at New York University, just in case I did not pass once again. After I took my qualifying examinations, at the end of January 1942, I actually attended a few classes at N.Y.U. while waiting for the results to be announced. -but I won’t keep you in suspense. On Friday, the thirteenth of February, the results were announced. I had passed, this time.

 During the interval between the taking of the qualifying examinations and the annunciation, I managed to do “Victory Unintentional.” This was a positronic robot story that was a sequel to “Not Final!” which had not been a positronic robot story. obviously I was trying to ride the series notion all I could, in the hope of surer sales.

 I submitted it to Campbell on February 9, 1942, and if I thought Campbell would find himself unable to reject a series story, I was roundly disabused. Nor was he so impressed by “Nightfall” and by my “Foundation” series as to find himself incapable of making the rejection a severe one.

 On February 13. the very day of my passing into the sacred list of those permitted to do research toward their Ph.D., my spirits were somewhat dashed when I received “Victory Unintentional?” back with a cryptic rejection, which consisted of the following, in toto, “CH3C2CH2CH2SH.” Campbell very well knew that this was the formula for “butyl mercaptan, “ which gives the skunk its smell, and I very well knew it, too, and Campbell very well knew I knew.

 Oh, well! I managed to sell it anyway, to Super Science Stories under its post-Pohl editor, on March 16, 1942, and it appeared in the August 1942 issue of that magazine. Though I did not include it in I, Robot, I did include it, of necessity, in The Rest of the Robots.

 After that, though, there came another dry period, the longest I was ever to experience. Once “Victory Unintentional” was finished, fourteen months (I) were to pass before I turned back to the typewriter. It was not the conventional “writer’s block,” of course, for that I have never experienced. Rather, it was the coming of a vast, triple change in my life.

 The first change was the fact that I was now beginning chemical research in earnest under Professor Charles R. Dawson. Research is a full-time job and I still had to work it around, somehow, my duties in my father’s candy store, so there was bound to be very little time for writing.

 Then, as though that weren’t enough, a second change took place simultaneously

 In January 1942 I joined an organization called ‘The Brooklyn Writers’ Club,” which had sent me a postcard of invitation. I took the invitation to be a recognition of my status as a “writer” and I couldn’t possibly have refused.

 The first meeting I attended was on January 19, 1942. It turned out to be rather pleasant. I welcomed the chance to get my mind off the qualifying examinations and the war disasters (though I remember spending part of that first meeting discussing the possibility that New York might be bombed).