9. THE BODY

THE CASE OF MERCURY RISING, 9

“Hey! Igor! You never said anything about you listening in to our private conversations!” I protested, “and anyway it’s any time we want it to be now we’re out of range of such terrestrial things as days and nights!” I protested to thin air.

There was a delay of a few seconds, and then his voice, distinctive as ever, chuckled and he said, “have no fear, I’m not intending to spy on you but I must check from time to time that all is well on your cosy little ark,” he said, “and it will only be from time to time. Remember, ask the computer that you named Mercury Rising anything you need to know. It’s a good name, by the way. I’m off!”

And there was a click, and I knew that when Igor said he was off that’s exactly what he meant.

“I am at your service,” intoned the impersonal voice of Mercury Rising, “ask me whatever you need to know and if the answer’s in my data chip I’ll provide you with it.”

“Mercury Rising, not at the moment,” I replied, hoping it would understand a negative reply, and its silence rather inferred that it did.

“Well, I hope that’s us on our own,” sighed Angelina, “and how about us taking a nap? It might be early but in truth I could easily give Rip Van Winkle a challenge in the snoozing department!”

“You said us. Do you want me to nap with you?” I asked.

“Of course, hairy man! What would be the point if you weren’t?” she smiled.

The bed, when we got to it, and it was really only a single bunk bolted to the metal floor, was a tight squeeze for the two of us, which meant to me that I could only possibly share it with someone I really wanted to. Anyone other than Angelina and I would have been tempted to make a bed of my chair downstairs and end up all aches and pains.

But it was Angelina, and I watched as she stripped down to her undies whilst I did the same. I knew that whatever happened during this strange odyssey we were on one thing was constant: my love for this woman.

Once in the bunk, Angelina wriggled as close to me as she could, and I sighed. She had become like a drug to me, an infinitely desirable narcotic that was as essential to living and breathing as was air and water, and there was no chance that I was going to fall asleep just yet. But first, I needed to know something.

“Mercury Rising, can you hear us when we’re up here?” I asked the thin air around us.

The reply came back instantly. “Of course. I am programmed to be ever alert in the event of unforeseen emergencies no matter where you are.”

“Are there likely to be any?” asked Angelina, and the silence that followed her words meant she had to repeat them. “Mercury Rising, are there likely to be any emergencies?” she asked.

“Unforeseen means unforeseen,” replied the speaker, “and I cannot predict anything, but there are small objects in the vacuum of space, too small to have been detected back on Earth, and I may have to take evasive action, which may disturb you from time to time.”

“At least we know that it’s wide awake,” I said, gratefully.

“It makes you think, though, doesn’t it?” whispered Angelina, shivering despite the warmth in our vehicle, “there’s so much we don’t know, so much that nobody knows about the tiniest things in the Universe, and it would only take a very small thing, maybe just a grain of sand or a pebble, to punch a hole through the walls of this ship, what did Igor call it, his Ark? And we’d be turned into dehydrated corpses in seconds, drifting forever in the vastness of a Universe nobody even begins to understand.”

I shuddered. “How macabre,” I whispered.

And that set the mood for the rest of what she called her nap, and it came as no surprise to me that after a while and with little else said I could tell, by her breathing, that she had actually fell asleep.

“Mercury Rising, alert us if there’s a problem,” I said, and closed my eyes as well.

“I will,” was the simple mechanical reply. Then probably because Igor had programmed it to detect us when we slept, it dimmed the lights and emulated the dark but not quite black of night time beautifully.

And so I slept too. And I know that I dreamed a lot, but whatever it was that I dreamed got lost in the mysteries of the emptiness all around, leaving me with a feeling of isolation even though Angelina was warm next to me.

When I woke up I looked at my watch. It told me the time all right but it would have been helpful if it indicated AM or PM of even which day. But it was a bog standard analogue watch and the only special thing about it was the fact that I’d fitted it with a new battery before we left Earth. The last thing I wanted was to be disorientated by temporal ignorance. And that, of course, had happened already. Was it day or was it night? Was it today or maybe yesterday?

I slipped out of the bunk, trying not to disturb Angelina, but we were so close and interdependent that it was inevitable that she noticed.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Sorry darling. I didn’t want to disturb you,” I told her, “but I was curious about a few things and going to see if I could find a few answers.”

“What are the questions?” she yawned.

“Well, to starters, the diamonds. Where are they? After all, we’d better know where they are if we’re going to blast them into the heart of the sun. And secondly, what are we going to blast them with? I see no great big gun!”

“I wondered that too,” she admitted, “though the diamonds are in a tin my handbag!”

“In your handbag? What are they doing there, for goodness sake?”

“It was Igor. He took me to one side and explained that he knows about men and how they lose things. Remember, he lost the dentures all those months ago? Anyway, he said women are more trustworthy. So he gave them to me to look after. In a tin in my handbag, as I said.”

“Harrumph!” I muttered, pretending to be offended. “And did you agree with him?”

“Of course! I know men too!”

“I don’t mislay things!” I protested.

She grinned at me, a grin that I had come to recognise and love because it foretold something I guessed I would delight in hearing.

“There’s a little something you keep in your pants,” she said with mock seriousness, “and it seems to be lost because it’s not where I want it to be. I can think of somewhere a lot better than in there to put it. Now be a good boy, Royston, and get back in bed!”

What else could I do? This was what I might have called, in my younger years, a promise. I looked at her face in the near darkness and squeezed back into bed next to her just as Mercury Rising decided to interrupt what I hoped would be a few wonderful moments.

“Alert,” it said, it’s voice calm rather than harshly appropriate to the word, “alert: I detect a human body and its drifting in space on a collision course with us! Alert!”

© Peter Rogerson, 21.02.20