The Planet Dweller

by Palmer, Jane;

  ‘Why would she still be so upset about that?’ asked Kitty innocently.

  ‘Well… I don’t think it was that so much. On the way back her horse went and tipped her into the stinging nettles at the bottom of Yuri’s garden. She was stung terribly badly.’

  Vicky sighed thoughtfully. ‘The fairies should have kissed her better.’

  ‘If you were a fairy, would you have kissed her better?’ Tom asked.

  ‘I would have though it was more a job for the goblins,’ added Julia.

  ‘That was probably what she was telling Yuri off about,’ Vicky decided.

  ‘Serves her right for killing little foxes,’ said Lin. ‘I wouldn’t like her to come and kill our little puppy.’

  ‘Oh, that’s not likely to happen,’ Julia reassured him. ‘Your mother said that when it grows up it’s going to be a very big dog. It will probably be able to eat one of her hounds.’

  At that, Tom and Kitty began crawling about the ring on all fours, snarling and snapping at each other.

  ‘You’ll wake the fairies up doing that,’ Julia said.

  ‘Shall we listen to see if they’re talking again?’ suggested Vicky.

  After what she had heard the other day, Julia wasn’t that keen. She had felt too foolish to mention it to her mother, yet worried enough to wonder what could have caused the humming sound. ‘Perhaps they don’t like us eavesdropping,’ she warned Vicky. ‘They might even get angry if they knew we were here.’

  ‘Let’s all hold hands and ask them to come up to us,’ Vicky suggested.

  ‘All right,’ agreed Julia. She drove the two dog imitations from the centre of the circle and told them to sit up and hold hands.

  Yuri had lost interest in cleaning his reflector and stood idly, leaning on his partially suspended gate looking down the slope to where the children were playing. There was apprehension in his expression, brought on by more than the visit of the local bully.

  ‘Fairy, fairy, come and play,’ he could hear the children sing. Then they stood up to join hands and stomp round inside the fairy ring, swinging their arms in time to the repetitive chant.

  Yuri started slowly down the meadow towards them, as if every step they took increased some terror he had been nursing for years. He was about to raise his hand to warn them not to make so much noise when the grass in the centre of the fairy ring began to gently ripple. The children noticed as well and immediately stopped their game. Although they’d been calling on the fairies to come and play, they had hardly expected the invitation to be taken up. Julia quickly snatched the younger ones out of the circle and stood rooted to the spot in hypnotised fascination.

  Being much younger, the others were far from terrified as a translucent shape full of squares, diamonds and circles materialised in the centre of the ring. It twinkled and sparkled at them like fairy treasure as though inviting them to come into its world. Kitty was so fascinated she took a faltering step forward to touch it.

  She was warned back by Yuri’s emphatic, ‘No! You must not move!’

  The web of different shapes twisting up and down in a complex spiral scared Julia. ‘What is it, Yuri?’

  ‘It is sort of strobe effect,’ Yuri tried to explain, just as alarmed as she was. ‘It is being projected from ground. Though you cannot see it, those shapes are really moving very fast. If you were to touch one of them it might cut your fingers off.’

  ‘But if it’s only a projection, my hand should go straight through it.’

  ‘Not with this. It is linked to something far above us.

  ‘How, Yuri, how?’

  ‘I cannot explain easily, Julia, but it will soon go,’ he replied, hoping that he was right.

  It didn’t fade though. If anything it became more intense.

  Julia could tell that its presence meant something terrible to Yuri. He carefully made his way about the apparition, moving as close as he dared, looking for a safe access point. Each time he seemed to find one, the spiral turned and barred his way.

  ‘Be careful, Yuri!’ Julia caught his arm and held onto it as he passed her. ‘You might be hurt if you touch it.’

  ‘There must be neutral point,’ Yuri muttered to himself and gently eased his arm away from Julia. ‘There must be place where it can be neutralised.’ Then he fancied he saw just such an opening. Yuri reached out towards it.

  The children instinctively stepped back.

  With a bright flash and loud ‘pop!’ Yuri was hurled out of the circle. Then the apparition disappeared.

  The astronomer lay so still and cold the younger children ran towards Diana’s garden screaming and shouting at the tops of their voices. Julia tried to find Yuri’s pulse as she had been taught at school and took off her cardigan to wrap it over his shoulders.

  Diana was lying on the settee in the living room after another attack of her voice, when four hysterical young children bounded in through the French windows as though Daphne’s hounds were after them. Unable to understand anything they blurted out in disjointed sentences, she hastily followed them into the garden and looked out into the meadow where Julia was kneeling by Yuri.

  ‘The fairies did it! The fairies did it!’ Vicky was saying over and over again, and the other three youngsters kept chipping in with equally unhelpful information as she dashed to them.

  ‘Something stunned him, Mum,’ Julia told her, sensing that it wouldn’t be wise to blurt out the whole truth too soon. ‘He’s terribly cold.’

  Diana knelt down to feel his skin. ‘Fetch the blanket off the settee, Julia. When he starts coming to we’ll get him inside.’

  ‘Is he very bad?’ inquired Tom, who had already removed his top hat in anticipation of the worst.

  ‘He’ll be all right, Tom. I’ve seen him in a worse state than this.’

  ‘Shall we run and fetch Dr Spalding?’ Vicky asked.

  Knowing a visit from that gentleman might result in making his condition worse or, at the best, leave him with another dose of tranquillisers, Diana told her, ‘No, I don’t think that will be necessary.’

  As soon as the blanket arrived, she wrapped it round Yuri and waited with fingers on his pulse until his eyelids flickered open.

  ‘Right, children,’ Diana announced. ‘The emergency is over. I think you can all go home now while Julia and I take him inside.’

  Reluctantly, Lin, Kitty, Vicky and Tom took their leave, looking back over their shoulders to see Yuri helped to his feet and guided into the living room. As soon as he was safely on the settee, the astronomer was overtaken by an attack of shivering that could have been diagnosed as the DTs by a less charitable person than Diana. At that moment she wished he would drink something that left a more obvious trace on his breath, then she could confirm beyond all doubt that his collapse had been due to alcohol rather than being stunned by irritable fairies. Wrapping the blanket more securely round him as he kept trying to pull it off, Diana pushed Yuri down onto some cushions and waited until he was capable of uttering words in English. As soon as he showed signs of wanting to make sense, Julia was sent to fetch another pint of milk.

  ‘What on earth have you been drinking, Yuri?’ were the first distinct words he heard.

  ‘Drink…’ he murmured unsurely, ‘I drink nothing...’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t have passed out like that without some reason. Are you sure you haven’t been mixing gin with Spalding’s tranquillisers?’

  ‘I do not take tranquillisers either. I was right Diana - I was right!’

  ‘Right, Yuri? What about?’ she asked, unable to relate his rambling to what he had told her the other day.

  ‘It is terrible - This could mean the destruction of the Earth!’

  ‘Oh, Yuri. Wake up, you silly man. You only fainted.’ Diana waved some smelling salts under his nose and he gasped himself to full consciousness.

  Far from pacifying him, they seemed to make him worse. ‘There can be little time now!’ Yuri persisted, pushing himself up from the settee. ‘We must stop
it! We must stop it!’

  ‘Stop what, you dumb-bell? Nothing terrible is going to happen. You dreamt it all.’

  ‘I saw it, though. I reached to touch it - It must be stopped.’

  Diana was used to Yuri’s strange flights of fancy and, because he wasn’t behaving rationally, didn’t take his raving to be serious. She wouldn’t let him move from the settee until he was much calmer and Julia had returned from the shop.

  ‘What did happen out there, Julia?’ she asked her daughter.

  Julia took a careful look at Yuri, then at her mother, and wasn’t sure what to say. The only thing for it was to tell the truth. ‘There was something in the fairy ring. It came up through the ground.’

  ‘Oh, Julia,’ Diana sighed in exasperation. ‘Can’t you see I’m trying to calm Yuri down, not make him worse?’

  Steeling herself to look her mother in the eye, Julia continued, ‘We were playing in the ring, and Mrs Trotter had just been talking to Yuri.’ She hesitated as her mother sighed. ‘When I was dancing round with Vicky, Tom and the twins, something started to move inside the ring. Yuri came down and reached out to touch it. It was like a pattern growing from the ground.’

  ‘Oh, Julia ... Why are you always trying to cover up for Yuri? He’s not going to get into any trouble if you tell us what really happened. I don’t suppose it had anything to do with Mrs Trotter, did it?’ she added as an afterthought when she remembered the inbred expression of her horse.

  ‘Oh, no, she’d already gone.’

  ‘All right,’ Diana surrendered, ‘I won’t make you tell me if you don’t want to. He’s obviously going to live, but we’ll have to keep an eye on him until he calms down.’

  It took a good hour before Yuri would calm down and was capable of being taken back to his cottage. Diana made him eat a meal, and, with the promise that she would drop in later that evening to see if he was feeling any better, she returned across the meadow to her own world of hot flushes and the alien voice.

  Moosevan,’ she kept thinking to herself, even when the name was not being pushed into her brain. ‘Who or what can Moosevan be?’ As she reached the fairy ring where Yuri had collapsed, she inexplicably felt the urge to give it a very wide berth.

  CHAPTER 5

  In a remote corner of the Mott’s even remoter galaxy a plot to deal with the bellicose empire-builders was being hatched.

  Reniola and Dax waited apprehensively at the controls of their spacecraft. The tyrannical Mott could have had surveillance patrols even in this secluded solar system: not that there was any guarantee that their mysterious accomplices would keep their rendezvous on the deserted planet. As far as the two Torrans knew, these entities had to come from the next galaxy and, as no other galaxy was visible with the most powerful telescope, it would have been no surprise if they didn’t make it.

  In the safety of their hidden home planet, the Torrans had at last solved the riddle of the Jaulta Code, the galaxy’s greatest enigma, and the Old Ones were obliged to respond to the message they transmitted. How a signal from an insignificant satellite could be picked up on the other side of the Universe was beyond them, and what the message was remained a mystery to even Reniola and Dax. For fear of it falling into the wrong hands only one terminally ill Torran was allowed to transmit it. Then all the deciphering and documents involved had been sealed in an impenetrable monument to the centuries of effort.

  Two flittering forms passed in front of the spaceship and a light shower of carbon dioxide particles floated gently down through the thin air. Dax and Reniola donned their atmosphere suits and went outside to wait patiently on the barren rocky ground. The glimmering shapes came closer. First they danced about each other in dainty pirouettes as though looking for some suitable place to rest, then perched on the rim of a small crater and waited.

  ‘Why don’t they say something?’ Reniola whispered into her voice link.

  ‘Give them time. They’ve probably never known anything like us Torrans before. We didn’t evolve until after they‘d left the galaxy.’

  ‘We deciphered the Code. Why should they be suspicious?’

  But Dax was listening to an alien thought. ‘I think they want us to remove our suits.’

  ‘You have to be joking!’ Reniola concentrated for a second. ‘You’re right. I can hear them. What shall we do?’

  ‘We’ve come this far. It would be absurd not to trust them now.’

  ‘Which do you think will happen first? Suffocation or freezing?’ The alien thought reassured Reniola. ‘Oh, all right. I suppose since I chose this stupid little planet I should be the one to find out.’

  ‘Someone will have to get back to the others to tell them what happened. Keep your suit on and watch what happens. I’m due to die because of the mark the Mott put on me anyway.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Reniola agreed reluctantly. ‘They must know what they’re asking.’

  Dax slowly released the clips holding her helmet to the light suit and she felt a cold draught seep through the gap. Although impossible, the atmosphere had balanced with that inside her suit. Not having inflated or froze, the Torran pulled the garment apart and stepped out of it, then unfastened her tail to let it sway in an unnaturally gentle breeze that ruffled her fine mane. As she stood before the visitors perched on the rim of the crater, she sensed that they were satisfied with the long legged, furry, feline.

  As Dax hadn’t suffocated, Reniola took off her suit and helmet to reveal her more portly proportions.

  The Torrans stood and waited. Their long muzzles sniffed the atmosphere for signs of sudden change, and their crimson eyes were alight with anticipation.

  The two visitors above them started to rotate within their diaphanous bodies. Two shapes formed.

  Before Dax and Reniola had time to glance at each other, they were staring ahead in disbelief. Accurate in form and every feature, they found themselves gazing at exact replicas of their own bodies.

  ‘You have achieved much,’ the taller slender shape said. ‘Now you must return to your people.’

  ‘But I have the mark on me,’ Dax protested. ‘The Mott can track me back to them while it’s still transmitting. It will only stop when I die.’

  ‘Don’t worry about the Mott,’ said her double. ‘We have removed the mark. For the sake of this venture and your own safety, you must assume new identities. We are now Reniola and Dax.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know why we had to break the Jaulta Code?’ asked Reniola.

  ‘The fact that you did is enough,’ the new Reniola told her. ‘As this galaxy gutters out, only waste material will die with it. We shall endeavour to evacuate all who deserve preservation before that happens.’

  ‘Where will you send us?’ the old Dax asked. ‘And where did you come from?’

  ‘There are millions of years yet to deal with the survival of the Torrans and like-minded species. Our main concern now is for those who do not have your mobility. Do you object to us using your forms?’

  ‘Why should we?’ asked the old Reniola. ‘We hardly expected to live this long.’

  ‘Life as you know it is not as important as you may believe,’ the new Dax explained. ‘But evolution, however primitive, must always carry on. As stars dwindle and explode and revert to the matter that will form more stars, much of it creates darker, more destructive, anomalies. The same happens with life. Not all life forms improve with time. There are always some that retrogress. By withdrawing from the galaxy when we did, we left the dregs of stagnant evolution. A few like you managed to progress despite this, and only someone like the Torrans could have broken the Jaulta Code. With so many stars gone, it was inevitable a struggle for what was left would ensue.’

  ‘Can we help you in any way?’ asked the old Dax hopefully.

  ‘We need you to disappear from the attention of others so we can operate in these guises. What we have to do will endanger you more than you could believe possible.’

  ‘Oh, we don’t mind that,’ the old R
eniola chirped, almost relieved that she would still have a dash of excitement to live with for the rest of her life.

  The old Dax, having just been saved from the inevitable death of the mark, was content enough to follow instructions. ‘All right,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll be known as Clyn, and Reniola as Holia. Those names are so common they’re protection in themselves.’

  ‘Very well. We are now Dax and Reniola. When we are believed dead, those names will die too.’

  The new Clyn was puzzled. ‘Will you die?’

  ‘No. We have outlived such clumsy points of evolution as death and birth. Now you must put your suits on and go.’

  ‘You must let us know what’s going to happen,’ Holia insisted. ‘They’d cut our tails off if we didn’t have something to tell them when we got back.’

  ‘You needn’t concern yourselves from now on,’ Dax told them. ‘You have fulfilled your side of the contract.’

  ‘She’s trying to say that after centuries of mental sweating over the massive problem the Old Ones set, the Torrans should have some idea of what you propose to do now it’s been solved,’ Clyn explained.

  Dax and Reniola conversed mentally for a short while, before Dax replied, ‘We must contain the ambitions of your most aggressive species, and preserve the ones who are being exploited from further suffering. Only then will we decide who is suitable for eventual transference. How we will do this is yet to be decided.’

  ‘We could give you a few starters,’ Holia told her enthusiastically.

  ‘Thank you, but we already have access to your memories,’ was Dax’s sobering reply.

  ‘Oh yes - of course. I suppose we must retire now then?’

  ‘No. Just be careful,’ Reniola advised.

  Clyn shivered. ‘I think the atmosphere’s getting a little thin. Cold too.’

  Holia understood what that meant. ‘We’re being told to go.’