Pete

Pete is Dan Davis’s cat and companion, an animal whose loyalty is expressed less through obedience than through his own urgent purposes. He protects Dan during the confrontation with Miles and Belle, crosses the Long Sleep with him, and is present when Frederica wakes. In the novel’s final image, Pete keeps trying doors in the belief that one will open onto summer, turning his characteristic persistence into an affectionate echo of the book’s central image of hope and return.

Identity and Character

Pete is a cat with a strong sense of his own priorities. When Dan waits for him after the attack on Miles and Belle, Pete is still prowling around the house, intent on the business that has just occupied him; Dan understands that the cat will come over only when his emotions have settled. He calls softly rather than trying to seize Pete, recognizing that the animal cannot be hurried out of the state he is in. Their closeness is real, but it does not erase Pete’s independence.

That combination of attachment and autonomy shapes their reunion. When Dan calls him home, Pete first sits down to wash himself. Only after he looks up and Dan opens his arms does Pete leap into them. His return is physical and immediate, but not submissive: he has finished his own business and then chooses contact. Dan carries him back to the car, where Pete sniffs the hardware in his accustomed place before discovering that the dismantled Flexible Frank has displaced it. He has to ride in Dan’s lap, and makes his displeasure plain.

Courage and Reunion with Dan

When Dan returns to 1970 and retrieves Flexible Frank from the locked garage, he dismantles the robot and loads its pieces into his car. While Dan is still occupied with the last component, he hears Pete begin to wail. Pete has gone into the house, where Miles and Belle are, and the commotion that follows is heard through running, crashes, Pete’s war cry, and Belle’s screams. Dan cannot see the struggle from where he waits outside, but Pete’s sounds establish that he has taken the fight to the people who had wronged Dan.

The reunion does not happen at once. The screen door is hooked, and Dan has to cut through the obstruction and unhook it before Pete can burst outside. Pete hits the screen with such force that Dan compares the impact to a stunt motorcyclist hitting a fence. Once free, Pete continues prowling for an entrance and issuing a deep challenge. Dan stays clear of him, knowing not to touch a cat while it is still agitated, and calls to him gently whenever he passes. Pete looks at Dan twice but initially ignores him; only after the commotion has passed does he sit, wash, and leap into Dan’s arms. The sequence makes their bond legible through patience and recognition rather than command.

Companion in the Long Sleep

Pete’s place in Dan’s plans becomes explicit when Dan tells Frederica that he intends to take the Long Sleep. Frederica fears that she will never see Dan again and asks why he and Pete cannot instead come live with her and her grandmother in Brawley. Dan promises that the separation will not be permanent: he will see her again, and Pete will go with him into cold sleep. Pete is not an incidental passenger in Dan’s future; Dan includes him in the promise by which he explains the coming separation.

That promise is fulfilled when Frederica wakes. As she opens her eyes and recognizes Dan and Pete, Pete chirrlupps and jumps onto the bed, making shoulder dives against her in an ecstasy of welcome. His greeting supplies an immediate, bodily answer to the long wait: Frederica is awake, Dan is there, and Pete recognizes her. The cat’s exuberance links the reunion across the years to the earlier promise that all three would meet again.

Aging, Care, and the Door into Summer

In the closing reflection, Dan observes that Pete is getting older and a little fatter, and is less inclined to choose a younger opponent. Dan anticipates that Pete will eventually have to take the very Long Sleep. His hope for the cat imagines a kind of afterlife fitted to Pete’s desires: catnip fields, complacent tabbies, robot opponents programmed to fight fiercely but always lose, and friendly people without a foot that kicks. The fantasy is both comic and tender, grounded in Dan’s knowledge of the cat’s pleasures and vulnerabilities.

Dan’s care also takes practical form. He has built Pete an automatic, self-replenishing, sanitary, odorless cat bathroom for bad weather. Pete nevertheless prefers to go outdoors and has never abandoned his conviction that trying all the doors will eventually reveal the Door into Summer. The contrast between an engineered convenience and a cat’s unaltered habit captures Pete’s character: he can be provided for, but he cannot be made to want what someone else has designed for him.

The image also resonates with the novel’s ending. Dan says that he has found his own Door into Summer and would not risk time travel again for fear of getting off at the wrong station; he would urge a son toward the future rather than back toward the past. Pete, by contrast, continues testing the doors. Dan treats the cat’s belief with affection rather than correction, finally allowing that Pete may be right. The closing image makes Pete more than a companion in Dan’s adventures: his stubborn search gives the title’s promise a modest, domestic form, sustained by curiosity, hope, and the expectation that somewhere a door will open.