Doctor Who_ Logopolis Part 3

And there it was! Aunt Vanessa was so delighted to find Fate giving Luck a small push in her direction during the course of the afternoon's rigmarole that she forgot to be careful where she trod. She was within reach of the police box when her feet skidded from under her, toppling her against the double doors.

They opened under the impact. When she scrambled painfully to her feet again she was standing on solid ground, astonished to find herself inside a large . . . laboratory, was it?

She heard a light chuckle and turned round, still a little dazed from her fall. 'Tegan . . .?

What on earth have you . . .! Goodness me . . .'

The sight was so terrifying that before the threat had fully formed in her mind she was stumbling back towards the double doors. She struggled with them; they seemed to be closing on her, trapping her in with that . . . evil!

And then her feet were skidding in mud again. She backed away from the monstrous presence that lurched towards her across the gra.s.s in slow-motion pursuit. Still it stayed with her, this chuckling thing for which she couldn't form a name, piercing her with a gaze that froze the thoughts in her brain.

Somehow Aunt Vanessa found herself beside the tyre. She reached for it, hoping to use it for a shield, and despite its surprising weight managed to lift it from the ground. The chuckle that came from the pursuing figure was frankly derisive.

The traffic on the road pa.s.sed by unheeding. No one heard the throttled cry, the chuckle of triumph, or smelled the ozone left in the air by the sizzling discharge of the electronic device.

Even the spare tyre that rolled out from the verge and wound its way between the stream of pa.s.sing cars remained unnoticed for several minutes.

The yellow light was so dense around them now that Adric could only make out the Doctor as a lumbering shape beside him. The boy's fingers were blue with cold and the locks were becoming harder to manage. With each door his heart sank deeper, and he could tell from the Doctor's voice that even a Time Lord's sense of proportion is not proof against all disasters.

'Careful!' the Doctor whispered when the wire coathanger missed the lock and sc.r.a.ped across the face of the door that the dingy light had transformed from blue to a deep oily green. 'We're getting closer into the nucleus of the bubble . . . if it has a nucleus.'

'It is a gravity bubble, then?'

'With this many images there's only one thing it could be.'

'What can be causing it, Doctor?'

The Doctor hesitated, as if reluctant to share his thoughts with the boy. 'When we materialised round the police box - someone had been here before us.'

Someone? The lock was stiff, and as the Doctor's low whisper continued in his ear Adric had to concentrate to keep his mind on the position of the tumblers he could feel at the end of the wire. He understood what the Doctor was trying to say, but it was hardly thinkable. Another TARDIS, materialising round the police box before they arrived?

Someone must have antic.i.p.ated what he and the Doctor had planned to do!

The lock clicked open. Adric turned his head towards the Doctor and his voice came huskily. 'But who?'

The Doctor put his finger to his lips, and moving Adric gently to one side reached out to push open the door.

The light of the sky rushed into their eyes. They were both astonished to find themselves in the open air, standing beside a police box on the by-pa.s.s.

The police inspector had spotted the illegally parked sports car and instructed the constable to pull over. While the police inspector crossed the verge to investigate, the constable identified a hazard to traffic in the fast lane and nipped out between the pa.s.sing cars with a due regard to safety to roll the tyre out of harm's way.

The constable was gratified to see the inspector running towards him with a view to giving him a hand dragging the tyre onto the verge. Or so he thought, until the inspector reached him.

What the inspector had to report was brief, breathless and, as far as the constable was concerned, utterly incomprehensible. The inspector was on the point of steering the constable over to the car to corroborate the story with the evidence of his own eyes, when they spotted the suspect.

The constable knew at once from the gentlemen's attire that they'd got an odd one here.

Your average member of the public does not wander abroad in a long red coat and even longer scarf.

Despite the shock, from which he had clearly not properly recovered, the inspector was able to muster a professional tone as he addressed the tousel-haired newcomer. 'Good morning, sir. Would that be your vehicle over there?'

The Doctor must have sensed unwanted complications. He signalled to Adric behind his back to stay under cover of the police box. 'Not mine, inspector,' said the Doctor, tactfully identifying the man's rank from the silver pips on his shoulder. 'No, I haven't driven for ages. Not a car, that is.'

The inspector maintained a respectful tone, though his suspicions were hardening fast.

'I wonder how you come to be here, then. There's not much else here but the road.'

'I . . . well, I admit that might be a little difficult to explain.'

The Doctor found himself being steered by the elbow in the direction of the abandoned sports car. 'And while you're working that one out, sir, perhaps you could also have a go at explaining this.'

The Doctor stared into the back seat, his face frozen into an expression of horror. What he saw confirmed his worse fears: somehow the Master must have escaped from Traken. When he spoke again the Doctor's voice was urgent.

'He's still around here somewhere!'

'He, sir?' The inspector glanced at the constable with a silent warning to be ready in case of trouble.

'The Master, of course,' said the Doctor, pointing to the gruesome evidence in the back seat of the car.

In the dreadful transformation every detail had been perfectly preserved. There was no mistaking the smart blue uniform of Constable Seagrave, who had last been heard of putting in a cal down a bad line from the nearby police box.

The other body was unknown to any of those present. But if Tegan had been there she would have been able to tell them that the inert shape, shrunken like the constable down to the size of a doll, was all that remained of her Aunt Vanessa.

4.

The Doctor was trying to explain something to the two official-looking men in blue uniforms. From behind the police box, Adric caught a few words: 'Now just a minute, Officer. You don't realise what's going on here . . .'

The inspector's face was a grey wall of officialdom. 'No, sir, but I'll take the details when we get back to the station. Lucky for you, it's not up to me to judge.'

'Lucky? Oh, now surely you don't think . . .' The Doctor tailed off. He knew from past experience that jumping to conclusions was a favourite exercise on Earth. And people in uniforms were much the same all over the universe.

The inspector glanced across at the constable. 'We're not paid to have opinions, sir.

Just to do our duty.'

'Wel , I have opinions,' the Doctor retorted, gesturing towards the ghastly evidence in the back seat: 'This is the calling card of one of the most evil creatures in this universe, and I don't intend to stand here and debate the issue with you.'

This last remark was as much for Adric's benefit as anything else. 'I'm afraid, gentlemen,' the Doctor went on, 'that I'm going to have to get after him.' So far the Doctor had been careful to avoid looking in the boy's direction. But now he threw the briefest glance towards the TARDIS, and momentarily caught Adric's eye. 'So, if you can help me create a diversion . . .'

The inspector's eyebrows went up a notch further. 'Yes, I see, sir. You'd better come straight along with us.'

'Of course, I'd love to. But . . .'

With tact, but firmly, the constable took the Doctor's arm. 'To a.s.sist us with our enquiries.'

Adric pressed back against the TARDIS, thinking furiously. Here was a chance to repay the Doctor for . . . wel , for just being the Doctor. He remembered their first meeting on Alzarius, when the Time Lord and Romana had taken him in and tended his wounds, and how subsequently the Doctor hadn't minded all that much to discover the boy stowing away on the TARDIS.

The two policemen began to steer their shambling suspect towards their car, and Adric had to back round a corner of the police box to stay out of sight. He didn't know that the thing he had stumbled over was called a bicycle, but it was portable, bulky and would provide a step up to the top of the TARDIS. It gave him an idea.

The two policemen had a firm grip on the Doctor by the time they got to the car. When the constable stopped to open the door the Doctor allowed himself to be surprised by the sight of the police box, and said, as if the thought had just struck him, 'Would you mind awfully if I just phoned my solicitor?'

'That's not for this sort of thing, sir. It's a police call box.'

'That's what I like about this country!' The Doctor exclaimed, mustering up an authoritative enthusiasm that heightened the two officers' bafflement.

'A place for everything and everything in its place!'

Whatever the Doctor was planning to do next, he was obviously not about to get into the car willingly. The inspector had a way of dealing with difficult cases. 'If you're asking for a formal arrest, sir . . .' The inspector had already made up his mind that the tall tousle-headed man in the absurd red coat was dangerous, a lunatic perhaps. The big toothy grin he got from the Doctor in response to the official warning was further confirmation of this suspicion. In consequence the inspector was ready for anything - except the thing that actually happened. No reasonable person could have antic.i.p.ated that a bicycle would come arching through the air above them, to land with a clatter on the police car roof. The Doctor was not a reasonable person in that sense, and in any case he had the advantage of glimpsing Adric the moment before, perched up on top of the police box with the bicycle held high over his head.

When the two startled officers turned to their vehicle, the Doctor detached himself quickly from their company and sprinted towards the police box.

'Quick! Get him, Davis!' The inspector's shouted command came too late. By then Adric had jumped down from the roof, almost tumbling onto the Doctor, and the pair of them had bundled in through the blue double doors.

Constable Davis and the inspector squelched across the gra.s.s to the police box, to arrive there just as the lock snicked shut. The constable put his shoulder to the doors, and when they refused to budge he shouted and hammered on the panel with his fist, which gave the inspector a chance to demonstrate the superior intelligence that had earned him his rank.

'No problem, Davis. He's in there, and we're out here. He can't stay cooped up forever.'

'What do we do, sir? Sit it out?'

'Can't waste the taxpayer's time, Davis. There's a key in the car. Get it.'

Intelligence misleads. The inspector reasonably mistook the police box for a police box, but if he had known as much as the Doctor about the thing he was planning to unlock he would hardly have been so confident. Knowledge of that kind, however, would have involved certificates in time flow mechanics, not easily come by on Earth.

The Doctor's own certificates were hanging on a wall in one of the TARDIS's rooms, although he couldn't remember which. That was the trouble with infinitely reconfigurable living quarters - to avoid confusion you tend to keep to a few favourite well-lived-in areas and leave the rest to the dust and silence. Certificates, in the Doctor's view, were historical evidence of having been taught something - not guarantees of present knowledge. They belonged in long-abandoned rooms.

Even if they had been impressively decorating the console room walls, no amount of certificates would have told the Doctor why the TARDIS seemed at that critical moment to have forgotten all it knew about time flow mechanics, and was behaving as if it were nothing more than the inspector's plain and simple police box.

It might have been the cloister bell. Adric had drawn the Doctor's attention to the sinister chime the moment they got through the doors.

'It's ringing again, Doctor. Shouldn't we do something about it.'

The Doctor was busy at the console. 'A choice of emergencies. In a moment. Better dematerialise first.'

The police box - or whatever it was they had materialised around was gone, and the Doctor very much hoped it had taken the gravity bubble with it. The console seemed to think otherwise. Adric knew little about the workings of the mechanism, but it wasn't hard to detect the laboured noise emanating from the time column, which flashed in a half-hearted way and resolutely failed to move.

'It should be oscillating by now, Doctor.'

The Doctor glanced down at the weak force indicator. The needle was lower now, but still well inside the red zone. 'The gravity bubble's still very close. It's dragging us back.'

'What about the cloister bell?'

'Shut the door.'

Adric did so, but was uneasy about it. 'We can't just ignore it.'

'Nonsense! Of course we can,' snapped the Doctor. Adric didn't know that the First Law of Crisis is to panic about one thing at a time. The Doctor was too busy with the console, checking the displays and making quick calculations in his head, to give lessons in the fundamentals. 'There must be something we can simplify here,' Adric heard him mutter to himself. Suddenly his bony index finger, which had been scanning the rows of dials and switches, descended on a small panel, stabbing at it accusingly.

'Architectural configuration . . . that's the one!'

Adric leaned closer to see what he was doing. The panel was labelled Interior s.p.a.ce Interior s.p.a.ce Allocation Allocation, and at the touch of a few b.u.t.tons was displaying what looked like a series of graphs with whole areas beneath the curves filled in with colour.

Antic.i.p.ating the question on Adric's lips, the Doctor said, 'We'll have to find some more power from somewhere. All this s.p.a.ce,' he waved a loose hand at the panel, 'takes up energy. I'm going to jettison Romana's room.'

'Are you sure?' asked Adric, very upset by the idea.

Uncharacteristically the Doctor's temper flared up. 'Why do you expect me to be sure?

This is life! Nothing is sure!' The boy couldn't remember ever seeing him so angry.

The Doctor returned to the panel, and for a moment his finger wavered over the red b.u.t.ton marked Execute. Adric held his breath. He knew the ominous tri-syllable only referred to the routine to jettison Romana's room, but from the tension in the air the word Execute Execute might have applied to Romana herself. His mouth was dry. He felt he should say something to rea.s.sure the Doctor, but all that came out was, 'I'm sorry. I just wondered . . .' might have applied to Romana herself. His mouth was dry. He felt he should say something to rea.s.sure the Doctor, but all that came out was, 'I'm sorry. I just wondered . . .'

'This needs a quick decision, not a debate,' the Doctor snapped, as much to himself as to Adric. Then he pressed the b.u.t.ton.

Instantly the illumination in the console room flashed brighter. Adric breathed again, and the Doctor turned to him and nodded, as if some profound truth had been demonstrated. 'You see!' The time column began to wheeze into action. They had lost Romana's room, and regained access to the s.p.a.ce/time vortex.

The constable returned from the car and handed the key over to the inspector.

On inserting it into the lock the two officers witnessed an unusual chuffing sound. Both raised their heads, mentally noting that the light on top of the box had begun to flash.

The constable didn't think much about it, but the inspector voiced the speculation that it must be some sort of new security arrangement. He found it harder to explain what he saw next.

The inspector pushed the doors open while the constable stood back, ready to help in the event of trouble. The first he knew of it was the expression on the face of his superior. The inspector turned to him and hissed: 'There's some trick to this. Davis - I want a ful report.' The constable followed the other's gaze towards the police box. His mouth slowly sank open, as if in silent mimicry of its compact empty interior.

They were in flight. The oscillations of the flashing column that was the central feature of the console were regular now, riding the time waves like a ping-pong ball bobbing on the open sea. The Doctor was patching some hasty co-ordinates into the panel to fill the forward reference he had to file for take-off - Adric understood that much about programming the console - and some of the old liveliness had come back into his eyes.

Adric was glad to be able to say something cheerful. 'We've done it, Doctor! That other thing - if it was a TARDIS - must have gone.'

The Doctor turned from the console to face the boy: the light in his eyes had been a trick of the twinkling reflections from the panel lights.

'Somehow I rather doubt it.'

He cast a second look at the oscillating column, then, a.s.sured that all was well with the mechanism, took Adric by the arm and steered him towards the door that lead to the TARDIS interior.

Adric found himself being ushered out into the corridor. 'What's the matter, Doctor?' the boy asked, confused. 'Aren't you going to answer the bell?'

'This won't take a minute.'

'What won't?'

'Answering the bell,' said the Doctor as his head disappeared back into the console room.

Adric blinked at the closed door. But before he had time to realise how hurt and puzzled he was by the Doctor's behaviour, the door opened again. The Doctor put something into his hand. 'Company while you're waiting. He's very strong on patience.' The door closed.