Doctor Who_ Logopolis Part 4

The book was heavy, bound in dark-brown leather. Adric tipped it to look at the spine and saw it was called The Complete Poetry of John Milton The Complete Poetry of John Milton. Opening the book brought a smell of distant cla.s.srooms. At the same time the corridor fell silent. The cloister bell had stopped tolling.

Corridors! Tegan was sick of them. Whether you ran down them or walked, they all wound into more corridors, or branched into junctions that lead again to corridors, or perhaps opened out into halls, from whose tall archways sprang more junctions that narrowed inevitably to yet more corridors.

Her state of mind had hardly been helped by the constant tolling, distant but always with her. And now, as she paused for breath, it seemed to be ringing in her head. She listened. It was in her head. Just in her head. It had stopped.

She was lost - inside a crazy little blue phone box. And there was no one to help: just her, and the silence, and corridors from here to kingdom come. So when she turned a corner and saw the patch of daylight through a distant arch, she ran to it as a thirsty desert trekker might run to a water-hole.

The daylight was a mirage; but she only came to that realisation after she had studied her surroundings for a long moment during which fear fought with curiosity, and both were slowly overcome by a rising indignation at the absurdity of the place. The ancient stone wal s and the pillars supporting the arched roof of the walkway that circ.u.mscribed the courtyard, were all constructed inside a large dome. Some invisible source bathed this great roof with a pale blue light in emulation of the sky, even as far as the suggestion of clouds.

She sat down on a low bench and said aloud, 'This place is completely and utterly daft.'

As if in answer the stone columns around her trembled slightly to the reverberation of a faint whirring, chuffing sound. A patch of intense blue, attached to no particular object, seemed to be forming in the middle of the courtyard. Vague at first, it soon acquired corners and a flas.h.i.+ng light on top.

Tegan stood up slowly, staring in broad-minded Australian disbelief at the police box that had materialised in front of her eyes.

The book was al printed in short lines that wasted a lot of the paper on the right-hand side of the page, and they gave the narrative a c.u.mulating rhythm that Adric found unpleasant at first. But as he got into the story - it was about flying people called Angels who were at war against the Evil creatures that lived in a Burning Lake - the rhythm seemed to help the way the story built up.

The Leader of the Burning-Lake Dwellers reminded Adric of the Master. Just as the Master had once been a Gallifreyan and was still a Time Lord, the evil character in the story was refugee Angel. So although the landscape of the story, with its Thunder and Lightning and Black Fire, was so obviously a fiction, this central correspondence with the truth riveted Adric's interest.

He was ascending a huge staircase that lead to a gate built of gold and studded with diamonds when he was jolted back from the book to the normality of the TARDIS. The door was opening.

The Doctor stood in the doorway, his face pale under the wild curls of his hair. 'Well, now we know,' was al he said as he ushered Adric back inside.

'Know what?'

'The message was very faint. But it was from Traken all right.'

'Traken!' The bright angels flew from the boy's mind. 'How's Nyssa? What's wrong?'

Taking time to choose his words carefully, the Doctor closed the door. Nyssa was safe enough; it was from her that the message had come. But Tremas, her father, had vanished. 'The Master must have had a second TARDIS hidden away somewhere,' the Doctor concluded. 'There's no doubt now that he escaped from Traken.'

'And he's taken Tremas with him?'

The Doctor made a vague gesture of affirmation; he had said as much as he dared tell the boy. Tremas, the brilliant Traken scientist and trusted Consul, had been a man in his prime, whereas the Master was very near the end of his twelfth regeneration. No Time Lord had survived the process for a thirteenth time. Clearly the Master had been desperate.

Adric clutched at the Doctor's sleeve. 'Then where have they gone?'

The Doctor hesitated. He couldn't tell Adric of his fears that the Master had physically taken over Tremas. Was he living in his body now? To achieve that was beyond the capacity of a Time Lord alone, but with some of the power of the Keepers.h.i.+p still lingering . . .

Angry with himself, the Doctor suddenly thumped the console. He had the self-control to choose a part some distance from the delicate array of needles, but the percussion was still enough to set them jumping. 'I was so sure we'd got him . . . But all the time he's been two moves ahead of me. He must have known I'd try to fix the chameleon circuit.'

These were speculations he could share with the boy; indeed, he had to. After his escape from Traken the Master must have come to Earth to lie in wait, wrapping his own time machine invisibly around the police box. It was the only way to infiltrate his superior technology into the Doctor's TARDIS.

There was one thing Adric didn't understand. 'But to know you were coming . . . he must have read your mind?'

'He's a Time Lord too,' the Doctor brooded. 'In many ways we have the same mind.'

Adric looked round the familiar walls of the console room and shuddered. If the Doctor was right the Master was somewhere in the TARDIS, imbedded like a virus in living flesh. If they landed in Logopolis they ran the risk of carrying the infection to an innocent planet.

'Then we can't really land anywhere, can we?' the boy asked.

Adric heard him mutter something in reply, but the Doctor wasn't really listening. His eye was wandering around the console room as if trying to trace the invisible string of a long tangled thought. The thought seemed to begin with the console itself and wind across the floor to the big double doors and then back again, eventually ascending slowly up the walls to the ceiling.

The Doctor crossed to the small door that led to the TARDIS interior and pushed it shut, examining the way it fitted into the door jamb. He seemed satisfied by what he saw and went over to retrieve the TARDIS Manual from under one of the feet of the hatstand, where the small book spent a lot of its time compensating for an inadequacy in the hatstand design, or perhaps a slight unevenness of the floor.

The Doctor had been leafing backwards and forwards through the pages for several minutes when he suddenly looked up brightly and said, 'Actually, there is one way of getting rid of him. I'm just trying to work out how much damage it might do to the TARDIS systems.'

The Doctor explained his dangerous idea. In principle it should be possible to flush the Master out - literally - by the simple expedient of materialising the TARDIS under water and opening the doors.

'Drown the TARDIS?' Adric exclaimed. 'But you can't!'

'I can and I have to,' said the Doctor flatly. 'And that is that.'

The strange pale blue light that seemed so like daylight must have been affecting her eyes, Tegan decided. The object she was examining was as solid as anyone could wish: a perfectly normal police box, even down to the stuff about police coming to your a.s.sistance written on the front. It was everything else that was crazy. She remembered - if her memory hadn't gone completely bananas along with everything else - that the crumbling stone courtyard she was in now, along with all that spaghetti of corridors, was supposed to be inside one of those police box things. Tegan was essentially a sensible girl, and she knew when she was out of her depth. What she had to do now was find some official person, preferably the captain of the craft - and give him a piece of her mind he would never forget.

She had walked round to the back of the police box by now, just in case there was some trick to it. No, it looked, felt and smelled just like the real article. What she didn't see, as she leaned against the blue wall at the back trying to work out some positive plan of action, was the door at the front of the police box slowly edging open.

5.

He thought it was a map at first. And then as the details on the viewer screen grew larger Adric could see it was an aerial image of a real city. Traffic moved along the grey veins of roads between the buildings, many of which were stained with age, although patches of silver and gla.s.s highlighted some newer structures with gleams of sunlight.

The main feature of the city was a thick grey-green river bangled with bridges. It lay across the centre of the screen like a serpent sprawled across a patterned cus.h.i.+on.

The time column had stopped oscillating. They were hovering in mid-air.

'London,' announced the Doctor.

'Why not the sea?' asked Adric. 'You said there were a lot of oceans on this planet.'

The Doctor crossed to the console and delicately re-set the co-ordinates. 'It's an ancient tidal river called the Thames.' The watery burial of the TARDIS would be taking place somewhere worthy of respect, he a.s.sured Adric.

'Besides, if we do it this way we won't have so far to swim.'

The boy helped the Doctor with the first part of the elaborate preparations. They had to close down most of the console system, and as the twinkling lights and little coloured instrument panels went out one by one the reality of what the Doctor was planning to do came home to Adric. A flood of water would sluice in and wash out the whole TARDIS.

The console room, the corridors, the cloister room and the myriad rooms behind doors he had never opened would be drowned under tons of thick green water. It seemed such a drastic way of driving out the Master.

'But you can't just abandon the TARDIS.'

The Doctor pa.s.sed an affectionate hand over the console. 'Yes, one does feel a tremendous loyalty to the old thing after all these years.'

'I don't mean that, Doctor.' It seemed to Adric that the Time Lord was overlooking the obvious again. 'Be practical. How are you going to get to Logopolis?'

The Doctor pul ed a switch and the secondary lights at the base of the time column went out, leaving the console looking lifeless. The only working technology in the room now seemed to be the viewer screen, which still showed the serpent motif of the Thames.

'There's a gap in your education, Adric. Why are we going to Logopolis?'

'To repair the TARDIS.'

'And if we don't have a TARDIS?'

The Doctor began to walk round the console, double-checking that al the switches were off.

'But we've got to have a TARDIS! What are you going to do for transport?'

'They also serve who only stand and wait,' said the Doctor simply, pointing to the works of John Milton that Adric was still holding, 'or haven't you got to that bit yet?'

He approached the screen. 'We're partially materialised and hovering. There's just enough power in the peripheral reserves to keep us up until I short the lines with this lever. We'll drop the TARDIS . . . here.' He pointed to an area where the river widened.

'Drop it?' The more Adric knew about the Doctor's plan the more dangerous it seemed.

'Couldn't we just materialise under water?'

'This way we make sure we land in the right place. A gentle splash-down.' Nevertheless, the Doctor made sure of getting a good handhold on the console and persuaded Adric to do the same. 'Well . . . there may just be a slight jolt. Ready?'

Adric nodded uneasily. 'Yes . . . if you are?'

'That's not very affirmative,' replied the Doctor sourly. 'I'd feel more confident if you just said "yes".'

They both held on tightly. The Doctor's hand closed on the lever.

Leaning against the back of the police box, Tegan glowered around the silly courtyard with exasperation. In the absence of anybody to complain to or order about she had begun to talk to herself, addressing herself by name.

'Right, Tegan. This is obviously some kind of elaborate joke, so we've got to find some way of putting a stop to it. The shock's the worst thing, and that's over. So everything's got to get better from here on in.'

What happened next showed that her powers of prophesy were as underdeveloped as her geography, as far as the TARDIS was concerned. Although nothing of her surroundings changed in the few moments that followed, she experienced a sudden, deeply unpleasant sensation that made her heart pound. It was like being in a lift that has taken it into its head to make a violent downward lurch.

She clung to the police box for support, feeling indignation and alarm, in that order.

Then just as everything seemed stabilised again, a ma.s.sive shock wave came up through the floor, cascading loose rubble from the stone walls and sending her flying.

She picked herself up from the flagstones. 'This is just too much. It's unbelievable.'

Apart from the dust her uniform was undamaged, although she could feel numb places on her body that were bound to turn into bruises. 'Crazy idiot of a pilot. Wait till I have a word with him . . .'

And then she froze. From the other side of the police box she heard a sound. If she had been convinced it was human she would have described it as laughter; a hollow, light chuckle.

She remained still. Nothing happened. Without moving from the spot, Tegan called out cautiously, 'Who . . . who is that?'

The same terrifying judder threw Adric up onto the console, and he came to rest against the stationary time column. Not until the reverberations had died down did he open his eyes. The first thing he saw was a sprawling heap of red coat, curls and scarf from which the odd arm and leg jutted out. The heap gathered itself together on the console room floor, and the Doctor's face grinned up at him.

'Adric? Still with us?'

The boy slid down from his perch and helped his companion to his feet. It wasn't his idea of a 'gentle splash-down' and he told the Doctor as much. The Doctor tried to make light of it. 'Must have touched the bottom.' When he had finished brus.h.i.+ng himself down he noticed that the boy was still glowering at him in an unfriendly way. 'Look on the bright side, Adric. We were very lucky the water was there to break our fall.'

Tegan's eyes darted around the cloisters, trying to detect among the stony shadows the figure whose presence she felt as a dank chill. The echo around the walkways made it impossible to locate the low chuckle precisely, but fear was urging her backwards towards the arch that had first brought her into the room.

She touched the flaky masonry of the wall behind her, but what she had mistaken for an archway in the quick glance she had allowed herself turned out to be nothing more than a shallow alcove that rustled with ivy. Still not daring to take her eyes off the danger in front of her, she began to feel her way along the wall.

The echo of that chilling sound floated through the walkway again, closer now. There was still nothing to see - or rather everything to see: darkly moving leaves among the foliage, deeper shadows within the shadows.

The Doctor was standing with his back pressed hard against the doors, and his feet planted firmly on the TARDIS floor, as if getting ready to hold back a battalion of battering rams. Adric was by the console, manning the door lever.

The Doctor went through it briefly once more, to make sure the boy understood. The trick was not to attempt to swim out while the water was rus.h.i.+ng in. They would tread water and breathe while air remained in the console room; then when the influx had steadied they could pull themselves out through the double doors using handholds on the fittings. Until they got out into the open river attempts to swim were bound to end in being swept down by the current into the interior of the craft.

'And be careful,' said the Doctor finally. 'The water pressure could send us both flying.'

Then the Doctor gave the word. As soon as Adric had pulled the lever he ran over to the Doctor to help him with the doors, putting his back up against them and digging in his feet. Now that the security mechanism was released he had imagined it would take all his strength to hold back the flood, letting the water seep in slowly at first, just as the Doctor planned. In fact it was as easy as leaning against a wal .

After a moment of getting the feel of the doors - this too was part of the Doctor's carefully developed plan - the boy looked at the Time Lord. The same question was in both their minds.

'Perhaps,' said the Doctor slowly, 'we're not down very deep.'

'Deep?' replied Adric. 'There's no pressure on these doors at all.'

The Doctor paused, though he still didn't dare to let the doors go. 'I think you're right,' he said at last.

'I am right.'

'Very good, Adric. Very affirmative.'

Together they straightened up and stepped into the middle of the room. There was no less stateliness than usual about the way the ma.s.sive doors steadily opened inwards.

And no torrent followed, not even a trickle. With an embarra.s.sed glance at his young companion, the Doctor walked out of the TARDIS and found himself standing on a wooden floating pontoon moored by the river's edge.

The pontoon had been eroded by the river and woodworm and time - mostly by time. It was a miracle the TARDIS hadn't gone straight through it. As it was, the planking had broken under the impact and the base of the TARDIS had been forced into it for a couple of feet, coming to rest against a metal girder that underpinned the wooden structure.

The Doctor looked around the deserted riverside. On both banks abandoned dockland stretched as far as the eye could see, a landscape of rusty skeleton buildings wreathed in weeds. The water that rocked the pontoon from below was thick with greasy green algae. But for the motion it looked solid enough to walk on.

'There you are, you see,' the Doctor said to the boy, who stepped out behind him. 'I knew there'd be a perfectly simple explanation.'

Adric was glad of the Doctor's a.s.surance that nothing serious had gone wrong with the plan. The initials TARDIS stood for Time And Relative Dimensions In s.p.a.ce machine, and it was a well-doc.u.mented fault in the Type 40 model that sometimes the time dimension was a little less relative to the other dimensions than it should be. According to the Doctor's diagnosis they had arrived at exactly the right spot - but a century or two too late. In the interim the bend in the river had silted up, moving the bank, and with it the pontoon.

Although perfectly satisfactory as an explanation the Doctor seemed unhappy with it, as though the event were hedged about with other quite different - and perhaps unspeakable - possibilities. As the Doctor grew pensive, Adric became aware of the whistle of wind through the girders of a bridge that arched the river a little way upstream. The Doctor was staring at the bridge.

'Wel , we nearly got it right,' Adric said as cheerfully as he could.

The Doctor stepped gingerly along the swaying pontoon for a better view of the bridge.

'Nearly - but not quite right,' he said absently. 'There's something not quite right about all of this. Before the police came, I saw something . . . somebody. Faintly, in the distance.'

Adric's mouth was dry when he came to speak the name. 'The Master?'