Doctor Who_ Human Nature Part 20

August listened intently to the communication, and then looked at his watch. 'Wait until the deadline expires. If one of these humans doesn't come to a window and start talking about the Pod in thirty seconds, then you can retaliate.'

'What's retaliate?' asked Aphasia.

'It means,' August cut the link and flicked the safety catch of his gun off, 'kill most of the enemy and let the survivors apologize.'

'Time,' Alexander whispered.

'Fire that gun thing some more,' Smith told Phipps, almost embarra.s.sed. 'Make sure they stay ducked.'

'Yes, sir.' Phipps squeezed off another burst, Smith letting the oily belt of sh.e.l.ls pa.s.s through his hands into the body of the gun. There were square bullets in with the round-nosed ones. Those were the ones that tore and splashed, that shattered inside so you became a blundering ma.s.s of organs, knowing that you were going to die, able to talk about the when and how of it.

But this was a battle, this was a whole system that swayed and changed on who died, not how. He remembered the books, the songs, the spectacles. Death was at the back of all the poetry, the muse that made it all so tragic and brave.

The rhythm of the gunfire blocked out everything else, and Smith gazed around the room as if it were silent and still. Joan, with her hands clasped over her ears, but her eyes still fixed upon him with a determined protest. Bernice, her anguish much more evident, huddling in the corner with Alexander. Anand was shaking his head.

Only Hutchinson was enjoying the spectacle, his smile growing wider and wider as he aimed through the window along the barrel of his rifle.

The burst finished. Silence crashed back in on the room. Phipps turned to seek the approval of his teacher. 'I think that'll give them something to - '

He stopped, looking puzzled. He slapped at something on his neck and twisted his head.

A tiny metal sphere was imbedded in the back of his scalp. The boy turned back to Smith. 'What is it, sir?'

Smith stared.

'I don't - ' Phipps' face turned red. His lip started to vibrate, as if he was going to burst out crying. 'I'm sorry - ' he blurted out.

And then his head exploded.

The blood slapped Smith straight in the face, covering his chest and hands, a fine spray filling the whole room.

The boys yelled and screamed, falling to the ground. Smith stumbled forward, blinded by the liquid, trying to find Phipps' body.

Joan was screaming for John, and Arthur, and trying frantically to get up over the ma.s.s of boys trying to hide.

Benny had pulled Alexander down and thrown herself on top of him. 'Don't look!'

she was shouting. She looked up. 'Doctor!'

Smith grabbed for the headless body and clutched it to him, his fingers finding the remains of the neck and the perfect hands as he tried to blink away the blood from his eyes.

He thought he could hear distant laughter ringing through the sound of the gun in his ears.

Everything he could see was red.

A vision was swimming before him in the red, a cat pinned out on a slab.

He was making sounds himself, he realized, as he rocked the body to and fro, the head still fountaining the red stuff. Noises came from the back of his throat without calling, and names. Names that he didn't recognise.

Benny had clambered to her feet, and threw herself across the beds, scrambling to make her way through the screaming children to the Doctor. She grabbed the handle of the umbrella as she went without thinking, perhaps just after a totem, a reminder.

Joan tripped and faltered across the red sprayed room also. 'John!' she called.

'John!'

Smith was fumbling with the fingers of the corpse, pulling them roughly from the trigger of the gun. The meaty thing fell aside, washing him in more red as it went.

He pulled the gun up to his chest and rubbed a red line from his eyes with his sleeve, trying to see through the window. Trying to see the enemy.

There they were, two of them, down there. The ones who'd killed the boy. His fingers tightened on the trigger. There was no need to think.

But he did think.

He thought about Puff the Magic Dragon, who lived by the sea. He thought about Verity, whispering words in his ear on the shingle beach. He couldn't hear the words yet, they were mingled with the sound of the waves on the sh.o.r.e, wearing the pebbles down to sand.

And then Benny was at one shoulder and Joan at the other.

'John,' said Joan.

'Doctor,' said Benny, and swung his umbrella into the line of his b.l.o.o.d.y vision, offering it to him. The question mark framed the two men down below.

Smith stared at it for a moment, a terrible pain creasing his face. He had to drop his gaze from the question the umbrella asked. Looking down, he found that he was looking at the poppy in his b.u.t.tonhole, a lighter shade amongst the red all around.

A single flower.

Unsteadily, he let one hand drop from the gun and grabbed at the poppy, held it gently in his fist as if it contained the answer.

'I'm not him, not the Doctor,' he told Benny. 'But he's real. I know he's real. He wouldn't kill them, would he?'

'No,' Benny told him. 'He wouldn't.'

'Even though they took first blood. Even though the war had already started?'

'No,' Joan told him, with a glance at Benny. 'You wouldn't.'

Smith nodded. He let go of the gun and grabbed the poppy with both hands, staring at it like it was the most important thing in the world. 'So what would the Doctor do?' he asked Benny.

'He'd find a way to turn this around,' Bernice told him, the words spilling out of her like this was the most certain thing she'd ever said in her life. 'He'd make the villains fall into their own traps, and trick the monsters, and outwit the men with guns. He'd save everybody's life and find a way to win.'

Smith made a decision. His hands enfolded the flower.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed for his umbrella, spun round, and stood up, a frown of terrible concentration on his face. 'There's another way,' he told the boys. He dropped his hat and let the cape fall to the floor. 'Throw away your guns.'

Chapter Ten.

What's Bigger on the Inside than on the Outside?

Major Wrightson was sitting in the front of the van, trying to compose a cable to HQ as the rain lashed down, visibly bouncing off the dome over the town. His own feeling about the barrier was that it was somehow divine rather than the work of the enemy, but he couldn't put that down. He had already called for reinforcements, without much idea of what they were to reinforce. All he really wanted was a general to come down here, see the barrier and make it into his problem. His men had been turning away civilians all day, and now it was approaching dusk.

Tomorrow, they'd probably have the press to deal with. From inside the barrier, around teatime, had come the noise of machine-gun fire. That had dismayed the men. Machine-guns were the ultimate taboo for the private soldier, and the thought that they might be being used in there on civilians... Wrightson had walked round the barrier in the last hour, having a word with all the sentries shivering in their oilskins.

There was still, of course, the matter of composing a letter about Torrence.

A new figure appeared on the darkening road, a bicyclist in a long mac. He hopped off as Wrightson looked up, and wandered over to the van. He had a centre-parting and a grin that had been utterly unperturbed by the rain.

'What's going on, Major?'

Wrightson was pleased that somebody had recognized his rank. 'The area's been sealed off, sir. n.o.body in or out, I'm afraid.'

'But I live in Farringham. I'd just cycled over to see my aunt in Sh.e.l.lhampton. Not only that, I'm due to address a meeting in town tonight.'

'Sorry, you'd best make provisions to stay somewhere else for the night. How are you fixed for accommodation?'

'That's all right, I can just go back to my auntie. You can't tell me what this is all about, I suppose?'

Wrightson shook his head. He hadn't been able to think of a story that wouldn't cause a ma.s.s panic. 'What's this meeting of yours, anyway?'

'Labour group. I'm Richard Hadleman, hopefully the next MP for this town. h.e.l.lo.'

Hadleman shook Wrightson's hand.

'You'll have some hope, won't you? No cotton mills in there.'

'Plenty of underpaid farm-hands and shop boys, though. Here, have one of our leaflets.' Hadleman reached into his satchel and produced one of the newly printed red pamphlets.

Wrightson smiled at it. 'The Ten Commandments Of Socialism? Won't please the clergy, will it?'

'The opiate of the ma.s.ses, according to Marx.' Hadleman smiled, but, seeing Wrightson's frown, he became serious. 'Anyway, I'm not here to win votes. If you can't tell me what's going on, can you at least tell me when it'll stop?'

'I'm afraid not. Out of my hands, rather.'

'Sure. Tell you what, if you chaps would like it, I can have my aunt send over a pot of stew and some whisky.'

Wrightson nodded. 'Thanks, but hold the whisky.'

'Oh, so it's that sort of - '

From the town, there came the sound of an explosion. Wrightson leaned out of the van window and called to the soldier standing by the barrier to his left. 'Position and weapon!'

'Position and weapon!' called the soldier to his comrade near by.

Hadleman listened as the call was repeated into the distance. 'That wasn't a sh.e.l.l or a grenade.'

'No,' Wrightson muttered, and then turned to Hadleman in surprise. 'How did you - '.

'My friend Constance has an interest in the military. What the h.e.l.l's going on in there, Major? Have you engaged an enemy?'

'No, I wish I b.l.o.o.d.y - sorry, I wish I had.'

'I'll leave you to it, then.' Hadleman started back up the road, hopping on to his bicycle.

Wrightson instantly caught the falseness of the comment. 'Don't do anything rash!

There's - ' But Hadleman was already out of sight. Wrightson sighed. He wasn't sure what kind of lie he could tell about the barrier anyway.

'Excuse me, sir,' the soldier by the barrier to his right called. 'Do you really want to know the position of Rippon?'

Smith led his cla.s.s quickly through the corridors of the school to the library. 'But this is mutiny, deserting our post!' Hutchinson was protesting. He was the only one who still carried his rifle. The rest had been left piled in a comer of the dormitory.

'Quiet!' Smith growled. 'I'm trying to save our lives. Bernice, the Doctor, how does he do what he does?'

'It's hard to say. It's rather like judo, or Reversi. The opposition usually thinks they've won, and then he makes them see the situation in a different way, and it turns out he has.'

'Hmm. Tricky.'

'John,' Joan began nervously. 'You aren't labouring under the delusion that you really are this Doctor, are you?'

'Of course not!' Smith held up his hand, and the troupe of boys halted in front of the library. From all over the school, the sound of small-arms fire could be heard.

'It's just a useful mental model. Now, something I've been wondering since I got here.' He gestured with his umbrella at an elaborately carved panel above the library door. 'What did you say that meant?'

'Maius Intra Qua Extra?' Joan laughed. 'You mean you really didn't know what the school motto meant?'

'No,' Smith mumbled, 'it's in a foreign language, isn't it?'

'Bigger on the inside than the outside!' Hutchinson snapped. 'It's about books. Now, don't you think we should - '

There came a vast explosion from one of the floors above. The boys all fell to the ground. Smith remained standing, tapping his teeth with the umbrella handle. 'Yes.

I see. How long's the school been in this building? Twenty years?'

'Yes,' Joan picked herself up and took his arm. 'Eighteen, to be exact.'

'Then how old's that inscription?'

Somewhat self-consciously, Benny took his other arm. 'Older. The arch is needed to support the ceiling here, and you can tell the carving's not been added later, because it extends further out than the edges of the arch. That was planned from the start.'

'So the motto was originally that of the building. Rocastle took it on. Is it a family motto?'

'No coat of arms,' Alexander said.