Time Pussy

The unnamed narrator of "Time Pussy" relates a story he heard as a boy from Old Mac, who had been an asteroid prospector back during the "Rush of '37". Old Mac tells the narrator about some cat-like animals he knew on Pallas that existed in four dimensions: in addition to the usual spatial dimensions, the Pallan cats "stretched somewheres into middle o' next week" (and were thus living precursors of Asimov's fictional chemical compound thiotimoline). The "time pussies" would howl twenty-four hours before seeing a burglar, and digest their meals three hours before eating them. Old Mac tells how some scientists back on Earth were willing to pay a million dollars for the preserved remains of a time pussy, but the animals would decay too quickly after death to be useful. The miners finally came up with the idea of soaking a time pussy in water just before it died, then quickly freezing the water. However, the attempt to preserve the last time pussy failed, because the water froze so quickly it was still warm.

• Time Pussy title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database