21. STARTING FOR HOME

THE CASE OF MERCURY RISING, 21

“You’re a cuckoo!” I told her, smiling, “you took it with you when you went to the loo not an hour ago. I saw you and you were in such a hurry I reckoned it must be that time of the month!”

She blushed and squawked “Silly me!” before rushing down into the basement where the minuscule toilet was. When she returned she was carrying her bag with a slightly self-conscious expression on her face.

“Don’t you say anything, and here’s what you want!” she said, and withdrew a slightly battered small tin that had once held fruit pastilles from the rediscovered bag, and shook it. The rattle told us that it still contained what could only be Igor’s diamonds.

“Attention! Time is of the essence!” almost snapped Mercury Rising in its most authoritarian voice yet, and the inner airlock door slid open. “The time has come to jettison the cargo,” it added, more gently.

I knew what I had to do and I took the tin from Angelina and went through the door into the airlock. As Igor had intimated there was a small locker in there, one that was the same colour as its surroundings, a mustard sort of yellow, which explains why I hadn’t spotted it before. Inside it I found the cushion, a phenomenally light pillow with, as directed, a pocket into which I could fit the tin of diamonds. By the look of it Igor must have made it himself, and I grinned as it crossed my mind that he had limited needlecraft skills.

“Any one of these stones would have seen us okay for the rest of our days,” I muttered to Angelina who had followed me in, for the diamonds were large enough to be very valuable and I had no idea where Igor had found them. He certainly hadn’t the sort of wealth that would have allowed him to tour the world sucking up unwanted and huge precious stones on the gemstone markets. I assumed he must have found a way of making them himself, though at the back of my mind I thought I had heard that the manufacture of even the tiniest real diamond is just about possible but extremely difficult and requires huge temperatures and pressures. Not likely in Igor’s neck of the woods!

“By the outer airlock door then,” I said, and placed it where I thought it might stand the best chance of being scattered by the draft of escaping air when that door eventually opened.

“Retreat to the cabin,” said the computer, this time a little less insistent.

And I did just that, holding Angelina by the hand. I was hardly likely to wait around for the emptiness of space to suck the life out of me! When the outer airlock door opened all the air, every molecule of it, would rush to become one with the vacuum of the Universe because, as my science teacher once told us when I was a schoolboy and knee-high to a grasshopper, nature abhors a vacuum and tries to fill it with anything it can find.

I sat in my chair, for once fixed the seat belt ‘just in case’, and glued my eyes to the monitor.

Then the computer decided on a piece of drama and started counting down from ten as if it was about to launch a rocket into orbit from Earth. Hardly necessary, but it added to the poignancy of the moment.

When it reached one I saw the outer airlock door slide open on the monitor and fancied I could hear the whoosh as the air in it tried to fill the immense vacuum of space. And with that air I saw the cushion as it seemed, for a moment, to want to stay where I’d put it next to the door, then lifted itself almost reluctantly before racing out into the vastness of an almost empty universe.

“Well, farewell diamonds,” I said quietly to Angelina, “they never were any use to man nor beast.”

“But been the cause of a hell of a lot of misery over the span of human life,” she commented, “I wonder how many people, men or women, have been forced to a grisly end because of a misplaced love of the glittery things?”

“Too many,” I agreed, and I watch the cushion and its unbelievably valuable contents slowly rotate as if it was a little world in orbit round a giant sun. And by now the sun was truly huge, though we were unable to see it as our craft had been manoeuvred so that the camera was looking away from it for most of the time. But it was shining all right on the cushion, and there was something pathetic about the way that ill-stitched terrestrial object seemed to hang in the vastness of a solar system that my mind now saw as even bigger than I’d previously thought.

“Ahem,” said Mercury Rising, and I grinned because as it spoke Mercury itself, the innermost planet of the solar system, seemed to be rising into the camera’s view.

“That must be a really hot little world,” murmured Angelina.

“But not the hottest,” I told her, and she grinned at me.

“I know you’d try and educate me,” she said, “because I’m a mere woman and don’t understand those things!”

“I’m not misogynistic like that!” I said, sounding petulant even to myself, and added, “it’s not my fault that science teachers didn’t used to think a female brain might not want to know about planets and stuff.”

“Then you’d better tell me why it’s hotter even than Mercury because you’d expect Mercury to be the hottest because it’s the closest to the sun,” she said, “because in all honesty it’s one of the bits of knowledge I’ve missed out learning about, being just a girl.”

“Carbon dioxide,” I told her, “you know, the gas that the butterfly woman said they absorbed instead of roast beef and Yorkshire pud? The same gas that we Earthlings had better stop pumping into the atmosphere, because it causes what they call the greenhouse effect and, like a greenhouse, increases the heat of everything inside it. So Venus, which has an atmosphere high in carbon dioxide, is warmer than Mercury even though Mercury’s a lot closer to the sun.”

“I guess I did know that, then, after all” she said, smiling so sweetly I could have done several interesting things to her there and then had I not been in possession of a huge amount of self control. It still astounded me just how much I loved that woman!

“I wonder if the butterfly people really understand how hot it is on Venus,” I mused.

The computer coughed. I know it didn’t have the plumbing necessary to cough, but it still contrived to cough.

“Information,” it said.

“Yes?” I asked in unison with Angelina.

“In my research into those you refer to as butterfly people, and after a few words with Mistress Flutterby, I ascertained that their home planet was in the process of heating up as a consequence of the star it orbited slowly swelling on its way to becoming what you humans call a red giant. Although that star will be cooling down, its increasing size will soon encompass the orbit of their world, and everything on it will be burned to a cinder in the fullness of time. It was already getting to be unpleasant to them before they left, which is why they have launched a flotilla of spherical craft in search of new homes. I think we can suggest that have become acclimatised even to the conditions on Venus.”

“I see,” I replied, “thanks, Mercury Rising.”

I’d never thanked it like that before, and I got the illogical feeling that its silence was a glow of sudden grateful pride.

After a period of glowing silence it continued.

“We are returning to Earth after this turn around Mercury,” it said, “and my silicon chips have been wondering.”

“They have?” asked Angelina.

“Yes, they have. The big question is, have you any plans to deal with the problem of the being who called himself Sandy Grimsdyke?”

That question hit me for a six.

Sandy Grimsdyke, the man in the moon from Barnsley. Stranded with three fellow travellers on an inhospitable place like the moon.

A science-fiction type castaway, marooned in space.

How could I justify leaving him and his friends there if it were possible for us to rescue him now that our mission was over?

“We’ll have to do something, of course,” murmured Angelina, looking at me.

© Peter Rogerson, 04.03.20