26. MERCURY CLOSING

THE CASE OF MERCURY RISING, 26

It was during the much shorter, by interplanetary standards, journey home that Angelina proved once and for all that I must always be in her shadow, for it was she who tended to little Mercury as if she was the child’s own mother, who kept the tiny scrap of life contented and fed and clean, and all I could do was hover in the background and philosophise about the superiority of the fair sex.

Igor had been briefed in as much detail as I could manage, which in all honesty was precious little, and said, rather weakly, I thought, that he was ready and waiting for our return. I asked him about his health and he shrugged my question off, which worried me. After all, he’d led us to believe he was terminally ill before we left home.

And so it was that before long in space-travel terms we were back in orbit round the Earth and already making a controlled decent even though neither of us had a single thing to do but sit in our seats and, just in case there was anything like turbulence to throw us around, belt ourselves in.

There was very little in the way of turbulence and, light as a feather from a fluffy cushion, we settled back down on Mother Earth not a dozen yards from where we had taken off a little over two months earlier. I would love to have given you, dear reader, a taste of the experience but really there was nothing to taste. One moment we were looking down to the distant surface of our home world on the monitor and, it seemed, the next we were standing up and making for the airlock.

Of course, it wasn’t quite as brief as that, but after you’ve been spending days then weeks with nothing to do but wait for the time to pass and watch old films that you’ve already seen more times than makes any sense, the short descent from orbit to green fields is as nothing.

And there was Igor.

Standing, but leaning on a walking stick and looking white as a sheet, Igor hardly looked the picture of perfect health. Why, the corpses back on the moon had looked healthier! Angelina’s sister was with him, holding him by one elbow and she had concern written on every line on her face.

“Why, Igor,” I said, “you look … dreadful!”

“Don’t you tell me,” was his reply, “I’m afraid I did manage to find a cure but the side effects of my wonder drug are probably worse than the condition itself!”

Angelina stood with me, holding Mercury, for that name even though it had been thought up on the spur of the moment, had stuck. The child, looking remarkably healthy for one who had come such a long way so early in her life would always be called Mercury. She was a miracle in so many ways and it seemed appropriate that she should be called by the same name as the winged messenger of ancient legend, for I’m sure had we taken more than a few hours longer reaching her, there would have been a fifth corpse on the moon. Our arrival had been a message of hope. It had saved her.

We all piled into my Land Rover, the car I’d had converted to operate from batteries rather than oil products, the one that I had driven to Igor’s before our journey had begun and the one that Igor had been using ever since our departure, though I could tell from the milometer reading he hadn’t driven it very far.

“Wait until we get back to my cave, and then I want to hear every word,” he said, rather too weakly to sound anything but dreadfully ill.

“He’ll pick up soon,” said Margie, his live-in girlfriend, “the cure’s working and he’s on the mend. You should have seen him last week.”

Crikey, I thought, if he looked worse than this last week he must have looked stone cold dead!

Igor drove my Land Rover the few miles from his own hidden and secret spaceport, though how he’d kept it secret was anyone’s guess, though it looked as though when the craft was in its hangar it might just as well have been in an a rather large agricultural barn that was going to rust and on the edge of a sort of ill-kept field.

He still lived in a natural cave despite his state of health, but I did note he had added to the machinery with a sophisticated air-purifier and several other medical aids that went beyond my own comprehension. But the cave, considerably more luxurious than the simple tomb on the moon where the Yorkshire castaways had lived for what was probably the best part of a decade, had about it an air of homeliness that was welcoming.

“How about some fish and chips?” asked Igor when we were seated and Margie was fussing and tut-tutting over Mercury, who was staring around her through pale blue eyes.

We didn’t reply. It seemed somehow cruel to expect a man who looked so sick to start peeling potatoes, and I guess he understood our reluctance.

“I had some delivered and froze them on the off chance you’d fancy some,” he said, grinning behind his whiskers, “the nutritious fare onboard Mercury Rising might have been healthy enough and kept body and soul together, but I’m pretty sure you’d say it was bland...”

“And monotonous,” added Angelina, cuddling Mercury, “and what’s more, I never want to see another omelette in my life!”

“By the way,” said Margie, Angelina’s sister and Igor’s live-in lover, “we’ve got the supplies you asked for. Nappies and baby formula. Now tell me how the baby survived whilst the adults all passed away? It seems most unlikely.”

“Mercury was in a heated home-made crib with an independent air supply,” I told her, “they must have known that whatever they were dying from was contagious and did their best to protect Mercury from it on the off-chance of her being rescued in time if none of them recovered.”

“She’ll have to be tested, though,” mumbled Igor, “we can’t have much more illness in this cave or it’ll be the death of me!”

“What’s your prognosis?” I asked him.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Who can tell?” he asked, “I reckon I’ve found a cure. At least it worked in a Petrie dish and I didn’t have much time for more comprehensive tests than that. And I do feel better. I can actually get out and about a bit, which I couldn’t have managed a week or two ago. But I’m not in the pink, not yet.”

“But he’s getting there,” put in Margie, determined to sound positive, “and he’d better get better because he’s promised me a trip to Venus before Christmas. He wants to introduce me to some giant butterflies, the ones you told him about.”

“With a bit of luck,” grinned the patient, and I could tell by the expression on his face that he had the will to return to reasonable health. “I was hoping that Blinky would be here to greet you, but he says he’s on a case and can’t spare the time.”

“Just as well,” I said, “because he wouldn’t like what we’ve got to tell him.”

“What’s that?” asked a surprised Igor.

“We quit,” said Angelina simply, “I’m not working for a man whose first reaction when we told him about the alien butterfly people was we ought to blast them out of the skies!”

“We’re of one mind there,” I confirmed, “the Curmudgeon Agency will have to manage without us from now on.”

“We’ll set up on our own,” added Angelina, “using the best part of three months back wages as starting capital.”

“If you get it,” said Igor darkly, “who can tell?”

Then Mercury started crying. Time, she was saying, for a feed. Where are those supplies of formula you mentioned?

THE END

© Peter Rogerson, 09.03.20