‘That’s what happens far away in the sun,’ he said, ‘but down here, it was as if the sky bent over and kissed the ground, just for a second. But in that second, something blew in.’

His voice was very soft now – not far from a whisper. And I was getting used to the way he pronounced everything. There was no way Lily was catching all of this. I felt a bit sorry for her.

Whizzy had blown into his garden on the solar wind, from the sun.

26

Tunnels from the Sun

The best thing about finding out everything you’ve ever wanted to know is that it makes your brain go into a dizzy, tingly kind of shock. A nice shock. Everything in Mr Clemm’s workroom stood out in dazzling shapes and colours, as if my eyes had turned superhuman. And I completely forgot to be nervous, because this intel was just so staggering.

Freakily, it might even be Mr Clemm’s fault Whizzy’s here – he’s not sure. The solar wind blew her into Earth’s orbit, but one of his magnetic devices might have pulled her down to earth. (I didn’t dare ask him what that device was supposed to be for.)

‘She protected herself inside some kind of casing back then – a strange ballooning thing, like plaster of Paris that’s only just set. I thought of it as a healing cocoon. Or perhaps it was a stage in her life cycle.’ He said this so quietly, it was almost as though he was talking to himself. ‘I rolled her on to a big plastic sheet and took her into one of the barns. I looked after her.’

My questions came tumbling out quite smoothly after that. How could anything live in the sun? How could eyes stand those temperatures, even if they’re made of something strong?

He’d had to do a crash course in thermodynamics and electrical engineering. And maybe Whizzy didn’t come from the actual sun itself – he doesn’t know. Maybe she came from the magnetic field of the sun, because there are magnetic tunnels between Earth and the sun, and those won’t be as hot. But he’s only guessing.

He rummaged in a drawer, pulled out a paper and passed it to me. ‘I caught her here on infrared.’

The image was really grainy and shimmered like pearls, but Whizzy’s shape was there.

‘Wow,’ I said, and we both stared at her for seconds. Down the hall, the kitchen had gone very quiet.

‘These frilly things down her sides – I think they’re organs for detecting rotation, acceleration, pressure and gravity. I’d had a friend from Cuba staying with me just before all this happened, and he used to talk a lot about the way different animals and fish sense things. There are more ways of sensing the world than the ordinary ones that we know about, Alfie.’