21
McGee’s Underground
Abode, on the Dark Planet
Knowing all explosions fade, even monster explosions billions of light years
away, supernovas that is, perhaps at its surface being 100,000 degrees, this
mega-supernova with the brightness of 600-billion times that of Earth’s sun,
10,000-light years away, Dr. McGee standing on the Black Planet looking up at
and into the Spiral Galaxy’s far-off darkness, in the constellation #89,
knowing it center to be very compact, boosted by a dense highly magnetized,
magnate. A sudden shockwave disturbed the space environment around the Black
Planet—causing McGee and his family to find shelter underground, thus the atmosphere
filling up, and stirring up gas and dust, and blinding the planet from its sun
and moon, dropping the temperature to a near freezing level for several months,
killing much of the foliage and all the long ear plants that had evolved in the
last million or so years.
Actually what took
place—Dr. McGee explained to me one afternoon, after his return to Earth from
the Black Planet, and I shall explain what he said now, the best I can: when this
explosion took place there was a temper tantrum, throwing off enough heat and
radiation to make today’s sunspots and coronal mass ejections look like
hiccups. This radiation vaporized most of the Dark Planets crust, the solar
wind had blown the remnants back out into the solar system around our planet. Saving
perhaps a good portion of the foliage, but not nearly half of what it was. But
for less than fifty-people, it would do.
Had the Dark Planet, had it been a larger planet it might have lost its
outer shell, and become like Mercury, a dead planet. We didn’t have big collisions either during
this cosmic shockwave, commonplace on many planets and moons as you know Dr.
D., knocking us out of our orbit—it could have done that,, thank God for that
it didn’t, we’d have plunged into the sun, I mean the nearest star. But that’s
how it was, if that makes any sense. Actually what I remember to be frank was a
swirling disk of dust and gas, like a solar nebula, circling the planet, what
stuff or material I can’t say, but blinding, hot and scorching.
With
McGee’s seven wives in a warm marble like cave, with grand peaks and towers, carved
to the likes of a palace by nature, and with his twenty-one children life went
on nearly as normal; a creek running
throughout the cave’s maze, allowed for a good water supply, and fish and other
growths that were eatable, hence, it was
under such circumstances, a pleasant, or as pleasant as it could be for those
months inhabitants within that hibernation period; and McGee, returned to
normal with a tremendously bigger appetite for food than for sex, thereafter.
But
all is not well, that ends well, he was getting tired of living a hermit’s life
on the Dark Planet, even with seven wives, in that he could do little, to zero
exploration into the cosmos.
#4996/1-14-2016
SF Vignette #7 (with Dr. McGee)
