Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors Part 17

Penelope bolted out of the house, clutching the flashlight flashlight to her chest. 'Stop!' to her chest. 'Stop!'

shrieked the guard, leaping to his feet, as she nimbly jumped down to the ground.

She turned. He was on his feet, hand on the hilt of his sword. She lifted the flashlight and shone its beam full in his face.

He was startled by the bright light, but only for a moment. Long enough for Mr Cwej to come up behind him and take hold of his neck.

The Doctor had muttered some explanation about nerve compression. However the fighting technique worked, it was certainly effective. The samurai's eyes rolled up and he dropped into Mr Cwej's grip.

100.The Adjudicator gently lowered the man to the veranda. Penelope was already scrambling back up, aware of the samurai's shout. Mr Cwej propped the warrior up against the wall and followed her back into the hut.

The Doctor hovered in the doorway. After a moment, a shout came from somewhere below them, in the courtyard.

The Doctor called out. Penelope didn't think it was a very good impression of the samurai's voice, but it seemed to calm whoever's sleep had been disturbed.

They waited a few more minutes, ears straining at the night's silence.

'All right,' said the Doctor. Penelope jumped at the sound of his voice. 'Now for the tricky bit.' He sat cross-legged in front of the modified time conveyance and thrust a hand into the clockwork.

A pale light filled the room as he made adjustments to the ovoid. 'The tricky bit,' he murmured, as the peasants watched in awe and Mr Cwej watched in fascination, 'is to take the pod with us. I have to create two self-contained time-s.p.a.ce areas for the transport, without a direct link between them.'

'Can you use the egg's recordings?' asked Mr Cwej.

'That's just what I'm doing. The coordinates might be a bit approximate, though. Better to take a bit too much than a bit too little!'

The light from the egg suddenly brightened to the point at which it was too harsh to look at. 'Right, said the Doctor.

He picked up Penelope's precious box of spare punchcards, plucked one out, and deftly poked a series of holes in it with a pen.

'Exactly what are you doing?' said Penelope, in alarm.

'Hold on!' said the time traveller. He fed the card into the hybrid mechanism.

Penelope felt her stomach turn over. The light leapt outwards, forcing her eyes closed. For a moment her ears rang. There was a violent lurch, like the feeling of a s.h.i.+p's deck beneath your feet in rough water.

She opened her eyes.

She was in a forest.

Her first urge was to faint dead away.

At least one of the peasants had actually done so. The others were praying fervently: 'Save us from suffering, save us from harm, Bodhisattva, come to us!'

Scores of them. All praying. As Penelope looked around, she realized they were in a clearing. A fire flickered in the middle, and the surviving villagers were huddled around it, staring up at them.

No staring past them. Penelope turned around.

The pod was a foot behind her. She leapt backwards and nearly fell into the fire.

101.

A fox watched Chris from the forest.

All the others were sleeping, all but a couple of guards. The sc.r.a.p of meat it wanted was right near the awake one.

The fox wondered whether he was going to go to sleep. Might he lie down, start snoring? Might he nod off still sitting up, his eyes drooping until the fox could no longer make them out in the firelight? Just long enough for a quick dash to the sc.r.a.p and back again?

But the human obstinately refused to close his eyes, as though he had something against sleep. Eventually the fox gave up in disgust, winding its way back into the forest.

Penelope opened her eyes as someone prodded her with their toe.

'Sorry to wake you,' said the Doctor.

'You didn't,' said Penelope, sitting up. Damp leaves fell off her clothes. 'I'm afraid even my adventures in Africa as a younger woman did not prepare me for slumber in a wet j.a.panese forest.'

He squatted down beside her. The clearing was full of movement. 'Dawn's not far away,' he said. 'The samurai are going to get quite a surprise when they wake up. I don't think they'll be in a very good mood.'

'Where are we going?' He held out a hand, and she let him help her to her feet.

'Doa-no-naiheya Monastery,' he said. 'The chief monk is a friend of mine.

Take Kame with you on the journey. He'll look after you.'

'My carriage,' said Penelope.

The Doctor turned to follow her gaze. Mr Cwej was checking the reins of the two horses.

The pod was strapped to the back of the hansom cab, like a bizarre piece of luggage. Some of the fused soil had been roughly chiselled away from it, lightening the load.

Penelope went up to the bizarre object. Its 'arms' protruded from one side of the vehicle. She looked at them, struck again by their resemblance to an insect's legs cast in metal, warped by the heat of their fall through the atmosphere. They seemed too delicate to have survived the plummet.

The thing's shape was like an hourgla.s.s: a thicker section at the 'head' end, from which the 'arms' protruded, a narrower midsection, and then a thicker base.

'Doctor,' she said, 'exactly how did you bring us here last night?'

He clasped his hands behind his back, suddenly turning into a university lecturer. 'Your mechanism was lacking a power source which could create a dimensional warping effect. I provided one.'

'In the form of the "egg"?'

102.

'Yes. But it's still your a.n.a.lytical Engine that's creating the essential equations.'

Penelope realized she was smiling broadly. She wiped the expression from her face. 'What about the villagers?'

'They're going to the monastery as well,' he said. 'The pod ought to be safe there, at least until we can determine what it is. And the chief monk can help find new homes for the villagers. A handful of them will be going to relatives in nearby villages, and one or two to Tos.h.i.+ to look for work. But for now, they need sanctuary.'

Mikeneko, Sonchou's wife, came up to them and bowed to the Doctor. 'We are ready to set out,' she said.

'You won't be able to keep up with the cab,' said Penelope. 'Doctor '

'I don't want them to,' he said. 'Mikeneko-san, if the samurai find you, you must tell them everything. Don't try to protect us. They won't hurt you it's only the pod they want.'

'Very well, Isha-sama. We should arrive at the monastery tomorrow afternoon.' Her face was lined and dirty, her eyes s.h.i.+ning too brightly. The shock had been forced down inside, Penelope suspected. The feeling of d.a.m.nation rose in her again, and she turned away.

'What's it like?'

The Doctor glanced at Chris, but didn't answer.

They had been silent for a long time, sitting side by side at the front of the cab. Penelope was inside with her time machine, hopefully getting some sleep.

Chris had slept fine, deeply, dreamlessly, but he still felt washed out. When he tried to think about what had happened yesterday, his mind sort of. . . and he wasn't sure whether it was some kind of weird shock, or something the Doctor had done.

'The first time the Doctor said, snapping Chris out of his reverie, 'I don't remember, I was unconscious. The second time. . . I don't want to talk about.'

'The third time?'

'Unconscious.'

'The fourth time?'

'Atypical. There were some strange time and energy effects involved.'

'But, you know, what does it feel like? Is it good or bad?'

'Good,' said the Doctor, 'in the same way that driving a vehicle very, very fast is a good feeling, until pow! pow! ' He slapped his hands together suddenly. ' He slapped his hands together suddenly.

'Like being shoved through a window. That's what it was like the fifth time.'

'What about the sixth time?'

'Unconscious.'

103.

'But I mean,' said Chris, 'and stop me if this is getting too personal '

'I will,' said the Doctor. 'Ask me now.' (You might not get another chance, he didn't add.) Chris's heart sank further in the direction of his sandals. 'How does it feel?

Do you feel good because you realize you're not going to die?'

'No.' The Doctor didn't look at him, eyes focusing far away, amongst the trees and the pattern of light and shadow. 'You feel awful, because you know you are going to die. Again.' An expression flickered over his face for a moment, as though he had remembered something and then forgotten it. 'With a bit of luck I won't be awake for the next one either.'

'But you said. . . ' But Joel said. 'You said you knew you were going to regenerate, because you'd found out about one of your future selves.'

'There are no guarantees,' said the Doctor sternly. 'History can change as well you know. You don't imagine I go about thinking I'm invulnerable, do you?'

Chris didn't say anything, fighting off a smile. It went away of its own accord when he thought of the next question.

What would it take to kill you, Doctor?

Chris turned the macabre thought over in his mind. The Doctor did seem invulnerable, the way he was always able to find a way out of impossible situations or to take whatever damage was thrown at him. If he had the chance to plan or improvise, he'd always be one step ahead of death.

But what if it was something random? Like a stray laser bolt? Something he couldn't predict or control?

What if it was an accident?

Chris glanced at the Doctor, who was scowling at the path in front of them, deep in thought. And he suddenly realized why the Doctor had been so jittery, so angry, all this time.

He knew it was coming. He knew he was going to be helpless helpless.

Chris suddenly felt terribly sorry for the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

104.

11.Sixteenth-century digital boy

Tuesday 21 May 1996, subjective time Probably March 1560, local time Dear Diary, This seemed like a brilliant idea two weeks ago.

However, when you are actually sitting in a sixteenth century j.a.panese palace (why here and now? I wanted pre-industrial, but this is ridiculous!) and typing on your PowerBook, it's too late to worry whether your time travel plan was as clever as you thought.

A few dozen entries ago, I was telling you about that sh.e.l.l-shocked look the aliens sometimes have. You can see it in their eyes, if they have eyes a kind of mix of surprise and defeat. The look people have when they've lost an argument or a job and they can't quite work out how.

Heck, I saw that look a month ago, in the eyes of a Lacaillan scout. (We've had a lot of scouts recently. The various species with a greedy eye on Earth have apparently decided that a single alien is a lot less conspicuous than a horde, or even a reconnaissance team.) The Doctor (how do I use our future meeting?) had brought the scout to us after bewildering him to a standstill. I didn't get the full story, something involving the London phone system, amphibians, and static electricity, but all that Lacaillan wanted was to get home as fast as possible.

I hope I'm not starting to get that look. The Lacaillan scout's look, like his brain was in backwards. The Doctor asked me: 'Are you sure about this? Very sure?' As though he knew knew what I was planning. what I was planning.

Supposedly he can't read your mind.

Maybe he knows my plan (such as it is) isn't going to work. Maybe the daimyo's going to have me boiled in oil. Maybe he does know what I've got in mind, and the pod is so much more important that he can't be bothered with 105 me. . . for the moment.

(As you know, dear diary, I nearly dropped the whole idea when he first turned up. Somehow I should've known he would.) The pod looks like a satellite to me. Probably left by some BEM or other to observe the human race until we're worth conquering. Ran out of power and fell out of the sky. (Wouldn't it be more likely to have fallen into an ocean?

Maybe the bottom of the Atlantic is covered in alien s.p.a.ce junk!) At least I won't have the same problem, if Tony the techie Tzun's battery additions keep on working. (Now, that'd be embarra.s.sing stuck three centuries in the past without the PowerBook. Geez, I think I just scared myself.) I'm still wondering why here, why now? Is it a coincidence that a time machine pops up just when I'm thinking about leaving Little Caldwell? Does it have anything to do with falling back in time ten years when I was a kid?

Did I attract something's attention? Am I really that important?

Frankly, diary, I doubt it. Stranger things have happened.