The Planet Dweller

by Palmer, Jane;

  Yuri was terrified and elated at the same time. He tried to pull away. The ring held him like a magnet and the caress became stronger. His incomprehension overcame him and he began to panic. The ring slackened its grip until he found himself once again sitting in the meadow.

  As soon as Cherry had gone, Diana slumped into an armchair and carried out the long overdue reorganisation of her thoughts. She remembered being called by the voice again, then immediately falling asleep. But what did she dream about? Flickers of awareness filtered from her subconscious to tell her that something of momentous importance had happened. She knew she should have delivered a message of some sort. What it was totally escaped her. Then she remembered Yuri, who must have mastered the ultimate in bizarre thoughts. Diana quickly washed and threw on the nearest dress to hand.

  Swinging open the back gate, she discovered Yuri kneeling beside the fairy ring. He was wearing a strange, blissful expression. He smiled and Diana grasped his outstretched hand to pull him to his feet like a misbehaving child.

  ‘What on earth are you doing out here now?’ she asked with a good deal more respect for the ring than she had given it before. Are you feeling any better?’

  ‘I feel ... strange.’

  ‘What happened?’ she demanded.

  Yuri looked at her as though it was unusual for her to take his condition so seriously. ‘I do not know. Something came from the ring and touched me.’ Expecting Diana to patronise him, his smile faded when it became apparent she believed him. ‘I cannot explain it. I have strange head this morning. I think it was gin and Eva last night.’

  ‘Perhaps. Why not come back to your cottage and have some breakfast?’

  ‘Eva makes me eat breakfast. I prefer to stop here.’

  ‘I want to ask you something, and we can’t talk about it out here.’

  Yuri resisted, still suffering from the saturating sensuality of the ring. ‘Why not?’ Suddenly he remembered something. ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Tuesday.’

  ‘No, I meant what date is it?’

  Diana thought for a second as she hadn’t written any cheques or looked at a newspaper for several days.

  ‘Something like the 21st. I only know it’s the summer solstice either today or tomorrow.’

  Yuri’s expression of tranquillity changed so rapidly, Diana thought she was going to have to catch him before he fell.

  ‘Now what’s the matter? You look as though a tank hit you.’

  ‘Tell me I’m crazy,’ Yuri suddenly pleaded.

  For once Diana wouldn’t oblige him. ‘Perhaps you aren’t, Yuri. I don’t know. But there is something I must try to remember, and you are the only one who can help me do it.’

  Yuri looked at her in bewilderment, as though she was some benevolent stranger. ‘What should I tell you?’

  ‘I want you to explain what you discovered from looking at the asteroids.’

  ‘You do not believe me anyway.’

  ‘I don’t know, Yuri, but I would like you to do it all the same.’

  ‘All right,’ Yuri agreed, suspecting that she might be trying to humour him in some extraordinary way.

  As a peal of bells rang out across the fields from the local parish church, all trace of his secret reverie filtered away and he led her back up to his cottage.

  To hide his confusion, Yuri looked as serious as he could. He picked up several exercise books from the floor where he had thrown them the night before and arranged them on the table. For thirty minutes he read out the observations most relevant to his conclusion as though Diana might have understood them. When the bells suddenly stopped pealing however, the astronomer realised that she wasn’t humouring him after all. The sudden silence made him aware of a frighteningly empty part of space. Then he visualised a stream of debris forming a ring about a small dead planet where the earth’s orbit had once been.

  ‘Go on,’ Diana gently urged him for fear of his wandering thoughts taking over and making him as unreasonable and incoherent as he had been the night before. ‘Tell me what you’ve found out?’

  Yuri sighed. ‘I tell you both… I tell you… I tell you…’

  ‘Again Yuri, tell me again,’ Diana insisted.

  Yuri gave in and explained the terror he had been nursing whether sober or drunk. ‘I find planetoids making alignments - patterns - at certain times of year. Long ago I put this down to coincidence. They were so brief, no one else notice it. I make note of these for long while, but planetoids are so difficult to find I have no one to check with. To find one of them you must already know where to look, and to find several on same night is very difficult. It occurred to me to make projection for their future alignment, and for many years nothing seemed to happen. Then I discover one big, major pattern spread across sky. It was like discovering Jupiter sharing Earth’s orbit.’

  ‘Pattern?’

  ‘It will be aligned at summer solstice. But there is one large piece of pattern missing. There should be another planetoid, but there is not...’ Yuri stopped.

  ‘So there’s nothing there?’ Diana prompted.

  ‘There is something there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Earth.’

  Diana knew that the revelation was terrible, though couldn’t immediately register why. Then she remembered Yuri telling her about the way the planetoids would accrete and form another planet. ‘You mean that the Earth is part of this jigsaw pattern?’

  ‘No, not Earth… something which it accreted around many millions of years ago, when solar system was forming.’

  ‘Surely everything in the solar system came from matter formed at the same time?’

  ‘There must have been something here, in this part of space, circling new sun already. I do not know why but, from its point of view, we are intruders. We are ones who enclosed part of its body inside our own planet.’

  ‘And you are saying that now that this collection of asteroids is correctly aligned, all they want to do is come together to form another planet?’

  ‘I get transmitter and equipment from Eva and make signal to probe for its control point. I eventually find right frequency. Machine inside body sends its signal out to planetoids from meadow down there. I believe the mass is so large that seismologists register it as being part of Earth.’

  ‘So when you signalled the machine, it materialised an image here?’ Diana was amazed that Yuri had the ability to do something like that.

  ‘It was not difficult to isolate signal. You know where to look and it is quite easy. I am sure this mechanism has the power to draw pieces of jigsaw together, like giant spring. The momentum would instantly create heat and melt planetoids. Gravity would draw them together and make them rotate. We would disintegrate and debris not used building new planet would become flattened disc to decorate it and our moon – if it survives! The moon might break free and pursue orbit of its own to become planet. Two new planets for one old one. If I am right, I should name them-’ Diana knew what names he was about to give them and her warning look made the astronomer bite his tongue. ‘Of course, there would be little point as we would not be around, not in whole pieces anyway. Some think planetoids came into being because a planet exploded. No one but me has yet worked out how a planet could explode. They do not think it possible.’ Yuri looked sympathetically at her mystified expression. ‘Does this help you remember what you wanted?’

  The awful light of realisation had gone on in Diana’s mind. She daren’t let Yuri know. What she had been thinking were the throes of natural ageing were a good deal more sinister.

  Yuri looked quizzically at her and she braced herself to smile sweetly. ‘I suppose, then, I’d better wait before booking up for next year’s holiday if I can’t be sure what planet I’ll be living on.’

  ‘There - you still mock me.’

  ‘No, Yuri,’ she protested thinly. ‘But I want you to promise me something.’

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘Will you do it?’

&nb
sp; ‘What is it?’ he insisted with a surprising degree of discernment for one who was supposed to be insane.

  ‘Please stay inside for the rest of the day. You look very tired. You should get some rest.’

  ‘Huh. You sound like Dr Eva.’

  ‘Why don’t you take a couple of tranquillisers and try to sleep.’

  He grunted again. ‘Now you sound like Dr Spalding.’

  ‘Everything will be all right,’ Diana assured him, wearing her intensely honest expression. ‘I’ll have to be out for the rest of the day and I’m going to send Julia to her cousin’s until I return. So if you flake out again there won’t be anyone around to pick you up. You don’t want Daphne Trotter’s horse to trip over you, do you?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Yuri gave a resigned smile. He was obviously convinced of his findings and what was inevitably going to happen.

  ‘Please, Yuri,’ Diana pleaded desperately.

  ‘If you feel that strong, I do it. I would sooner die drunk in here, than sober out there.’

  ‘It’ll be all right.’ Diana had to sound convincing. Even he wouldn’t believe what she knew.

  Unable to think of some way to dope Yuri without him knowing, Diana returned to her cottage and tipped her sleeping daughter out of bed. With strict instructions to tell the other children to stay out of the meadow and the key to the front door, she packed Julia off to her cousin’s.

  Making herself as tidy as possible and reviewing the contents of her handbag, Diana put the will she had made and had witnessed months ago into an envelope. She wrote the address of her solicitor on it, affixed a first-class stamp, put it in her handbag, and left to post it.

  CHAPTER 9

  For some while Yuri genuinely tried to obey Diana’s orders. Even though he managed to control his restlessness about the impending end of the world, the encounter with the strange entity in the meadow below filled his head with very odd desires. One moment he was able to dismiss them from his turbulent thoughts and, in the next, the only thing he wanted to do was rush down to the fairy ring and summon them into life again. Until that morning he hadn’t known the true meaning of confusion.

  Yuri dashed about his cluttered living room in frustration, snatching up exercise books, textbooks and anything that could be stacked into a pile with them. These he crammed into the already overflowing bookcase whether they belonged there or not. Cushions were pounded back into shape. Vases, plates and ornaments were thrown into the sink and scrubbed clean of any ancient patterns that had managed to adhere to them. The table was rapidly waxed and polished, legs, struts and all, armchairs and sofa pounded until every speck of dust from years past had given up its hold. This was a lot of dust, and the resulting attack of sneezing drove Yuri into the garden.

  He rummaged about in the coal bunker where he kept the unused garden tools Eva had bought him and pulled out a scythe. It was practically free from rust and as sharp as the day it was purchased. He was reluctant to hack down the stinging nettles at the bottom of the garden as they had done him such a favour in molesting the pompous Daphne Trotter. Yuri nevertheless reasoned that his state of desperation was greater than his gratitude, and set about them with the ferocity of a true madman. With arms stung more than Daphne’s extremities, Yuri ploughed on regardless until he was actually able to see the fence that bordered the property.

  Exhausted, he slumped down in the middle of the felled weeds and pulled off his shirt to reveal a shabby T-shirt and a haphazardly tied neck-scarf that was too worn to serve any useful purpose. He rubbed the nettle stings on his arms ruefully as he looked about for something else to attack. Still the urge to go back to the ring gnawed at him. He pulled his fob watch out of a trouser pocket and discovered that he had managed to only kill forty minutes. It wasn’t even midday. Perhaps if he phoned Eva..? She would be mad and driven one step nearer to having him certified, and not be the best company to spend one’s last day on Earth with, and Diana had gone and deserted him the very day he needed to be convinced of his insanity the most.

  Perhaps the world was only coming to an end in his head and the strange experience in the ring a symptom of that encroaching madness? That must be it. He was a scientist and should use what sense he had to rationalise his hysterical thoughts. But he had collected his data over the years in a thoroughly scientific, albeit increasingly inebriated, way and his rational sense told him that it was inevitable the Earth would explode at any moment. Whether he dropped dead then and there, or lived for another hundred years, didn’t bother Yuri. It was the people he knew that he grieved for. Diana, little Julia and her friends - and even Eva. How could the entity that had held him so gently in its phantom hand be the very thing that was going to destroy them?

  An idea filtered into his jumbled brain. What if he could contact it and make himself understood? Yuri shuddered. There were many ways to be killed; he knew several of them from uncomfortably close experience. The idea of being crushed in the palm of an unknown being with perfumed thoughts permeating his every cell again filled him with the fearful fascination that had been trying to pull him back all morning.

  Leaving his shirt where he had let it fall, Yuri stumbled unsurely down the meadow towards the fairy ring. He was almost relieved to see no sign of movement anywhere near it. Suspecting the mechanism was marking time below the ground, he stepped into the ring believing he could jump aside at the slightest movement of the grass. But it was not the mechanism below that had been waiting for him to arrive.

  Yuri was so taken with looking at what was happening inside the ring, he didn’t notice that an opaque curtain had suddenly been drawn around the perimeter. He found himself wondering where the rest of the meadow had gone before he realised that it had completely enclosed him. Misty butterfly patterns engulfed him in their upward revolving spiral. The hand that had held him before enclosed Yuri, plucking him up and whirling him at such frantic speed that he lost consciousness.

  ***

  ‘I think I prefer being a boulder after all. Just how do Torrans manage to cope with these infernal tails?’ complained Reniola.

  ‘They’ve got bones inside them attached to a nervous system you’re supposed to operate,’ Dax told her. You’re not meant to keep treading on it, and if you do, it’s supposed to hurt.’

  ‘Can’t get the hang of nervous systems either. It’s difficult to believe we developed from creatures that had them. Do you think we could swing from a branch with one of these appendages?’

  ‘I doubt it. The Torrans only evolved tails as a form of ornament and some of the bushier ones are grafted on after the originals have been worn out.’

  ‘There is something strangely distracting about the thought that I’m wearing somebody else’s tail that has had more than two owners.’

  ‘While you’re developing a complex about your rear appendage, you might like to give some thought as to how you intend to rectify Moosevan’s accretion equipment.’

  Reniola wasn’t enthusiastic about the reminder. ‘Why can’t I be Dax now? This Reniola creature’s anatomy doesn’t suit me at all.’

  ‘Why don’t you make your mind up?’ snapped Dax in exasperation. ‘It’s too late now anyway. I’ve processed all her memory and reflexes so nothing would know me from the real thing.’

  ‘Until you hit them with a nuclear punch.’

  ‘That is something neither of us will use until it becomes absolutely necessary.’

  ‘With these ears I wouldn’t look forward to it either. They’d probably disintegrate before the rest of us.’

  ‘We can always reassemble if that happens.’ Dax stopped suddenly. ‘Wait.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Somebody else has arrived.’

  ‘What? Another one? I thought this galaxy was supposed to be running down.’

  ‘It wasn’t from this galaxy.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Reniola groaned. ‘What is Moosevan up to? She’s treating the gate like a plaything.’

  ‘Moosevan only fe
els, doesn’t see as we can. She has no mechanical knowledge so therefore doesn’t understand things that concern us. Her sensations are all; she exists through them.’

  ‘Well, I hope she has a sensation telling her to put whoever it is back before those Olmuke operate the net. Otherwise we’ll have to deal with that as well.’

  ‘Moosevan and her kind have strange ways, but they wouldn’t knowingly cause the death of anything living. We must deal with what we’re here for first. There’ll be time enough to check afterwards.’

  ‘You speak for yourself,’ complained Reniola. ‘I’ve got to make a safe planet for her. I don’t know why the confounded contraption should have stuck. It was only installed a thousand million years ago.’

  They stopped their long strides to peer over a ridge at three suited figures below.

  ‘Now what are they up to?’ Reniola said.

  ‘They’re looking for the other new arrival. I’d better get down there and cut them off.’

  ‘No chance on these clumsy leg things. You might be able to lure them away, but don’t those creatures kill anything on sight and wonder what it was afterwards?’

  ‘It’d be too inconvenient to transmute now. I’ll have to make a run for it. You find the control point.’ Without further ado Dax leapt away at a speed the duplicate owner of her body would have found fur raising.

  Reniola scratched the unfamiliar muzzle that projected before her eyes and sloped off with a less energetic pace in the opposite direction.

  ***

  Yuri clutched a handful of warm orange sand. It ran through his fingers like mercury. As he looked about he found he was partly submerged in the powdery granules. They supported him like the caressing touch of the apparition that had snatched him away. He tried to rise in search for some place to hide but kept losing his balance. Then he gave up and looked at his bewildering surroundings. It didn’t take him long to realise that this was no place on Earth, or any planet near it. The red daylight sky, streaked with the faint rainbow remains of long dead of stars, told him that it wasn’t even his own galaxy.