24. THE MOON CHILD

THE CASE OF MERCURY RISING, 24

There could have been nothing more boring than the days that slowly swelled into weeks as we hurtled back towards our home planet. With Venus getting further and further behind us and even the dead balloonist nowhere near our trajectory, we had precious little to look at on the monitor. Even Carry on Camping lost its charm!

But we had each other and had the time to learn in precise detail what most pleased the other, but even that became, not exactly a chore, it could never be that, but one familiarity too great. So it was a relief when, one day, Mercury Rising bade us pause in our love-making and take a look at the monitor.

The moon dominated the screen, its grey ochre monochrome, broken here and there by some of the larger craters and their shadows. And there was one crater, not unlike many of the others, that was in the dead centre of the screen.

“That central crater is where the man Sandy Grimsdyke was standing when we came two months ago,” the computerised voice said in sombre tones.

Two months! Is that all? I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had said two years! Time was becoming a strange elastic kind of thing, something that stretched interminably both behind us and before us, and left me feeling confused..

There was no one standing there now, eyes raised to the lunar skies and waving arm, and no sign that there might be anyone watching us. Yet I couldn’t help noticing a compacted patch of dust where feet had left their marks, and without me asking Mercury Rising zoomed in on those footprints, magnifying them until they might have been mere inches away. I could quite clearly make out the pattern of boot treads, almost certainly from those attached to the worn all-in-one space-suit I had noticed Sandy Grimsdyke wearing when we had seen him.

“Shall we land?” asked the computerized voice of Mercury Rising, still sombre and non-committal, clearly waiting, possibly for the first time, for an order from us.

“What’s the point?” asked Angelina, “if we can’t see them? After all, they were pretty keen on detecting us last time we came, you’d think Sandy would have suited up if only to wave at us once more. Maybe they’re fed up with us, not taking them.”

“You could suit up too,” intoned the ship, “there are simple but perfectly adequate suits in the locker.”

Locker? What locker? Where might there be a locker I didn’t know anything about?

“The locker is in the airlock, where the cushion was,” continued the computer helpfully, even though I hadn’t asked it. “There are two perfectly lightweight but useable airtight vacuum resistant suits, complete with helmets and boots, an air supply and intercom, and the humans in their crater might be in need of help.”

“Then land,” I insisted, “it’s just possible that there could be something wrong here. It wouldn’t be right if there’s sickness amongst them, and we could help them if we arrived in time.”

“Neither of us has any medical expertise,” pointed out Angelina, “and what about us catching it like Igor suggested we might?”

“Your airtight suits are unlikely to let anything dangerous in,” murmured Mercury Rising, and I couldn’t help thinking that it was joining in to the conversation as if it was a third human being itself. Then, without pausing, it continued, “Landing procedures in action. Please be seated in case this gets bumpy.”

It didn’t get bumpy. We didn’t even notice the exact moment when we touched down and wouldn’t have known we were on the lunar surface if the ship hadn’t told us. There wasn’t really a change in anything because one of the side-effects of the kind of gravitational drive Igor had invented was the way it tended to equalise the pull of gravity no matter where we were.

“What now, then?” asked Angelina.

“We can’t stay long,” said the computer, “but you can take half an hour or so if you want to investigate the whereabouts of Mr Grimsdyke.”

It didn’t say why, but half an hour was a time limitation I could comfortably live with. I learned later that much more than half an hour and the small supplies of air we had in the bottles on our back-packs would be exhausted.

We suited up in the airlock and it seemed that Igor had provided us with a one-size-fits-all selection of garments designed to protect us from the vacuum that lay beyond the walls of our ship. Never mind: there were only two and they fitted both of us.

Then the outer air-lock door was opened by the ship’s computer and for the first time since our adventure had begun we were on the outside of the vessel that had fed us, lubricated us when we were thirsty, and given us air to breathe since we had left home.

“We’ve not got long. That guy Grimsdyke mentioned this crater,” said Angelina, her voice crackling to me via the wireless intercom, our one and only umbilicus connecting us together.

I went to where there had clearly been feet, for the prints left by them were very obvious, and they led to a series of steps that someone had hewn into the moon rock. The steps were crude, but still must have taken a great deal of hewing, especially when those doing that hewing were burdened by unwieldy space suits.

“Let’s go down,” I whispered, though why I needed to whisper wasn’t clear to me.

She nodded, and together, slowly, we made our way down less than a dozen steps until we reached an equally rough archway that seemed to lead into the walls of the crater itself, and there we saw the first real signs of earthly activity, for there was a metal wall and a round door set tightly in it.

“This must have been part of their rocket, or whatever it was they used to get here,” I said.

“Does it open?” asked Angelina, and I pushed it.

The door did, indeed, swing open, and when we walked through it we found ourselves in a tiny compartment, obviously the airlock adapted from a space vessel. There was another door directly opposite us, and when we closed the door behind us, the one we’d entered through, the other door automatically opened.

It led into the kind of place I’d never have dreamed could exist anywhere, let alone on the moon. It was a room, but rougher than rough, cave-like yet clearly man-made, and the floor was covered in a few randomly distributed rugs, possibly the from floor covering of their space craft if it had the luxury of carpets. Sandy had said they had utilised its components for their home here on the moon, and we could see how.

But it wasn’t the rough walls or the shabby floor that attracted our attention so much as the figures lying in grotesque positions on the four chairs that constituted just about the only furniture in the room other than what had once been a control desk.

There was no doubt about it. They were all dead. Sandy was amongst them and from the look of him without his helmet on he might have been dead for a week or maybe even more.

“This is horrible,” muttered Angelina, “don’t breathe the air here, for Heaven’s sake.”

“I’ve never, we couldn’t...” I stammered. And I hadn’t seen anything like this macabre sight. I’d had nightmares occasionally, once or twice, in my adult life, but not one of them was as terrifying as the way I felt as I looked at the sorry picture of death in front of us. These fellow humans must have collapsed suddenly onto their chairs and died, possibly one at the time, with nobody to tend to their corpses or find a burial place for them.

Angelina made her way across the cave-like room to an anteroom at the back, out of sight where we initially stood.

“Oh no,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Quick, we must get this away,” she shouted, and when I joined her I saw what the matter was.

In what looked like a jerry-build crib, enclosed in an airtight bubble, lay a baby,

And although we couldn’t hear anything in our space suits, from the way the baby was moving we could tell that it was crying and still alive.

© Peter Rogerson 07.03.20