Mercutian adj.

After a time they reached the Mercutian vehicle. It was a cubical box, with a pyramid-shaped top, some thirty feet square at the base, and evidently constructed of metal, a gleaming white nearer like silver than anything else Alan could think of. He saw that it had a door on the side facing him, and several little slitlike windows, covered by a thick, transparent substance which might have been glass.

Aside from the vegetation which they were so methodically blasting, the Mercutian tetrahedra—for such Professor Hornby swore they were and such we later found them to be—had not yet come into real contact with the life of our planet, much less its master, Man.

The temperature might, in fact, approach or exceed -300° F. And Mercutian air—though it contains a high percentage of oxygen—is of such low density and pressure that there is little practical difference between exposure to it and exposure to the vacuum of the interplanetary void!

Old Creepy was down in the control room, sawing lustily on his screeching fiddle. On the sun-blasted plains outside the Mercutian Power Center, the Roman Candles, snatching their shapes from Creepy’s mind, had assumed the form of Terrestrial hillbillies and were cavorting through the measures of a square dance.

[Reviewing Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury] This is also a SF-detective blend reminiscent of Asimov’s current experiments in the form: sabotage, attempted murder, successful murder (with gravitation as the weapon), a mad robot (whose madness is the crucial clue), weird Mercutian rocklife—they’re all here.

‘I haven’t time or ability to think straight now. But I have thought of this. Earth could be wiped out. If so, we on the Moon are the only human beings left alive in the universe. And...’ ‘There are the Martian colonies. And the Ganymedan and Mercutian bases.’