Doctor Who_ Just War Part 17

Steinmann restrained him. Instead, the older man asked simply, 'How can we lose this war?'

'Ah. Don't try to trick me.'

'It was a straight question. How can we possibly lose?

Are you suggesting that the British can ever beat us back to Berlin? They can't even stop us attacking their cities! The English are a mongrel race, corrupt, decadent, divided. You tell me of their "stiff upper lip", their "quiet resolve", their "Blitz spirit", their "tradition of democracy"? Just look at Guernsey, my dear, see how long those things lasted here. Not a single shot was fired. There isn't any organized resistance. Don't fool yourself that the Channel Islands are a special case, or that London and Manchester would resist any more than Paris or Lyons did. The sun has already set on the British Empire.

'You ask me to look at Kitzel and Wolff. I am glad to.

Look at how tall Wolff his, how physically fit. Look at Kitzel's childbearing hips, her hourgla.s.s figure. Look at their clear complexions, their blue eyes, their golden hair. How can such a pure, such a beautiful race, possibly be defeated? I see two attractive young people, working for their country. They are my bloodline. Do you not see: the Reich unites us. It harnesses our skills, leads us to total victory. I am of the first n.a.z.i generation, but already the second is here, and they are stronger still. They, and the generation after that, learn in their schools of our science, our achievements. They learn of the failure of democracy. They learn to distrust the Jew, the Marxist, anyone who talks of equality while claiming to be set apart from lesser men. It is the twilight of the old age, elderly men like myself will soon give way to the ubermenschen ubermenschen, a glorious race of supermen. How can such people ever be defeated when the possibility of defeat does not even exist for them?

'That's why I know that you are lying, Summerfield. Not because you talk of men on the Moon and time travel. Not because you babble unscientific nonsense. These things you speak of are imaginative, but they are not impossible: half a century ago La.s.switz was writing about trips to Mars. Oberth and von Braun claimed ten years ago that they could build a "Moon Rocket". The Reich's scientists have already broken the sound barrier; I'm sure that we'll soon be travelling faster than light, and then even faster than time itself. I always knew that Einstein was a fraud. But so are you, my dear.'

Steinmann paused. 'You can't be from the future. We n.a.z.is are united by our heritage, and our destiny is in the stars! In the future, people such as you - the weak, the decadent, the liberal - have all been eradicated. Future history has already been written by men such as Hartung. Tomorrow belongs to us, not you. If you were really from the future, Miss Summerfield, you would be a n.a.z.i.'

Roz Forrester threw another piece of bacon fat into the midst of the flock of pigeons swarming across the gra.s.s near her bench. She had needed a break and a cigarette.

The birds circled round the stringy rind, waiting their turn for a meal. As the pigeon with the rind in its beak bit into it, it tossed its head from side to side, carelessly hurling little sc.r.a.ps into the air, which other birds eagerly pounded on as they landed. The pigeons maintained a strict pecking order.

Odd how that phrase had lasted in human language to her time, centuries after the last bird had become extinct. Every wild animal and plant species had disappeared from the Earth by the thirtieth century, except for humanity and the rat.

Here, a thousand years earlier, the ecosystem was virtually intact. This Earth teemed with life: there was moss between the paving stones, flowers sprang up in the rubble of the bombsites, little brown birds nested in the trees.

There was a sense of certainty here, too, a sense of order. This was a time when everyone knew their place, from the King right down to the smallest pigeon. Other people might find that restrictive, but Roz could see the attraction of such a rigid system. There was order, and a sense of discipline. There was crime here, but it was so small-scale: a protection racket here, a burglary there. The criminals and the police force had a gentlemen's agreement that they didn't carry guns. There didn't seem to be a drugs problem. There weren't any rogue combat robots or gangs of evil mutants roaming the streets. She had to remind herself that this was the Undertown, the place that no right-thinking human would ever go. The chattering cla.s.ses in her time kept asking: why not sterilize the whole area and start again from scratch? Half a dozen photon charges would do the trick. This past London was like a parallel world where the city was still beautiful, still proud of itself.

There were no monsters monsters here. Nothing deformed with a horned snout would lumber round the next corner and ask her the time in haltering English. No slimy, green-skinned blob would menace her for spare change. In the thirtieth century, down in the Undertown, there was an alien beggar in every doorway, an alien crime lord behind every door. They were all here. Nothing deformed with a horned snout would lumber round the next corner and ask her the time in haltering English. No slimy, green-skinned blob would menace her for spare change. In the thirtieth century, down in the Undertown, there was an alien beggar in every doorway, an alien crime lord behind every door. They were all immigrants immigrants, of course, they had come to Earth to take a human's job, or just to claim ILC allowance. Although there had been a number of incursions later on in this century, the first official, lasting, contact with an alien race wouldn't be made for one hundred and fifty years. Everyone here was purely human, with two eyes, one nose and one mouth, all in the correct place, and so it would remain for another century.

The Age of Legend was fast approaching, the time when her people overthrew their masters and went on to become examples of hope and justice for the entire world. A thousand years from now, South Africa was still there: a rock of stability in a chaotic world. Her family were still part of the ruling elite, their genetic material almost unchanged from the Xhosa in this century. The Forrester clan stood out in a world in which humanity had become racially h.o.m.ogenized. While other people's ancestors succ.u.mbed to cosmetic gene surgery, and the rest of the thirtieth century had been swept by the craze for body-beppling, she was pure pure.

The pigeons had finished feeding, and the whole flock were standing still, looking at her with their strange sideways glances. She threw her last piece of rind at them, stood and went back to work. It was beginning to rain.

'Have you seen the UFO?' Chris asked, checking his ammunition. They were nearing the exit of the accommodation block. They hadn't encountered any resistance.

'The what?' Two troops burst through the door in front of them, Sten guns blazing. The Doctor pulled his briefcase up, for cover, but Chris stood firm, oblivious to the bullets richocheting around him. Then he charged them.

' Banzai Banzai!' Chris whooped. He fired twice, hitting each of his targets in the chest. The Doctor ran over to them but could tell before he arrived that the men had died instantly.

'You killed them,' he whispered.

'Yeah,' grinned Chris, 'with my last two bullets. Neat, eh?'

The Doctor glared up at him. 'Those were people, Chris, this isn't a video game.'

'Look,' stammered Chris, 'I know that. But they would have killed us. This is war, Doctor.'

The Doctor laid his hand on Cwej's shoulder. 'Chris, I'm grateful that you came to rescue me. But there is always an alternative to violence. It's searching for that alternative that separates us from people like the n.a.z.is.'

As the Doctor was speaking, Chris was bending down, picking up a couple of stick grenades and one of the Sten guns. 'Sometimes we need to fight for what we believe. That was the motto of my Lodge at s.p.a.ceport Nine Overtown: "Just fight for what's just",' said Chris. All the same, he hesitated, and decided not to take the weapons.

An alarm bell started ringing. The Doctor's head snapped up. 'We need to leave.'

'We're boxed in here,' said Chris. 'We need to head for the main gate.'

'That's the one place we can't go. They'll be expecting us, and they'll have all their guards there. They don't know where we are yet.'

'This base is tiny. We could easily blast our...' Chris's voice trailed out. '...find an alternative,' he finished.

'Quite,' the Doctor said. He thought for a moment. 'When we get outside, we need to follow the stream,' he announced finally.

The Doctor went first, looking around the fake landscape for any sign of movement. A squad of guards was running for the hangars and another group were already posted along the track to the main gate by the concrete trees. Tentatively, the Doctor and Chris stepped from the accommodation bunker.

'Because there's no way out of the base, their priority is to protect the high security areas. They know that we're not going anywhere. My guess is that they'll call in reinforcements from Granville.' The Doctor was striding confidently towards the stream. Chris followed. In his uniform, guards might think twice before shooting at him, and that was all he needed. He still had his mission.

'Doctor, we have to get Hartung now we're here. That's why the SID sent me over.'

'I'm not entirely sure that he's here. He might be in Guernsey, or even back in Granville,' the Doctor said.

'Yeah, British intelligence has seen him in both those places. The British don't know anything about this base, though. What do we do?' They had reached the stream and were following its course.

'Well, I'd love to have a look in those hangars, but they've doubled the guard on them, and that's just what we can see. They'll have done the same around Hartung. We need a breathing s.p.a.ce, to work things out. We won't get it here, and we won't get it in Granville.'

'The farmhouse,' Chris realized. 'We could go to the Gerard farm. They looked after me last night.'

'We'd be putting them at risk,' the Doctor warned.

Chris shrugged. 'What else can we do?'

They had reached the fence. The stream vanished into a pipe, emerging on the other side of the barrier. Tantalizingly, fifty yards beyond was perfect cover: dense woodland. If they could reach that then they ought to be safe. The Doctor bent over.

'This drain is only six inches across; we can't get through.'

'The fence is electrified.'

The Doctor looked up at it. 'Yes, I thought it might be.'

'I've only got a knife. How do you get through an electric fence?'

'The traditional method involves a bicycle tyre, a partner and more than a little pot luck.'

Before the Doctor could elaborate, there was the sharp bark of a submachine gun. On the brow of an artificial hillock stood a n.a.z.i soldier in the black uniform of the Waffen-SS.

They had been warning shots, fired at the Doctor. Now he was yelling something at him in German. 'Are you all right, Leutnant?'

He thought that Cwej was a genuine soldier. Chris motioned that it was safe to come down, and made a threatening gesture towards the Doctor. His 'prisoner' played out his part, looking suitably terrified. The n.a.z.i clambered down. As he reached ground level, Chris elbowed him in the solar plexus, then punched him hard in the jaw. The n.a.z.i fell back, almost comically.

The Doctor blinked, bemused. He gazed at Chris for a second, then back at the fence. 'Yes. It's not perfect, but we don't have time for anything else. Lodge one of that man's grenades in the pipe.'

Chris did as the Doctor said, and they took cover. The grenade did its work, clearing the earth from the base, and even ripping the fence itself. The Doctor had broken cover and was heading that way before the smoke had cleared.

Chris followed.

'It's still live,' the Doctor warned. Chris was careful not to touch the wire mesh, and was acutely conscious of the stream water lapping around his feet, but the gap was easily large enough for him to ease himself through.

There were dogs barking behind them. The Doctor clenched his fists in frustration. 'I forgot to replace the dog biscuits.' Chris looked blank, until the Doctor explained, 'I had a bag of biscuits in my jacket to slow down the dogs, but the Germans took them from me when they emptied my pockets.

We'll have to hurry.'

Once they were on the other side, they ran upstream, water splas.h.i.+ng around their trouser-legs. Here, in the water, both their footprints and their scent should be obscured. They were soon ploughing through the woodland. Chris was surprised how fast the Doctor could run. As the Doctor predicted, the n.a.z.is had heard the explosion: Chris could hear the Alsatians behind him, almost at his heels, but the undergrowth was so thick that he couldn't see them.

9 Thought and Memory

They were meant to be looking for von Wer, the spymaster, but the search was proving fruitless. This didn't surprise Roz, of course, because she knew that the Doctor wasn't a German spy. What had surprised her was how easy British Intelligence had found it to pin the blame on the Doctor: they only had three sightings of him. The surveillance reports were astonis.h.i.+ngly mundane: the Doctor walked down Oxford Street, the Doctor bought a cup of tea and an iced bun, the Doctor caught a train at Paddington Station. He had never been seen with anyone else, he had never dropped anything suspicious into a litter bin, something that might have been a dead-letter drop. Despite that, and without any apparent reason, they had linked him with a dozen known German agents and three break-ins at defence establishments. The Doctor was an enigma, and successive a.n.a.lysts had decided that he was their problem. The more she looked at the 'evidence', the more Roz was convinced that there wasn't a spymaster at all. She continued to work on the 'problem', diligently plotting his movements.

Watching Reed across the desk, as the afternoon wore on, Forrester noticed that he was taking her for granted now, something Roz found flattering. While he had never behaved with anything other than impeccably good manners, there had always been a distance between them. She had been his Xosa Maiden, a dusky archetype from a schoolbook deep in his unconscious mind; someone he'd wors.h.i.+pped from afar from an early age, and had now come face to face with. Roz was uncomfortable being idolized. That gulf seemed to be narrowing. He accepted her on her own terms now, saw her as a person, a woman, a fellow officer.

Was she beginning to accept him, too? It had gone well beyond that. Looking at him now, as he jotted something down on a notepad, Roz realized that she could actually picture herself staying here with this man. The idea that she might live here with anyone - especially Reed - shocked her. Settling down had never occurred to her before, not with feLixi, not even with Fenn. She would turn a few heads, Roz mused, at a time when most English people had never seen a black woman. They could never have children, of course.

How could she bring half-caste babies into this time? They would be true aliens: mottled hybrids formed by the grafting together of two genetic strains kept pure for centuries.

What on earth was so attractive about this rather dull Englishman? Roz had an innate distrust of psychoa.n.a.lysis.

She had let the undergrowth grow up around her own unconscious, actively discouraged missionary expeditions, and stuck up a few shrunken heads to warn off the more persistent explorers. Judge a person by their actions, not their potty training, that was her motto. She had been there too many times when the Freudroid at the Lodge had confidentially announced that the serial killer they were looking for was a solitary academic type in his mid-twenties who fancied his mother, only to discover later that the real killer was four times older and just liked killing people so she could brag about it in bars and on chat shows.

But she had to admit that she found George Reed and his leisurely world attractive. It was so uncomplicated a life.

There was a clear distinction between good and evil. An emphasis on moral responsibility. Benevolence. Decency.

Christ, they even let you smoke in their offices without giving you a lecture.

There was something familiar about George, with his smooth, pale face, his neatly brushed hair and his precise accent. Deep in the dark continent that pa.s.sed for Forrester's mind, was there a longing for an English Soldier? The English had always been a part of her culture. Chief Xhosa had led his tribe into the Transkei in the early sixteenth century. Less than forty years later, fewer years than Roz's own lifetime, the Europeans had arrived. It was they who had introduced Christianity, capitalism, even the idea of nationhood. Xhosa ident.i.ty was defined by the English. In the nineteenth century, so close to 1941 that Roz could almost see it, her people had been split into two groups: those who opposed the British, and those that collaborated with them.

You couldn't ignore them. Roz's ancestors? They'd collaborated. The Rarabe Xhosa had fought with the British in the Fifth Kaffir War, against all the other Xhosa tribes. Did that make her people any less 'pure'? Look at the English: culturally, racially, they were a mix of Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Romans, West Indians, Indians, Jews and who knows what else. Learning from the English had paid off: it had been the Western-educated, reasonable Christian Xhosa who won their country's freedom, not the Zulu with their spears and fierce independence. The first name of her people's great liberator had been Nelson.

Roz wasn't being nostalgic; she wasn't going native; she was being practical. The Doctor had vanished. Bernice hadn't made contact. Cwej had been sent to his almost certain death. If the Doctor, Benny and Chris were all dead then she had two choices: stay here, or go back to her own time in the TARDIS. Benny had told her that the British won Earth War Two, four years from now. After that, life must have returned to normal. Roz was in her early forties now, so she could reasonably expect to live for another century, even given the primitive state of medicine here. She would live through the Age of Legend if she stayed; she could fight alongside her family, help build the future she knew was coming. Her fight for Justice would continue.

George returned her glance, and smiled. Roz smiled back.

The Doctor sniffed the air. 'Cordite. Shots have been fired here.'

Chris felt his stomach tighten. 'Monique and Monsieur Gerard?'

'There's no sign of them. There are heavy vehicle tracks outside, but they could have been made by a tractor.'

'We have to search.'

The Doctor nodded thoughtfully. 'Yes, we have to, but we can't be long. The patrol will almost certainly catch our scent again. Do you know your way around?'

'Yes,' Chris muttered. The kitchen looked just the same as it had when he was last here. The range was still warm.

He had only been gone a couple of hours. What if he had led the n.a.z.is here? What if he had killed the brave farmer and his daughter?

Chris headed upstairs, the Doctor remained in the kitchen, keeping watch. The farmhouse had four bedrooms, one for Monsieur Gerard, one for Monique, one for both of her dead brothers. Once on the landing, Chris opened up each of the doors in turn. He had slept in the one nearest to the top of the stairs. This had been Luc's room. It was untouched from this morning. Chris had not been into any of the other bedrooms before, but it became clear as he checked them that they were empty, too.

The last room he came to was Monique's. He paused at the doorway. The room was feminine, with frilly white netting and floral-printed wallpaper. It smelt of her perfume. There was a spa.r.s.e dresser, a cluttered bedside cabinet. Monique had an old iron bed, with coral bedsheets. A doll had been carefully tucked into it. There was something else resting on the bed, something flat. A note? Chris stepped over to the bed. It was a sketch of him, drawn in pencil, from memory. A very good likeness, right down to the moustache.

He took it downstairs and showed the Doctor.

'She was a good artist,' the Doctor noted.

'What do you mean "was"?' Chris said accusingly.

The Doctor bit his lip. 'I'm sorry, a slip of the tongue. I haven't found any blood. They might have got away. We could check the barn and the chicken shed.'

Cwej shook his head. 'No, like you said before, we can't stay. At least the n.a.z.is don't have this picture, so they won't be able to establish a link between me and Monique.' He folded the picture and slotted it into his tunic pocket.

'We'll go to Granville,' said the Doctor. 'Hartung might be there. It's probably where they've taken Monique and Monsieur Gerard. If not, at least Steinmann will be there.'

'Doctor, you're a bit conspicuous in those clothes.'

The Doctor patted the briefcase. 'Well, I've got plenty of money to spend on a new suit, but there's no gentleman's tailors for miles around. Do you think Monsieur Gerard would mind if I borrowed an outfit from him?'

'I doubt he'd mind, Doctor, but he's about as broad as you're tall.'

'Oh, that's not a problem, then, I'll just wear the clothes sideways. Isn't that what you humans call "cross-dressing"?'