Doctor Who_ Unnatural History Part 31

The Doctor pushed open the door and led Sam into the office, remembering to knock only once the door was half open.

'Come in,' called the man in the corner. The Doctor swept past a neatly organised desk and towards the workbench.

A grey-haired man was bent over the bench, amid a web of computers, oscilloscopes and what looked like an IV drip bag filled with white goo. Sam saw that it was attached to the Doctor's stabiliser device. A fluorescent light flickered overhead.

'Professor Daniel Joyce, I'd like you to meet Samantha Jones. And vice versa.'

The grey-haired man got up from the workbench and stood tall over the both of them. He smiled and shook her hand. 'A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Sam.' His gravelly Scots brogue made the last word sound like 'Sham'.

'Well, it's been lovely, but we have to go now.' The Doctor reached for the stabiliser.

Joyce slapped his hand. 'It's not ready yet.'

'What!' The Doctor wheeled around and started pacing frantically across the room, hands pressed to his temples. 'Not ready? We've only got about two hours '

'I know,' Joyce interrupted him, a bit defensively. 'The nanocircuitry web hasn't finished regenerating.' He tapped a computer monitor. Sam could see a complex 3D diagram slowly sketching itself in, labelled in maths symbols, or maybe Greek.

'You a.s.sured a.s.sured me it would be ready in time.' me it would be ready in time.'

191.

'I had to stop work for an hour or two. The head of department came by for her inspection. I couldn't be seen to be working on anything too odd.'

The Doctor started leafing through the papers on Joyce's desk. 'Afraid you're building another atomic bomb, are they?'

Sam blinked. 'Another?'

'It was only a small one,' said Joyce mildly. Sam found herself looking around the lab, in case it was still around. 'Just a demonstration of how easy it would be for some lunatic to get hold of the components. It certainly convinced my students.'

'I'll bet it did,' said Sam.

'You'd think the antinuclear movement would have thanked me!'

'Please!' The Doctor cast Joyce's papers down in a dishevelled ma.s.s. 'I need you to get it finished right away.'

'Another half an hour.'

'I don't have half an hour!'

'You said you have two hours.' Joyce carefully squared the papers on his desk.

'Well, yes, I've got two hours, but I don't have half an hour!' The Doctor was pulling books from a shelf, glancing at their t.i.tles for possible answers, pushing them back into place. Joyce followed him a few paces behind, wearily reordering whatever the Doctor left in disarray.

'It'll take that long for the last of the circuitry to flow into place,' insisted Joyce.

The Doctor spun around and grabbed him by the shoulders. 'I'll help.'

'It's a one-person job.'

'I can monitor the '

'I've got it under control.'

'There's nothing I can do? Nothing?'

'Nothing. Honestly.'

'Oh, all right, then,' said the Doctor, and wandered out to look at the stars.

As soon as the Doctor was gone, Professor Joyce called in his a.s.sistant, a serious young woman with reddish-blonde hair. 'Larna, could you keep an eye on the nanocircuitry web for me, please? Thank you.' The woman settled into Joyce's chair at the workbench, casting a worried glance out of the window at the Doctor on the patio outside.

192.

Professor Joyce stretched, and looked at Sam with a twinkle in his eye. 'It's still a one-person job, but I didn't say I had to be the person.' Sam returned his smile. 'Tea?'

'I'm more the coffee type.'

'As am I. Fortunately, I happen to have some of the instant variety which I guarantee is only mildly toxic.'

Sam followed him to his office across the hall, a narrow room jammed with shelves and cupboards. He took cups from a neatly ordered shelf, then pressed a switch on a small jug kettle. Sam flopped into a fraying grey easy chair beside the desk.

'He's always in such a hurry,' Joyce told Sam as he took a coffee jar from another shelf and spooned shiny granules into the cups. 'I don't know, sometimes I wish that old banger of his would pack up for good. Maybe without his TARDIS he might learn to appreciate the value of putting his feet up for a while.'

She stared at his right forearm as he poured hot water on to the granules and added milk. She'd spotted the dark blotches when they'd shaken hands for a moment she thought they were needle tracks. But now she could make out that they were a tattoo, scarred in a botched attempt at removing it, a lengthy serial number in blue-black ink.

But Joyce looked maybe sixty. He'd have been an infant in the concentration camps. If that.

'You're one of them, aren't you?' she said. 'One of the Doctor's lot.'

Joyce chuckled. 'My dear Miss Jones, it's been a long time since I was one of anyone's "lot".'

'You know what I mean. A Time Lord.'

Joyce shook his head. 'I'm afraid I don't have that honour. Though I have had some dealings with them in the past.' He sat down opposite her, putting the mugs on the corner of the desk. 'No, I have, ah, other other responsibilities. Smaller ones in some ways, bigger in others.' responsibilities. Smaller ones in some ways, bigger in others.'

'Like banning the Bomb?' she said.

'Like banning the Bomb.' Somehow that felt out of place; somehow she'd thought that sort of thing was supposed to be beneath people like him. 'Oh, they'll talk about the sanct.i.ty of the Web of Time, about how you have to be careful, but to tell the truth I've never been very good at the whole "do I have the right?" sort of thing.' He leaned forward towards her, his eyes alight with almost too much conviction. 'The way I see it is, do I have the right not to try try?'

'Hmm,' said Sam.

193.

'Exactly,' he agreed emphatically. 'The present is what we make of it. And so is the past, for that matter. After all, a couple of years ago I wasn't even Daniel Joyce.' That she could deal with; maybe two hours ago she hadn't been Samantha Lynn Jones. 'We're defining what is as we go along. That's what we're here for. We don't need to be bound by the way things are, or were, or are supposed to be.' He set the cup back down and rubbed his forearm, as if ma.s.saging that scar. 'Though I'll admit my enthusiasm's got me into a little trouble in the past. . . '

He was clearly warming to his theme, the way old people did, so she sat back and just let him talk. Her eyes wandered over his desk. There was a small framed print of an elaborately gowned, slightly plump redhead in the far corner, beside a larger family portrait of Joyce with his wife and a daughter in her thirties. That made sense. If his girl was grown up, no wonder he was talking to her like this now he must be wandering about in search of someone to be a father figure to.

Suddenly Joyce was giving her a knowing look. He'd noticed that she wasn't paying attention. 'You're thinking of running off with him, aren't you?' he said.

'Well. . . yeah, I suppose I am.'

Joyce sighed ruefully. 'He collects them like. . . like bottle caps.'

Slowly he stood and began to walk across the room. The change in his manner was abrupt, absolute.

'They all think they have to go with him to have a worthwhile life,' he said quietly. 'But they don't. There's so much to do right here. The Doctor doesn't know what he's missing out on. Imagine if he concentrated all his efforts in one place, one time.'

'You mean, imagine if he was like you,' said Sam.

Joyce was still lost in his train of thought. 'He just keeps collecting collecting them, one after another. As though he's compelled to. It must be something in his biodata,' he muttered. them, one after another. As though he's compelled to. It must be something in his biodata,' he muttered.

She shrugged. 'I suppose he must have put some of it in my biodata, then.'

Joyce's eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and he asked her what she meant. It took quite a while, and the rest of her cup of coffee, but she managed to get out an explanation about how the Doctor felt he had changed her biodata.

'Well, it's an interesting theory.' Joyce finished his own cup. 'Except, of course, that it's nonsense.'

'It is?'

'Well, I admit the basic concept's far from unheard of. But without your timestreams ever having crossed? Painstaking modifications to the worldline 194 of someone who wouldn't otherwise ever have been within a mile of meeting him? When there were bound to be hundreds of other people whose timestreams were already closer to intersecting with his, and wouldn't need so much meddling? Doesn't that sound the tiniest bit implausible to you?'

'I've just been mugged by a unicorn after discovering I've got an evil twin,'

said Sam. 'This week, nothing sounds implausible.'

'Well, take my word for it,' said Joyce, amused. 'He can't be responsible for your condition. Not without some more, ah. . . direct, intimate contact between his biodata and yours.' He raised an eyebrow. 'You haven't had that, I trust?'

'I don't think think so,' said Sam. 'So who's responsible, then?' so,' said Sam. 'So who's responsible, then?'

Joyce shrugged. 'In the end all that matters is who's responsible for what you do next.' He gathered up the coffee cups and headed for the staffroom with them. When she followed, he caught her in the doorway for a moment, pointing a stern finger at her. 'And it had better be you.'

It took her a while to spot the Doctor. He was sitting on a lawn near the Physics building, watching the clouds behind the bell tower. The moment he'd been told there was nothing to do, it was as though a switch had been thrown.

She sat down beside him, and he reached an arm around her shoulders to protect her from the chill.

'Look,' he said, pointing upward.

'Clouds,' she said, raising an eyebrow. 'Next?'

'No. I mean look.'

Sam looked. Long grey streamers were pouring across the sky, westward.

'They're heading towards the scar, aren't they?'

'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'But I meant, look look.'

If he's going to point out the one that looks like a hippo, thought Sam, I'm out of here.

But instead she just followed his gaze. Clouds moving, clouds mating, clouds dividing. The more you looked, the more you saw. Puffy shapes expanding and dissolving into other puffy shapes, long strings thinning out until you couldn't see them any more.

They were quiet together for a while.

'I can hear her crying out,' he said.

'The TARDIS?'

He nodded. 'All this time. She's been holding on to her link with me. I think she wanted me to feel this.' His face looked still and hollow in the orange-tinted 195.

street light. 'She wants to know. . . how could I do this to her?'

Probably the same way you can risk my life, thought Sam. And most of the time convince us both that we don't mind it.

'She's like a person like an old friend, isn't she?'

'Oh, we've had our differences, especially lately. She's been getting so head-strong very clear ideas about where she wants to go. . . ' He shook his head, looking down at his toes. 'I wanted to come here weeks ago, but she'd been badly injured. She still hadn't fully recovered by the time I. . . ' He trailed off shakily.

'By the time you had to do it,' she said, 'or you'd never know what happened to your friend.'

He gave a faint smile, grateful for the attempt to let him off the hook. 'I only took the TARDIS to low-risk places while she recovered. . . dropping the T'hiili off in one of the yellow dimensions, that sort of thing. But that wasn't what she wanted at all. All those easy trips, she fought me every step of the way. But when I set course for here. . . it was as if she wanted to go here all along. I don't know why.'

'Maybe she was curious.'

'Perhaps. . . ' He trailed off, watching the clouds stream endlessly on. 'I might have to get used to this sky,' he said. There was a tremor in his voice which she hadn't heard before.

Sam just held on to him. This was a bloke who could die and then get up and walk away. About the only thing he could really sacrifice was his freedom, or a friend. And if the TARDIS died he'd lose both.

'I could have stayed here,' he murmured. 'Here in San Francisco. A few years ago, the opportunity to settle down presented itself.'

'This could've been home,' she said.

'But I left. I always do. After a while I stopped thinking about it, stopped looking back. There were always new adventures, new places, new people. . .

After a while I hardly saw anyone from the old days at all. And in all of that time I never knew about the mess I'd left behind here.' He sighed and pulled his knees up under his chin. 'I feel as though my past is finally starting to catch up with me.'

'At least it's your own own past,' she said. past,' she said.

'Good point.' He managed a slight curl of a smile. 'There's just so much of it sometimes. I try not to be as old as I am. Usually it works.'

She raised her hands to his face, then gently lifted it till his eyes couldn't help but meet hers. 'Look,' she told him. 'If worst comes to worst, and you're 196 stuck here what're you gonna do about it? Are you gonna curl up and die? Or do you think you'll just find enough things to get caught up in right here?' He still looked shaky, and she swallowed hard, feeling a sudden spikiness building up in her throat. 'You still believe all that stuff you told me about living in the moment, right? 'Cause if not, I'm a bigger sucker than I ever thought I was. . . '

'No, you're right,' he said simply. 'I'm just not very good at not getting to do what I want.'

'If you'd settled down here, would you ever have met Sam?'

He shook his head. 'And I wouldn't have dragged you into this.'

'And we wouldn't be sitting here talking right now.'