by Jane Palmer
***
In fact, Yuri had slept so well the night before that he was up bright and early. As soon as Eva had left he was down by the fairy ring looking into the mysterious depths of the pattern inside it. The dancing spheres and diamonds entranced Yuri. The odd one would now and then break away from the spiral and flutter towards him like a smoky butterfly, gently touch his face or hand then evaporate with a faint pop. Knowing the clout these inoffensive patterns could deliver, Yuri was not so eager to accept their invitation as he had been before. These shapes marked the entrance to a very long tunnel, perhaps infinity.
Whatever controlled those plucking parcels of mist seemed to sense both his apprehension and fascination.
Suddenly feeling the penetration of so many painless bullets, Yuri found himself sitting in a still pool of air. Something had encompassed him like the hand of a colossal giant. It didn’t close over him; he could still see the fairy ring and the meadow about it, yet they were not part of this strange world. His body relaxed as though it had been lowered onto a mattress of down. Without needing to think, someone else’s thoughts slipped into his mind. They didn’t speak to him, just filled his body with an intensity of feeling he had never known before. It wasn’t human; it was longing. It didn’t betray its nature, but permeated his head with unearthly perfume.
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?’
‘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.
