7. MERCURY RISING

THE CASE OF MERCURY RISING, 7

I don’ t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. I’ve read about rockets taking off for orbit and the way the acceleration forces astronauts back into their seats and pulls their faces into strained effigies of themselves. When I was a schoolboy I read such stuff avidly. My dad had a collection of old magazines from his own youth, most of them so old they were going mouldy, and I read the lot of them. And I’ve seen films of space explorers taking off. I thought i knew what it was going to be like when our strange vertically elongated saucer took off, and it was nothing like that.

Instead, we were barely aware of motion. The feeling of nausea soon passed and we were just about back to normal, sitting in our rather comfortable chairs in front of a shiny coffee table and wondering what was what.

Angelina picked up the notebook Igor had told us we should read and slowly thumbed through it. After a couple of minutes she said, “this is interesting,” and looked at me.

“What is?” I asked.

“Apparently the first thing after take off that we must do is give this vehicle a name,” she said, “then every time we want it to do something we begin with that name and it knows we’re talking to it, but we must make sure we never use it in ordinary conversation or the thing might get confused.”

“In case the machine messes everything up, I supposed,” I murmured, thoughtfully.

“It’s nice having to give it a name we choose, though,” said Angelina thoughtfully. “It makes everything sort of personal to us rather than to Igor.”

“He’s that kind of guy,” I said, not knowing whether it was true or even what I really meant.

“What do you think we should call it?” she asked.

“Something to do with our destination? If we actually get there, I mean,” I suggested, shuddering at the thought of being lost for eternity in deep space.

“We’re going as close to the sun as Igor dared send us, in the shadow of Mercury, which, as far as I know, is a rather hot little world,” she replied, “being so close to the sun, that is.”

“I checked up on it,” I told her, “and it’s unbearably hot during the day, which is a great deal longer than an Earth day, and teeth-chattering cold during the nights. We couldn’t stand either so I doubt we’ll be able to land on the planet.”

“How do we know what we’re doing?” she asked, “Igor never told us, did he? You’d have thought he’d have said something.”

“Maybe there’s more about it in the note book?” I suggested.

“I’ll look in a minute, but first, what are we going to call this bird?” she asked.

“Mercury something or other?” I suggested, frowning.

“Maybe … let me think, when we get into space itself and heading towards the sun in Mercury’s shadow, we’ll see it as if it’s rising in the morning with the sun behind it, so what about that? Mercury Rising?”

“Mercury Rising? Yes, I like that. It rolls off the tongue and sounds sort of scientific, yet we’re unlikely to just put those words together in conversation,” I agreed, grinning at her.

“Then I’ll fix it at that.” She looked at the slim book again, and nodded her head before clearing her throat, and “vessel renamed Mercury Rising” she said in a clear voice.

There was the briefest of pauses, then a disembodied voice, which made my heart leap into my throat, echoed her. “Mercury Rising. Accepted.” it said.

She grinned at me, then put her nose back into the book.

“Ah,” she said after a while, looking back up at me “I get it. There’s a screen on that wall over there,” she pointed, “not a big one like the science fiction films have with gigantic images of a virtually empty stretch of space until asteroids come shooting past, but we should be able to see it quite clearly.”

I looked at where she was pointing and yes, there was what looked like a television screen to me. It blended in so well with the surrounding wall that I hadn’t noticed it until then.

“Switch it on, then,” he said.

“You do it,” she told me, “have a go!”

“All right. See if this works,” I replied, “Mercury Rising, Screen on!” I commanded.

Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

“It’s a question of vocabulary,” she said, grinning, and “Mercury Rising, monitor,” she said.

And the darned thing obeyed her. The black screen glowed instantly and showed an image of what I assumed was in our vicinity. And what was in our vicinity was nothing. No land, no clouds, just black, and it would have been featureless had it not been for the stars. And they weren’t the twinkling variety you might see in the sky on a clear night from your back garden, but points of light against a stark black backdrop.

“It’s sort of beautiful,” she whispered, then “Mercury Rising, show Earth.”

“Here, let me have a look at that book,” I said as the screen shifted its view and we were treated to a view of our home world. Looking at the image on the screen we could see the kind of view you might get on a clear day looking down from an intercontinental flight. Below us was an endless stretch of blue ocean with a few small clouds dotted randomly like solid things.

“That must be the Atlantic,” I said, “and look, there’s a coastline. Probably the States.”

As we looked the image shrank and what was at first just part of an ocean slowly became the whole disc of the world with a shadow over part of it, almost halving it. I was mesmerised by what I could see.

Angelina reached for one of my hands and held it tightly. “This is something,” she whispered, “home as we never saw it before.”

“It’s worth the possibility of danger and death just to see it this once,” I agreed, “but I think we should get to know this ship before one of us needs to go to the loo and we don’t know where it is!”

“Good thinking,” she said, smiling at me, “and sleeping accommodation. There’s got to be a bed for two or Igor wouldn’t have sent the two of us and he certainly can’t have expected us to sleep in these chairs, and I can’t help thinking it’s going to seem really spooky trying to sleep anyway, with all that black nothing around us.”

The view on the monitor had moved from the Earth to include the neighbourhood, and although it’s been widely publicised that the Earth is encircled by so much man-made debris in orbit that it’s a wonder it isn’t all like a solid shield of metal waste protecting our planet from invasions by little green men from Mars, it looked pretty empty to me. I could see nothing until, after quite a while sitting back and staring, I noticed a shiny metal object slowly drifting by, some distance away.

“Mercury Rising, what is that object?” I asked, and the reply came in that same disembodied voice, “metal artefact of unknown, possibly non-terrestrial origin...”

And a shiver ran through me when my mind repeated non-terrestrial for me to contemplate and then worry about.

Non-terrestrial? Where from, then?

“Mercury Rising, where’s the toilet?” I asked.

© Peter Rogerson 19.02.20