In the U.K. this met with a mixed response, and not just from those who preferred Star Trek. Britain’s decision to opt out of the Federal Space Programme had seemed a welcome economy in the niggardly nineties. Once the moon came in sight, however, the patriotic tabloids started screaming, how come these inferior foreigners were prancing around in the Greatest Show Off Earth with no U.K. involvement unless you counted the use of English as the expedition’s lingua franca?
But all most True Brits felt when they realized their choice of channels had been reduced from ninety-seven to ninety-six was a vague irritation, which Andy Dalziel would probably have shared had he been able to switch over manually. Unfortunately he was confined to bed by an attack of gout, and irritation rapidly boiled into rage, especially as his visiting nurse, who had retired to the kitchen for a recuperative smoke, ignored all his cries for help. It took a violent splintering explosion to bring her running, white-faced, into the bedroom.
Dalziel was sinking back into his pillows, flushed with the effort and the triumph of having hurled his useless remote control through the telly screen.
“Now look what you’ve made me do,” he said. “Don’t just stand there. Fetch me another set. I’m missing Star Trek.”
It took three days for it to emerge that what the two hundred and twenty-seven million witnesses had seen wasn’t just an unhappy accident but murder.
Till then, most of the U.K. press coverage had been concerned with interpreting the dead man’s possibly unfinished last words. The favourite theory was that Oh mer... was simply oh mère, a dying man’s appeal to his mother, though the Catholic Lozenge stretched this piously to Oh mere de Dieu. When it was suggested that a life member of the Société Athéiste et Humaniste de France (Lourdes branch) would be unlikely to trouble the Virgin with his dying breath, the Lozenge tartly retorted that history was crammed with deathbed conversions. The Jupiter, whose aged owner ascribed his continued survival to just such a conversion during his last heart attack, showed its sympathy for this argument by adapting Camden’s couplet in its leader headline — BETWIXT THE MODULE AND THE GROUND, MERCY HE ASKED, MERCY HE FOUND. The Defender, taking this literally, suggested that if indeed Lemarque had been going to say Oh merci, this was less likely to be a plea for divine grace than an expression of ironic gratitude, as in, “Well, thanks a bunch for bringing me so far, then chopping me off at the knees!” The Planet meanwhile had torpedoed the oh mère theory to its own satisfaction by the discovery that Lemarque had been raised in a Lourdes orphanage where he had been very badly treated and never taken to the seaside (the Planet’s italics), persuading the editor that this poor deprived foreigner had reverted to infancy in the face of annihilation and was once again pleading to be taken au mer. Chortling with glee, the Intransigent pointed out that mer was feminine and congratulated the Planet on now being illiterate in two languages. Then it rather surrendered its superior position by speculating that, coming from Lourdes, Lemarque might have fantasized that he was falling into the famous healing pool and started to cry, Eau merveilleux!
It took the staid Autograph to say what all the French papers had agreed from the start — that Lemarque was merely exclaiming, like any civilized Gaul in a moment of stress, Oh merde!
All this Dalziel found rather less enthralling than nonalcoholic lager. But when the Spheroid scooped them all by revealing under the banner CASE OF THE EXPIRING FROG! that the Eurofed Department of Justice was treating Lemarque’s death as murder, he sat up and took notice, particularly when it was announced that the man in charge of the case was the U.K. commissioner in the Eurofed Justice Department, none other than his old friend and former colleague, Peter Pascoe.
“I taught that lad everything he knows,” he boasted as he watched Pascoe’s televised press conference from Strasbourg.
“Lad?” snorted Miss Montague, his new nurse, who could snatch and press her own considerable weight and whose rippling muscles filled Dalziel with nostalgic lust. “He looks almost as decrepit as you!”
Dalziel grunted a promise of revenge as extreme, and as impotent, as Lear’s, and turned up the sound on his new set.
Pascoe was saying, “In effect, what was at first thought to be a simple though tragic systems failure resulting in a short circuit in the residual products unit of his TEC, that is, Total Environment Costume, sometimes called lunar suit, appears after more detailed examination by American scientists working in the U.S. lunar village, for the use of whose facilities may I take this chance to say we are truly thankful, to have been deliberately induced.”
For a moment all the reporters were united in deep incomprehension. The man from the Onlooker raised his eyebrows and the woman from the Defender lowered her glasses; some scribbled earnestly as if they understood everything, others yawned ostentatiously as if there were nothing to understand. But it took the man from the Spheroid to put the necessary probing question — “You wha’?”
Patiently Pascoe resumed. “Not to put too fine a point on it, and using layman’s language, the microcircuitry of the residual products unit of his TEC had been deliberately cross-linked with both the main and the reserve power systems in such a manner that it needed only the addition of a conductive element, in this case liquescent, to complete the circuit with unfortunate, that is, fatal, consequences.”
Now the reporters were united in a wild surmise. The Onlooking eyebrows were lowered, the Defending spectacles raised. But once again it was the earnest seeker of enlightenment from the Spheroid who so well expressed what everyone was thinking. “You mean he pissed himself to death?”
Dalziel laughed so much he almost fell out of bed, though the nurse noted with interest that some internal gyroscope kept his brimming glass of Lucozade steady in his hand. Recovering, he downed the drink in a single gulp and, still chuckling, listened once more to his erstwhile underling.
Pascoe was explaining, “While there would certainly be a severe shock, this was not of itself sufficient to be fatal. But the short circuit would have cut dead all TEC systems, including the respiratory unit. It was the shock that made him fall. But it was the lack of oxygen that killed him, before the dust had started to settle.”
This sobered the gathering a little. But newsmen’s heartstrings vibrate less plangently than their deadlines and soon Pascoe was being bombarded with questions about the investigation, which he fielded so blandly and adroitly that finally Dalziel switched off in disgust and poured himself another glass of Lucozade. The nurse seized the bottle and raised it to her nostrils.
“I think this has gone off,” she said. “It smells peaty.”