Doctor Who_ Logopolis Part 7

It was in hexadecimal notation, using Arabic digits up to nine followed by the first six letters of what was called the Roman alphabet, so that the first fifteen numbers could be represented by a single character. In some ways it was a complicated way of counting, instead of the more usual Earth notation which used only as many symbols as there are fingers and thumbs on the human hand. But ten is a very awkward number, the Doctor had explained, only divisible by two and five. The hexadecimal notation was based on the number sixteen, which can be halved four times, and then produces perfect unity.

The Monitor signalled to Adric to follow him. 'I must check the External Registers. Read it to me as we go.'

Tegan had been kneeling beside Nyssa, watching the TARDIS closely for the past few minutes. It was still shrinking visibly, though the rate seemed to have slowed. She saw Adric and the Monitor leaving the room, and scrambled to her feet to follow them. But in the doorway she stopped and looked down the length of the hall they had entered. One long wall that stretched away into the distance as far as she could see was lined with dark-robed figures, each seated before a console that was a scaled-down version of the Monitor's in the Central Register. They spoke earnestly into the apertures in front of them, filling the room with the rhythmic incantation of 'the Numbers'. As Adric and the Monitor moved slowly away down the hall, Tegan hung back in the doorway, appalled by the sight of al those earnest, joyless faces.

The Monitor moved from work-station to work-station, looking over each shoulder and listening in. Behind him trailed Adric, reading aloud from the print-out. 'Zero-A, Zero-four, Zero-Zero, nine-two, two-C, eight-seven . . .'

They had turned a corner and pa.s.sed through a doorway to enter a second similar room. Adric was barely conscious of his surroundings; it took all his concentration to read accurately from the paper in his hand. The Monitor's progress was slow and deliberate; only once did he hold up his hand to interrupt Adric's flow as he leaned over a fellow Logopolitan to exchange a few whispered words.

He returned to Adric shaking his head. 'I'm sorry, I thought we had found something. It's somewhere in this sub-routine . . . somewhere.' He paused to look up and down the room, and Adric took the opportunity to survey the perspective of hundreds of whispering workers hunched before their consoles.

'But Monitor, why do you need so many people? I still don't understand why all this can't be done with machinery?'

'For many uses machinery is unsurpa.s.sed. But Logopolis is not interested in those uses. Block transfer computations cannot be run on computers.'

'Why not?' the boy asked.

'Our manipulations of numbers directly change the physical world. There is no other maths like ours.'

Adric was surprised by the weight of sorrow in the man's voice. If he hadn't wanted so eagerly to know more, Adric might have had the tact to stop pressing his questions.

'You mean the computations themselves would affect a computer?'

'Change its nature and cause it to malfunction,' the Monitor confirmed. 'Only the living brain is immune.'

'But you have a computer out there. You were using it.'

'To record the code, and prepare new algorithms, yes. But we must never run our programs on it.'

Adric scanned the print-out in his hand with new respect, and the Monitor, seeming to take this as an indication that they had rested enough, said 'Perhaps we can continue . .

Adric felt a surge of panic. In the process of resting his eyes from the hard black print he had completely lost his place among all those figures that, he had to confess, meant nothing to him.

The Monitor must have realised Adric's predicament. Gently, without having to consult the print-out, he said, 'We had reached zero-seven, zero-four, A-zero, three-zero, three-eight. We should be somewhere towards the end of the third block.'

The silver-haired Logopolitan was smiling at him. Adric's pulse slowed, and he found his place again. Together they moved on down the long row of seated workers.

The Doctor stirred and tried to lift his head. Even in his coma, immobile within the black winding-sheet of unconsciousness, the persistent sound, screwed up now to the pitch of pain, had somehow penetrated his awareness. Some fierce red luminosity swam in the darkness behind his eyes; it sapped the strength from his neck, and his head sank once more onto the TARDIS floor.

If he had been able to open his eyes he might have seen, imaged on the viewer screen, the Logopolitan devices Nyssa had identified as loudspeakers. From the distorted perspective they seemed like giant steel-gauze hands cupped protectively around the tiny time machine. The gauze vibrated slightly as the energy pulsed through it.

The deadly buzzing began to fade. Quite suddenly it stopped altogether. In the silence that fell like soft snow, the Doctor opened his eyes.

There had been nothing out of place in the Registers, the Monitor was sure of that. The secret was out here in the deep and winding streets, alive with whispers and the click of abacus beads. But there were far too many of them. They could never check them all in time.

Still reading from the print-out, though noticeably flagging now, Adric walked close beside the Monitor. He had become almost hypnotised by his own incantations. 'Eight-three, zero-three, A-three, three-seven, two-B, two-B, three-F, zero-D...' The paragraph of figures came to a conclusion in one more restful island of white s.p.a.ce on the page before his eyes. 'That's the end of the third block', he told the Monitor.

The Monitor was turning from side to side as they walked, glancing at the bowed, seated figures and the abacuses in the entrances that lined the street. He dipped his head to Adric in acknowledgement and said 'The work is wearying to those unused to it, but we must continue.'

Adric took a deep breath and began again. 'Fourth block begins... Zero-three, zero-two, zero-zero, F-eight...'

'Zero-zero, E-eight, I think,' the Monitor corrected, without interrupting his surveillance.

The Monitor was right; Adric had misread the figure. 'Sorry, E-eight,' said Adric, wondering at the precision of detail held in that smooth grey head. 'It is difficult, I know,'

said the Monitor, putting his hand on Adric's shoulder. 'But accuracy is of vital importance...'

Meanwhile in the Central Register a small group of the Logopolitans that Tegan had noticed conferring with the Monitor earlier were setting up a pair of large flat devices on either side of the TARDIS. They looked a little like portable screens.

'Some sort of sonic projectors,' Nyssa suggested, raising her soft, clear voice a little over the sea-sh.e.l.l sound of myriad whispers that washed into the room from the Registers beyond the doors.

Tegan was puzzled. 'What's the good of that?'

'They must be creating a temporary zone of stasis around the TARDIS. But I'm afraid I don't understand their science.'

'That goes double for me,' said Tegan. The Logopolitans had waved them politely back from the TARDIS while they set up their screens. Now Tegan was steering Nyssa towards one of the doors. 'But one thing's clear as daylight. Come and take a peek in this room here...'

She pointed through the doorway to the External Register, and for the first time Nyssa saw the source of the echoing whispers. 'They all seem very dedicated,' she said, watching them.

'Dedicated! That's one way of looking at it. You know what I think? I think it's sheer exploitation. Just look at their faces.'

'They certainly all seem very serious,' Nyssa agreed. 'But I've seen that look on my father's face - intense dedication. These people are scientists. They're trying to help the Doctor.'

'If you ask me they must be under some huge threat to keep them so hard at work,'

Tegan said. 'Not that it seems to be doing the Doctor any good.' The two girls were walking back to where a knot of Logopolitans were gathering around the TARDIS. Some of the group stepped politely aside as the girls approached.

Nyssa stopped in front of the TARDIS, measuring it with her eye.

Tegan had noticed the same thing. There was no doubt about it: the TARDIS had stopped shrinking.

Adric's throat was very dry now, and he spoke with obvious effort. '...eight-nine, nine-A, zero-A, one-one, E-seven...'

Once again the Monitor stopped him. It was the fourth time in the past three streets.

Adric was becoming an unreliable reader. 'E-nine,' the Monitor corrected, a little testily.

Adric stared at the paper in front of him. The little black figures were starting to dance in front of his eyes. 'Sorry,' the boy said. 'E-nine, three-three...' But he broke off almost immediately. 'Did you say "E-nine"? It says E-seven here.'

The Monitor seized the paper. 'You're right, E-seven. And the next three numbers are wrong...' He looked rapidly up and down the street, calculating the shortest route. 'Come on, this way.'

Tegan's elation at finding that the shrinking process had come to a halt was quickly replaced by a renewed sense of despair. 'The TARDIS isn't much use to anybody that size, stable or not,' she said to Nyssa who was kneeling beside her. If only one could see in through those small black windows.

'Perhaps it gives us some time,' said Nyssa, after a moment.

'Time to do what? We don't even know if he's alive in there.'

But the Doctor was alive. After his ordeal the very idea astonished him, but, as he sat up, holding his head in his hands, the suspicion shaped itself into a theory which hardened into a fact. Yes, he was alive!

The moment he saw the Logopolitan devices magnified in the viewer screen he realised what had happened. 'They've arrested the dimension spiral. Things are looking up.'

The street seemed narrower than the others, and the sounds quieter. The Monitor stopped at the junction to make sure of his bearings.

'This is the street. The error should be somewhere here...'

They advanced side by side, just as they had in so many streets before. But now the Monitor moved more slowly, like a cat that can smell its prey.

The first two cells on the left-hand side of the street were occupied by chanting Logopolitans, busy at their abacuses. But the third cell stood empty.

Adric noticed it first. The shrunken body lay carelessly beside the vacant stool like a neglected child's toy. There was a faint, fresh smell, like ozone, in the air.

The next two cel s revealed the same gruesome story. Horrified, the Monitor looked up from the tiny body he had knelt beside. 'Sabotage,' he said darkly.

'Murder,' corrected Adric. 'That's far worse.'

The Monitor stood up, and his voice was low and harsh. 'Interference with the workings of Logopolis. That could be the most dangerous crime in the universe.'

At the time it struck Adric as odd that the Monitor should raise his eyes as he spoke, looking not along the length of the street, but fixing his gaze quite definitely on one particular point in the sky.

What the Monitor was looking at Adric was soon to discover. But the boy recognised at once the shadow of terror that lurked beneath the surface of those leaden eyes.

8.

Adric looked up and down the street, alert for any sign of the being he had come to hate so much, and all the time trying to keep his gaze from drifting back, as it kept doing in fascinated horror, to the tiny corpses of what had once been Logopolitans. The Monitor meanwhile had picked up one of the abacuses and was rattling off some rapid calculations, pausing occasionally to make emendations to the print-out.

And if he had seen the Master? Adric wondered what he would have done, and realised how much he had come to depend on the Doctor's wisdom. Without him it was hard to reach a decision - a state of mind he was certain the Doctor would not condone. Adric vowed then and there to make it his mission to find the Master.

Almost as if he had conjured up the image from his mind, a figure appeared at the far end of the street. It was standing on the terrace of pink rock above the dwelling places, and was clearly no Logopolitan. Instead of the flowing dark robes, it wore - or rather, was imbued in the aura of a white, shimmering translucence that seemed to fade even as Adric looked. It was the figure the Doctor had negotiated with on the bridge!

The Monitor had been too involved in his own work at the abacus to see any of this.

Now he got up briskly, rolling up the print-out. The movement distracted Adric's gaze for a fraction of a second, and when he looked again there was nothing where the watching figure had stood but rocks and the shadows of rocks.

'Quickly!' said the Monitor. 'We must return to the Central Register at once.'

At least the hideous buzzing had stopped and the console room now looked its old self again. But the exaggerated gravity that slowed down his movements, and the giant faces of Nyssa and Tegan in the frame of the viewer screen were enough to remind the Doctor that he and the TARDIS were still literally in a tight squeeze.

If the error was in the dimensioning routine there was a remote possibility of being able to dematerialise by shorting out the chameleon circuit altogether. It was a dangerous business, but it was something to do! Struggling against gravity as he moved towards the console, the Doctor tried to draw together in his mind the remnants of his knowledge of time map structuring. Romana's help would be useful, he thought. Or come to that, anybody's.

He went to work, overlooked by the girls' huge unseeing faces. Grounding the chameleon circuit was a ma.s.sive task - the whole Real World gearing would have to be unharnessed before he could get to the necessary components - and the result was risky at best, and at worst unthinkable. In the heart of his two hearts the Doctor must have realised that the only real chance of help was from outside. Yet a streak of stubbornness was driving him to a course that might only add to the danger. Wielding the sonic screwdriver he began to remove the first panel of the console.

The screen-like objects on either side of the miniature TARDIS were emitting a faint hum, Tegan realised after she had been kneeling beside them for a while. Nyssa had explained that they were probably sending out some sort of cancellation wave to hold the effects of the scrambled dimensioning in check.

And a lot of use that was. Tegan looked in despair at the tiny vehicle that had spirited her to this strange and remote place. It had already caused her such distress that she didn't care if she never saw it again. Except that it was her only way back to civilisation.

And the Doctor was in it. Adric broke into her thoughts, rushing in through the door with the Monitor. 'The Monitor's done it,' the boy exclaimed as Nyssa and Tegan scrambled to their feet. 'He's found the error.'

The Monitor quickly explained as much as was necessary. The error was in Block Four of the dimensioning routine, and somehow the correct figures had to be got to the Doctor so that he could re-enter them into the console.

'a.s.suming he's alive in there,' said Tegan, taking the amended print-out from the Monitor.

It was her idea to hold up the printed sheet towards the TARDIS, in the hope that the Doctor would be able to read it on the Viewer Screen. 'Let's just hope he knows what to do,' she added. Adric helped her unroll the print-out. 'He will. He's the Doctor!'

And his own words reminded him of his vow to track down the Master. How long they would have to wait until the Doctor was out of the TARDIS, or what state he would be in when he finally emerged, were unknown quant.i.ties. Meanwhile the evil Time Lord was somewhere near, stalking the Logopolitan streets. Adric jumped up. 'I've got to go back,'

he said. 'The Master . . . he's out there.'

Nyssa caught hold of his arm. 'The Master? I'm coming with you.' Nothing would put Nyssa off. 'I came here to find the Master I must know what's happened to my father.'

Adric saw the determination in those serious olive-green eyes. He took her hand, and, with a wave to Tegan and the Monitor, they ran down the stairs towards the street.

Up until that moment the Doctor had been sitting under the console, studying one of the small components littering the floor around his feet, a collection of multi-coloured objects that might have been mistaken for infants' toys.

It was no pleasure disa.s.sembling the Real World gearing. There are some things in life, the Doctor thought to himself, that shouldn't be tampered with - and the TARDIS was certainly one of them. She was so temperamental that it was almost impossible to isolate a fault without generating a number of others.

Then he reminded himself that it was because of the TARDIS he had come to Logopolis. Funny, that. You put up with its tantrums through the centuries, and then a sort of vanity drives you to try and improve the old vehicle. To tamper, in fact. But in that he had been out-tampered by the Master.

'The cheese-board is the world, and the pieces,' the Doctor said aloud as he began to dislodge the next component in the chain, 'are the phenomena of the universe. As my old friend Huxley used to say.' Or was it chess-board? Yes, chess-board, of course . . .

And then he remembered with a chill the rest of what Huxley had said. He had been speaking of the battle of science to wrest knowledge from that stubborn opponent, the Nature of Things. But the words might quite as well have applied to the Master. 'The opponent never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.'

Ignorance was the word. There was no denying it: he was an ignorant old Doctor, and he had made a mistake.

He lifted his eyes again to the viewer screen, but the earnest young faces were gone now, he noticed with some disappointment. Now the Logopolitans were blocking the viewer with a sheet of paper covered with numbers. His head had actually ducked back under the console before he realised. Numbers! He jumped up again - or rather tried to.

If the exaggerated gravity hadn't slowed the movement he would certainly have cracked his head on the under-side of the console.

Magnified on the screen, the Monitor's precisely hand-written emendations stood out clearly against the machine print. Very pleased with life, the Doctor reached for the data block.

'The mark of the Master,' said Adric with a shudder, pointing out to Nyssa the doll-like, dead Logopolitans. He had managed to trace his way back to the street where the Monitor's search had wound to its ugly conclusion. 'He must have added his own voice to the Numbers, and corrupted the Doctor's code,' said Nyssa, the anger flashing in her eyes. Adric remembered that this was the man who had almost destroyed her planet, and who was almost certainly responsible for her father's disappearance - though in what way the Doctor hadn't explained.

Adric pointed out the spot where he had seen the translucent figure that seemed to have followed them from the planet Earth.

'The Master?' Nyssa asked. Neither of them, they realised, knew what the Master looked like.

'Him . . . or something worse.'

They had begun to explore beyond the end of the street, where a T-junction lead off out of sight in both directions. The susurration and clack of beads came more strongly from their left, so Adric presumed that way lead back to the centre.

For some reason they both had an instinct to explore to the right. It was nearly the undoing of both of them.