Doctor Who: Shada (12 page)

Chris whipped round in shock – and saw, instead of the police box doors through which, he reminded himself, he had
definitely
entered, two much bigger white doors made of whatever material the rest of the room was made of. Through the doors he could see the awesome girl and K-9 crouched over the Professor.

Chris dashed back through the doors. He’d never been literally agog before, agog with eyes popping and jaw juddering, like Tom when he sees Jerry launching a disproportionately spectacular act of revenge.

He turned back to point at the police box, which was still clearly a police box, and one that he could see all the way around. ‘I-I-I-I-I-,’ he stammered.

‘Hurry up!’ barked the girl, as if his reaction was incredibly petty and tedious.

Chris found himself obeying. Despite this latest revelation, he could remember her directions as if she had deliberately implanted them in his mind. For all he knew, she had. He ran through the inner door and through the corridors as instructed, alternating between admiration for the capacity of the human mind to adjust to incredible new situations and screaming.

He found the correct door and poked his head around it into what seemed like a Victorian hospital ward, with plastic curtained-off alcoves. Chris hadn’t any energy left to be overwhelmed and so snatched open the locker and brought down the medical kit, a large metal suitcase-affair that was stencilled with a red cross. Then he hefted it up and ran back up the corridors, into the main room and through the impossibly not-matching doors that led to the Professor’s study.

He burst out to see that the girl had propped up the Professor’s head on a selection of hardback atlases. ‘Professor? Can you hear me, Professor?’ she was calling.

‘Mistress,’ said K-9 in tones Chris was sure contained a hint of sympathy. ‘His mind has gone.’

‘You said part of it, K-9.

‘Affirmative,’ said K-9. ‘But the part that remains is now totally inert.’

Chris dashed over and set down the medical kit. ‘Thank you,’ the girl said cursorily and opened it to reveal a bewildering array of bizarre-looking instruments, including a stethoscope with two chestpieces, a big box of very ordinary-looking sticking plasters and a large translucent collar that looked something like a neck-brace, all of it tangled up in a length of oddly striped bandage.

Working quickly and efficiently, the girl fitted the collar around the Professor’s neck and operated a switch built into its underside. Tiny green lights began to flash on the collar, with a beep rather like a hospital’s heart monitor. But instead of a single beep, the rhythm was a faint but steady beep-beep beep-beep.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Chris.

‘He’s breathing and his hearts are beating, so his autonomic brain is still functioning,’ said the girl. ‘This collar can take over those functions and leave his autonomic brain free.’

Chris was baffled. ‘What good will that do?’

‘He should be able to think with it,’ said the girl, looking anxiously down at the Professor. His eyelids fluttered, a tiny movement for just a second.

Chris shook his head. Now this was something he did know about. ‘Hold on, think with his autonomic brain? No no no. The human brain doesn’t work like that. The different functions are separated by…’

He trailed off as the girl looked up at him with an expression that was deeply pitying, as if to say
You can’t really be this stupid
.

‘Unless of course,’ said Chris shakily, ‘unless, that is, unless…’

‘Yes?’ said the girl, like a schoolmarm encouraging a particularly backward pupil at the end of a long Friday.

Chris looked between the girl, the robot dog, the police box and the Professor. ‘Unless the Professor isn’t human?’

The girl smiled and extended a hand. ‘I’m Romana. And neither am I.’

Chris shook her hand and to his surprise wasn’t instantly transformed into a block of ice.

‘I am a human,’ he confessed. ‘Is that OK?’

Chapter 21

THE DOCTOR WAS nosing around the ruined spectrograph, examining the innards with the aid of a slender metal probe that occasionally whirred, buzzed and lit up. He had told Clare it was a sonic screwdriver. Clare had so many objections to that, but she pushed them to the back of her mind and got on with carbon-dating the book using her own equipment in the far corner.

‘Quite incredible,’ muttered the Doctor.

Clare nodded. ‘The book has no discernible atomic structure whatsoever, Doctor.’ No other man – or indeed woman – had ever reduced her to the role of lab assistant. For some reason, she found she didn’t mind. It felt perfectly natural to be handing him tools and test tubes and asking helpful questions, as if it was something that you just did with the Doctor.

He looked up from the spectrograph and pocketed the sonic screwdriver. ‘Simple pseudo-stasis,’ he said airily. ‘The more interesting thing is this.’ He tapped the spectrograph. ‘The book must have stored up vast amounts of sub-atomic energy and suddenly released them when the machine was activated. Now does anything strike you about that?’

‘A few things,’ said Clare. ‘What in particular?’

‘In particular,’ he said, ‘that’s a very odd way for a book to behave.’

‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ said Clare.

The Doctor raised a finger importantly. ‘Aha! Never underestimate the obvious!’

‘But what does that tell us?’

‘Nothing,’ said the Doctor, equally grandly, ‘obviously.’

Clare could tell he was waiting for her to say
And what does
that
tell us, Doctor?
So she said, ‘And what does
that
tell us, Doctor?’

He grinned. ‘Obviously it was meant to tell us nothing, which is exactly the opposite function of a book. Therefore—’

Clare cut him off. ‘It isn’t a book!’

He smiled encouragingly. ‘So what is it?’

A teleprinter over in Clare’s corner chattered into life, the results of the carbon-dating test. She crossed over and tore off the strip of paper. ‘Twenty thousand years,’ she said slowly. She picked up the book in her other hand and stared at it wonderingly. ‘Doctor, this book is twenty thousand years old!’ Her mind was suddenly full of ridiculous thoughts about aliens and/or Atlantis.

The Doctor peered over her shoulder at the print-out and pointed. ‘Look there.’

Clare gulped. ‘A minus sign. Minus twenty thousand years…’ She looked helplessly up at him. ‘What does that mean, Doctor?’

‘It means,’ he said, ‘not only that the book is not a book, but that time is running backwards over it.’ His features took on a particularly stern and forbidding aspect. ‘I think I’d better return it to my friends as soon as possible, don’t you?’

He held out a hand.

Clare knew that if she handed the book to him she would never see him or it again. An entire new world of amazing possibilities would be closed to her for ever, and she would wonder to the end of her days about the last crazy twenty minutes. On top of that, Chris would probably go ballistic over the loss to science and the forfeiture of his amazing, if accidental, discovery.

But somehow, Clare knew, the book
wanted
to go with the Doctor. It felt the same way about him as she did. He was the right pair of hands.

So she handed it over.

For the first time, the Doctor touched the book. Clare watched as, the moment it touched his skin, he flinched and stood back, his eyes closing involuntarily. A seraphic smile formed on his lips. What was he seeing, she wondered?

Then his eyes opened and he waved cheerily to her. ‘Thank you, Clare Keightley. It’s been a pleasure working with you. I’ve rather missed your sort.’

‘Can’t I come with you?’ Clare protested.

‘I think it’ll be much safer if you stay here and wait for your friend Parsons,’ said the Doctor. ‘Goodbye! Sorry we didn’t get to do any running!’

And then he burst out of the lab and was gone.

Chapter 22

THE BELLS OF Cambridge struck six.

Skagra sat in the passenger seat of the brown Capri, considering his next move. The book was the antepenultimate part of his plan, a precisely detailed scheme to which he had devoted most of his life. So where was the book now? Where had the Professor hidden it?

He pressed the tips of his fingers around the cold metallic surface of the sphere and accessed the mind most recently added to it.

He flinched as he anticipated the full force of Chronotis’s mind, the mind of a Time Lord, bursting into his own. He blinked, for once taken by surprise.

This was it? What he felt now might once have been a powerful mind. Now it was nothing but greyness, mist and confusion.

A faintly unpleasant taste surged at Skagra from the melee of Chronotis’s thoughts. It was a weak, warm sensation with an aroma of scorched plant material, and for some reason it was accompanied by the letter T. Skagra cast it back, searching deeper.

Suddenly, from out of the greyness, a large shape began to form. This was more like it, thought Skagra. Whatever this thing was, it was at the heart of Chronotis’s deepest thoughts. It was roughly circular, a hoop of some kind, with a web of netting suspended from it, and a metallic strut at one end.

The object got larger and larger, and Skagra concentrated harder and harder, trying to divine its meaning.

Letters formed beneath the object.

S, I, E, V, E.

Skagra suppressed his irritation and rejected the object. It was irrelevant.

He pushed deeper, aiming to bypass the general disorder and access recent memory traces.

He saw himself in Chronotis’s rooms, from the Professor’s viewpoint.

No – he needed to go further back.

He pushed deeper still.

The mental image disintegrated in a haze of grey and then reformed in a different pattern. This time it showed a tall figure with a long scarf. The face of the man was hazy, unformed. The Professor had clearly attempted to hide the man’s identity. Futile. Skagra immediately recognised it as the Doctor. Did he have the book?

No – that was suddenly clear.
The Doctor had gone to fetch the book from Young Parsons
.

Skagra concentrated, trying to break through and bring up an image of this Young Parsons. The grey veil lifted for a moment and he was suddenly seeing through Chronotis’s eyes again. He was busying himself preparing the T liquid in an antechamber of his dwelling. Skagra was distantly aware of a twittering noise from the main room. The twittering noise asked something about borrowing some books about carbon dating and the Professor said something about creative disarray –

Skagra felt Chronotis’s mind slipping away from him. Again the metal loop appeared, the sieve.

For all his slippery forgetfulness and senility, Chronotis had still evidently retained some of the mental training and telepathic discipline of a Time Lord.

These efforts at concealment would almost certainly have proved fatal.

Skagra made one final attempt and demanded all Chronotis’s knowledge of the book.

Chapter 23

CHRIS LOOKED ANXIOUSLY as Romana leant over the Professor, her face lit eerily by the green glow of the collar and the red eye-screen of K-9.

‘The collar’s working,’ she told Chris. ‘K-9, is there any trace of conscious thought?’

K-9’s radar-dish ears twizzled. In some way, thought Chris, he must be able to connect wirelessly with the collar. ‘Processing data, Mistress.’ There was a pause, then he added, ‘It is too early to tell.’

‘Good,’ said Chris.

Romana’s eyebrows shot up. ‘What do you mean,
good
? What’s good about any of this?’

‘Well, don’t you see?’ asked Chris, who thought it was obvious. ‘When one works as a scientist, one doesn’t always know where one’s going, or that there even is anywhere for one to go, only that there are always going to be big doors that stay permanently shut to one.’ Chris had often noticed that when he was at his very best, when he was communicating the abstract (and yet concrete) wonder of the scientific method, that people tended to assume an enthralled, glazed expression, as if he was opening their minds to entirely new ways of thinking. He was delighted to see that even Romana eyes seemed to be frosting over, and K-9’s tail antenna had drooped as if in fascination.

Chris waved a hand around the room, taking in the dog, the collar and the police box. ‘You see, I look at all this. And suddenly I know that a lot of things that seem impossible are possible, so yes, that’s why I say “good”—’

K-9 made a peculiar noise, almost as if he was clearing his throat. ‘Mistress!’ he said. ‘The Professor’s condition is rapidly deteriorating!’

Chris was astonished to see tears forming in Romana’s eyes. ‘Oh, K-9, isn’t there anything we can do?’

K-9’s head lowered. ‘Negative, Mistress. The condition is terminal.’