Mary

When the closing warning sounds, Pearl’s mother still has one hand inside the carriage.

“Location sharing on, always, Pearl, all the time.”

Pearl raises the phone. The woman checks the symbol, then the bag wedged between her daughter’s knees. For a week and a half she has been calling London, checking timetables and calling again. In the bag’s outer pocket she has put the return ticket, printed out, even though there is no need.

“And when you get there…”

“I’ll call you, yes, Mum.”

The woman withdraws her hand. Pearl feels the urge to get off. The warning sounds again and the doors come together. As the electric train begins to move, her mother is still there. She raises her arm a little, as though she still wants to add something. Pearl shows her the phone through the glass. She does not put it away until the platform disappears.

The train journey stirs a whole range of emotions in her. The scenery, the people, the tourists, the comforts, the speed: everything is new to Pearl, and she enjoys it enormously. She takes plenty of photographs too. Some she sends to her mother. She is particularly struck by the changing landscape as she approaches London. The green, wooded landscape of Keswick that she loves so much, where she has grown up, gradually gives way to paved streets, tall buildings and crowds, more people than she could count in a minute if she tried.

When she arrives at the London station, she steps off the train and sees more people than she has ever seen in her life. She has only seen crowds like these in films and books, but nothing compares to being there in person, faced with so many. There is no time to stop and take photographs or admire everything that catches her eye. Once inside the terminal, she has only two hours to get to the ESA offices. She goes straight outside, finds a taxi and heads there.

Once she reaches her destination, it takes Mary a few seconds to recognise her. The woman who comes out to reception looks first at the man sitting beside Pearl. Then at the bag on her lap.

“Johnson?”

Pearl stands up. Mary checks the name on a screen. She has a pen tucked into her hair. As she reaches out to shake Pearl’s hand, it falls, and they both bend to pick it up. Pearl gets there first.

“Thank you. Did you manage to find the building?”

Pearl nods. She has been sitting in front of the agency’s name for twenty minutes. She follows Mary down a corridor to an office with a black sofa and a large window. A mug sits on a pile of magazines beside a wrapped sandwich. A man is working at two screens.

“Marian,” Mary says, indicating him.

He raises a hand without taking his eyes off an image.

Pearl sits and begins taking out her material in the order she rehearsed on the journey. The clean copy of the report first. Mary sets it aside to open the notebook.

“Since when had you been watching that sector?”

Pearl points to the first entry. Mary turns back a few pages.

“It’s already here.”

“I hadn’t marked it yet.”

“But it’s there.”

The woman turns the notebook towards Marian. He finishes typing something and draws his chair closer. Pearl leans forward. On the page there are several unnamed points and a calculation from class that she has crossed out. One of those points is Nut. Mary asks her about the conditions that night. Pearl has to look for the answer on another page. As she turns it, one of her mother’s shopping lists falls out from between the sheets. She picks it up and puts it in her pocket. Marian enters the date into the computer.

A new point appears behind a small curve.

“What’s that line?” Pearl asks.

Mary turns to him. Marian stops typing. The woman brings two chairs over to the desk.

“Come here.”

The photographs come from different instruments. The brightness changes, the size of the frame and the number of visible stars. The cross marking the object remains. Pearl looks at the dates. She takes the agency’s replies out of her bag and puts the first beside the keyboard. On the train she rehearsed how to ask the question. Now all she can do is point to a sentence.

“They told me there was something wrong with my telescope,” the girl complains.

Mary picks up the letter.

“That it might have been badly adjusted.”

“They checked it against theirs.”

The woman reads it again. Pearl waits for her to look at Marian, but she does not. At the bottom is her signature, beneath two paragraphs almost identical to those in the second message. Mary puts the paper down in front of her.

“The reply was mine.”

“I lost three months.”

“You also obtained other observations.”

Pearl presses the bag against her legs. Mary separates the letter from the other papers.

“We should have asked you for this then,” she says, touching the notebook. “The second telescope. Did you adjust it yourself?”

Pearl takes a moment to answer.

“Alice’s dad. I took the measurements.”

“Did you show him the first ones?”

“I told him where to look.”

“Did you also tell him what you expected to find?”

Pearl looks at the two open notebooks. In the second, the marks follow those in the first almost exactly.

“Yes.”

Marian begins writing a note beside the dates.

“Did anyone else take the measurements?”

“No. But the instrument was different.”

“We have that already,” Mary says. “What we’re missing is someone who looks without knowing your results.”

Pearl looks at the marks that resemble one another so closely. She has checked every one, repeated the calculations at Alice’s house until her father asked them to let him sleep. Now Marian adds a note and moves on. Pearl puts her hands back inside the bag. She finds the edge of the ticket and folds it beneath her thumb. Marian opens another image. Where the yellow point was, there is a small streak. In the next, a shadow divides it down the middle. Two discs separate against the black background. Pearl stops touching the ticket.

Marian advances the sequence. The discs change position relative to one another. Pearl searches her notebook for the night of the measurement that did not fit.

“I was measuring the light from both of them together.”

Mary draws the sheet closer.

“That’s what we’re checking.”

At the bottom of the image are NASA’s name and two identifiers: NDDT 612 and NDDT 613. The date is earlier than February. Pearl looks at the beginning of the sequence. Then at her first drawing.

“Who found them?”

Marian opens his mouth. Mary interrupts him.

“There are several records from before yours. Some we obtained after receiving your report.”

“But they were already there.”

“Yes.”

Pearl shifts in her chair. The bag’s seam has left a mark on her palms. Mary places a form in front of her. It includes a list of the observations she has contributed and permission to use them. Pearl reads her name. Beside it are the words ‘Contributing observer’. On the journey she imagined the call to her mother. Even the sentence she would begin with. Now she keeps reading until she finds the space for her signature.

“My mother has to sign this.”

“We’ll send it to her too.”

Pearl takes the pen she picked up in reception.

“Will you use the name I gave it?”

Mary finds the word in the margin.

“Nut. We can use it in the file. The numbers distinguish the two bodies.”

Pearl sees it appear on the screen beside the identifiers. She draws the form towards her and signs.

Marian keeps working while Mary prepares the copies. Two spheres appear on the second monitor. A line enters from one edge; towards the centre it splits into others that diverge between the orbits. Pearl finds Earth. She has to move closer to read the name.

“So you confirm it, you, NASA, everyone agrees it’s a binary planetary system,” Pearl tells them, trembling with excitement.

“Binary planets, yes, wandering through the cosmos, apparently dead, but they’ve awakened under the Sun’s influence; that’s why they’re luminous,” Mary replies.

The girl takes a moment before saying anything else.

“Where are they going?” she finally asks.

Mary puts the copies on the desk.

“There’s still too much uncertainty.”

One of the lines crosses Earth’s orbit. Pearl follows it with her finger without touching the screen.

“Could this one happen too?”

Marian checks which layer is open. Mary waits for him to nod.

“It still could.”

Pearl watches the screen until the lines begin to blur together. The hum of the ventilation system fills the office. Mary moves the mug sitting on the magazines and puts the copies in its place.

“That’s why the earliest dates matter to us,” she says.

Pearl opens the notebook at the drawing she had overlooked. She looks for another sheet, an earlier one. Marian turns his chair towards her. The phone vibrates inside the bag. Her mother asks how it went. Pearl writes that they listened to her. Before sending it, she looks at the map again.

‘It went well. I’ll call you later.’

She puts the phone face down. As she takes out the notebook, the return ticket falls to the floor. Pearl picks it up and slips it between two pages without checking the departure time. She moves the first sheet towards Marian and can hardly believe what she is seeing.