The next asteroid, numbered 263, was spinning fit to bust, due to a chance encounter back in the dinosaur’s hey days. The Captain decide, for the safety of the Hoi Polio, who were itching to get out and stretch their legs, to halt the spinning.
Slow approach, hissing guidance jets. All quiet on the western.
She sphinx stretched out a paw and made it so, leaving claw marks between the scattered craters.
They disembarked and discovered a woman in a deck chair, asleep.
Excuse, said the Captain, all gentle like, Are we on course for the solar housing department? We have the paperwork. Here she waved a manilla folder from the Philippines.
The woman awoke, and noticing that the asteroid had settled into an eternal sunrise/sunset position, hugged the Sphinx, then the Captain and as many of the Hoi Poloi as she could muster.
That was a pleasant hugging, said the Captain, might I enquire if we are taken for long lost relatives? Or perhaps members of a winning team?
It was a hugging of thank you, said the deck chair, I have been watching the stars sweep endlessly past since I, you have no idea. This quiet contemplation of a sunrise, or is it a sunset, is positively relaxing.
Of course, it is neither, the sun will neither rise nor set now that the asteroid has come to rest. It will be forever now.
I shall start a tourism industry based on an eternal happy hour, said the deck chair, I shall neither go to bed nor get up. Every meal will be breakfast and diner combined, lunch, brunch and teatime will be outlawed. Pyjamas bottoms with a dress jacket will be worn for special occasions and public holidays. There will be no days, weeks, months or years, so that I shall live forever and never get told.
It will be great for studying the suns corona or coronet. The great plumes of plasmatics that spray out of the roiling surface in fits and starts. Wafting tempests of solar wind across the planets and into the asteroid belt and braces.
Studying the expression that was the corona with darkened telescopes, revealed Aton’s dressing up box. In plumes and swirls, the constituents of marzipan and kataifi, honey rivers and streams of caramel lava twisting in widening gyre. The detail, assorted chocolate boxes, ribbons swiftly removed, nestled in a tray of plasticma, each individually tailored to hold a particular variety without hurry, next a small pools of crème anglaise in shoals and patterned configuration replying to each others gravitational attraction, with particle ejected of cane sugar, unrefined and clumping with sticky fingers.
Step back, the whole escaping like wistful pond splash in slow motion, only to fall back exhausted into the belly of the sun, to unburn and reburn the best bits.
Invisible, indivisible, unparticled, smaller than the smallest, slipping between the spaces that were too small, the solar wind chimes, singing a voiceless symphony, raced away into the. Carrying nothing but an overnight suitcase containing a change of clothes, a yellow toiletries bag, toothbrush, toothpaste and flannel, some sun cream in a tube less than 100mm and half a packet of waterproof plasters. In the side pocket, an e reader in airplane mode, kept switching itself on and off without warning and an apple that was getting warm and unappealing.
Without malicious intent, but with deadly cargo, the solar breezes headed out towards the human realms where humans realmed, luckily protected by the magnetosphere or wobbly teardrop of lies which enclosed the plantet but not the other one or the asteroids.
We shall have to find a planet with a central core of iron, said the Captain, preferably spinning a yarn but definitely projecting a safety magnet o spere to protect us from this sweet destructive confectionery. This wind is positively acrimonious or do I mean acerbic, aggressive or corrosive.
In the meantime, said the deck chair, Would you like a cocktail, they are half price?
I think that you may need to revisit your business model, said the Hoi, the idea of happy hour is to entrap the thirsty with drinks, sold at less than cost price so that at end of the hour they are so inebriated that they continue drinking even though the drinks now cost one and a half time their normal. As it stand, you are likely to go bankrupt in less time than it takes to boil a kettle or darn this hole in my sock, holds up foot.
Let us leave this cocktail asteroid, as it is going to go bust toute suite.
The Guardians of the Cave 