Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones (19 page)

“Where are we going?”

“I’m not saying, but if you like Chinese food then you’re in luck.”

Kevin smiled. The door of the Spectrel swung open and he stepped in ahead of the Doctor.

“Like, I take it I’m not going to need a passport, am I?”

“Hmm?”

“For China?”

“Of course not. Now, I’ve got some checks to do to make sure my Spectrel’s okay.”

“Like pre-flight checks?”

“You could say that. Now, if you’d like to sit over there and keep out of mischief, then we’ll be on our way.” The Doctor busied himself at the control panel, watching a projection of characters in what Kevin now recognised as Squill. He watched the script scroll past with the eye of a canny amateur computer programmer.

“Can I ask you a question, Doc?”

“If you must.”

“Why didn’t you intervene in stuff like the Kennedy assassination? I mean, I can understand that you’re not supposed to interfere with history and timelines and stuff, but Kennedy seemed like he was a pretty good guy. Surely the world would have been better off if he’d not died so young?” He took a bite from the Jamaican chicken patty the house-bot had delivered without him even having ordered another one. He wondered whether the house-bots now had an algorithm for his appetite, and knew better than he did what his needs were.

“We did intervene,” said Doctor How, who was deeply engrossed in the projection, which was now showing diagrams that were beyond Kevin’s comprehension. “Or, rather,
I
had to.”

“What?” Kevin coughed as he tried not to choke. “So, like, there really was a conspiracy?”

“Oh, you and your conspiracies. Give it a rest, lad.”

“But you just said you intervened in the Kennedy assassination!”

“Yes, but it wasn’t a conspiracy. It’s like I told you about aliens when you first became my assistant – it’s not a conspiracy if your government doesn’t even know they exist because they’re not conspiring to hide anything. They’re just bad at their jobs. Most governments are. Pick a civilisation anywhere in the Pleasant universe,” he swept his hand through the projection, “and you’ll find a useless government at its heart.”

“Well?”

“What do you mean ‘Well?’” asked the Doctor.

“You can’t just tell me you were involved in the Kennedy assassination and then leave it at that, Doc!”

The Doctor broke his gaze from the coding and looked over at Kevin. “I can if I like.”

“Well I’ll ask someone else then – one of your cousins.”

“They had nothing to do with it.”

“So who was there?”

“Yes, he was.”

“What?”

“No, he wasn’t there. Who was.”

“That’s what I was asking.”

“No. Pay attention, lad. Who and I were there.”

“Um, right. You and Who were there?”

“Yes, that’s what I keep trying to tell you. At times I really do wonder about you.”

Kevin rolled his eyes. “So, like, what happened?”

The Doctor sighed a long sigh and got up from the Spectrel’s control panel. “I don’t want to paint my brother in a bad light, but you’ll find out the truth sooner or later. The fact that Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 should at least give you a clue.”

“Um, it doesn’t help that you go bananas whenever I bring up the subject of you-know-who and that show.”

“I’m sorry. I know I can be over-sensitive. He’s my brother, and I love him. But the legacy of trouble he’s caused me in the last fifty years has hardly endeared him to me. The others… They chose to abdicate their responsibilities, but my brother…” The Doctor shook his head. “I only wish he had. It would have been far easier to carry on alone than have him work against me – against all that each one of us had worked towards.”

“You never explained what that is.”

The Doctor waved his question away. “Some other time. As our adventures progress it should become apparent to you. Right now you should appreciate that I’m giving you what they call expositional narrative.”

“What?”

“It means I’m about to tell you a story that explains things. Technically, we have all the time in the world, so why not? You’ve earned the right to know why we went our separate ways. Or, rather, why the others relinquished their responsibilities.” The Doctor turned off the projection, sat down and settled back into his chair and began to talk.

I’ve told you previously that I viewed the world as having entered a new and more dangerous age after the Second World War, after humanity’s failure to harness nuclear power for peaceful purposes. The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 confirmed that, but my brother and my cousins took its peaceful conclusion as evidence that you humans didn’t need our help any more. My brother was always somewhat manic, but the release of pressure sent his mania spiralling up to new heights. That was when he told his story – our story – to the BBC. Of course, none of us knew he’d done that until the series of
Doctor Who
was in the can and scheduled for broadcast. We knew about the Kennedy assassination in the timeline, and so far as we were concerned it accounted for all the anomalies in late November 1963. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

It was your fellow junk television addict Where who contacted me to say he’d seen a trailer for
Doctor Who
, and that the first episode was to be broadcast at teatime on Saturday 23
rd
November. We, the Time Keepers, were to be laid bare – albeit as fiction. I was straight on to my brother, demanding to see the scripts, to gauge the extent of the damage. He refused to let me into his Spectrel, so I settled for arguing with his full projection just in front of me, right here.

He just laughed it off, and told me that the clue was in the title – it was just a few biographical tall tales about himself. Given that he’d not accepted any payment for his role as ‘creative consultant’, he couldn’t see that he’d breached any moral code, and insisted that he’d changed enough of the details so that we’d not be recognised. But Gaelfrey to Gallifrey? Spectrel to TARDIS? Was that really enough? His trademark blue police box was still there – instantly recognisable to anyone remotely familiar with him – and of course that was the whole point. Of all of us, he’d found it the hardest to accept that the public would never know – indeed,
must
never know – our contribution to the Allied victory, let alone all the other things we’ve accomplished. His ego wouldn’t let him settle for his place in human history to remain in the shadows. No, he wanted the adulation of mortals. If he couldn’t be adored himself, then he would settle for nothing less than the immortality of his own legend. It was the Sixties, and he wanted to ‘live it large’, as you would say. I have to say that Why was another one with a very relaxed attitude. He was always a chancer and a ladies’ man – a peacock, if you will. The Swinging Sixties in London were a dream come true for him. You know I’m not one for popular culture, but I believe the fictional character Austin Powers was loosely based on him. Except that I regard Mr Powers as less of a joke. That philandering fool would be tickled a lurid pink just to know that I’m telling you about him.

I digress. Back to Who. That I, his younger twin brother, had been knighted for services to science by Queen Victoria a century before still rankled, so he upgraded himself in the script from humble Time Keeper, to Time
Lord
. As you know, he and I are the only ones with doctorates – I have several to his single one – and I am a visiting professor at Imperial College. Whilst I do enjoy the way Professor Sir Peter How trips off the tongue, I would never insist on being called anything other than Doctor because it’s what I feel I’ve earned for myself. So his final act of megalomania was to call himself
The
Doctor, and to have all the other fictional Time Keepers – I mean Time Lords – not only to refer to but actually to defer to his fictional incarnation as The Doctor. It was the indicator of a true messianic complex that every single plot line marked him out as the one and only saviour of not just mankind, but the entire universe. Every other Time Keeper – Time Lord, I mean – was depicted as having no more brains than a Dolt.

He wouldn’t listen to reason, and resorted to calling me an establishment stooge and a square. I was told to lighten up because this was the Sixties and a new generation of free-thinkers were taking the stage. Finally he called me a hypocrite for having encouraged Lewis Carroll to write
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and
Alice Through the Looking-Glass
, which were the first children’s fiction works to talk about space-time theory.
Doctor
Who
, he insisted, was to be a harmless children’s Saturday teatime television show – a more accessible and less elitist twentieth century answer to Carroll’s novels. That was the thing with my brother: he always blew with the wind of human fashion – you can see that reflected in his portrayal in the TV show itself – and the illogical and nonsensical bullying language of trendy Sixties sociology served him very well.

Bipolar disorder is a cruel disease. After the high came the crushing low as old friends like Churchill spurned him, and he realised the magnitude of what he’d done. He contacted me on the night of November 21
st
, a Thursday, weeping with remorse and begging for forgiveness, offering to go back and delete it from the timeline. I told him he was forgiven, but that the deed was done; that no past event should be altered according to the rules we’d drawn up and signed. The first series had been advertised and its broadcast was now inevitable.

Never quote a rule at a bipolar person. They turn them over in their head looking for the holes, and they find them in absurdity. I heard the penny drop. If he couldn’t change past events, then he’d change the future – even though we’re forbidden from doing that too. In a split second he turned from depression to mania, and began babbling about his plan to make amends.

He reasoned – and I use that word loosely – that the first series of
Doctor Who
in itself would cause massive ripples in the timeline of human culture, and in itself encourage your civilisation to reach for the stars. He would save President Kennedy’s life the following day in Dallas. The demented bipolar view was that he could play his heroic fictional self in real life just a day before his fictional self made his first appearance. Somehow this public exposé would make the fictional unveiling of the existence of Time Keepers perfectly alright by making it even more massive.

He was wild-eyed as I pleaded with him to leave the future well alone. He told me that I just didn’t understand the genius of what he was about to do. The projection snapped off and I knew he was already in the nowhere of transdimensional travel, where I was powerless to stop him. I knew he would already be plotting a course for the United States and a way to prevent Kennedy from being assassinated the following afternoon in Dallas. Our cousins were unable or unwilling to help, so I knew it was down to me to save the future from my brother. I was tired, and he had the advantage of me because someone with bipolar mania has boundless energy and needs no rest.

I looked at my timeline and saw that it had become blurred. A probability cloud had formed at the Kennedy bifurcation – the timeline according to which the President was either alive or dead after Friday 22
nd
. And please don’t draw any comparisons to Schrödinger's cat. That twee probabilistic conundrum is truly random in nature. This was a straightforward battle of wits between two Time Keepers.

Kennedy would win his campaign for a second term, but the future looked increasingly grim after that. Ethically, I can’t give you details, but I will say that it was a terminal state of affairs for your kind.

Kennedy had to die in Dealey Plaza.

How would Who attempt to save Kennedy? I had no clues from the probability cloud. I called round my cousins one last time, but they wanted nothing to do with it. They were sick of what they saw as my over-obsessiveness about the sanctity of the timeline. They said Who must know what he was doing, or that any consequences from his meddling could be sorted out at a later date. Such was the spirit of the times that they rather admired his cavalier – or to use an expression becoming popular at the time ‘freewheeling’ – attitude to the job. In no uncertain terms I was told that I was on my own. One – and I won’t say who – even remarked that I’d have Kennedy’s blood on my hands.

I had to find out how Who was going to prevent the murder and then counteract it. My only choice was to go to the place of the assassination, and witness the event itself.

The motorcade was due into Dealey Plaza at 12.15. I arrived in the Spectrel five minutes beforehand, with full cloaking on, in the car park behind the Grassy Knoll. It backs onto rail tracks, and everyone was looking the other way so it was easy for me to walk the few dozen yards to join the back of the crowd. The first car of the motorcade, a white Ford driven by the Dallas Police Chief, came into view from behind the Texas School Book Depository. It was right on time. That was my first indication that Who had interfered, because in the original timeline – the one you’re living in now – the motorcade was fifteen minutes late. The President’s limousine was behind the first car, followed by the other vehicles.