Doctor Who: Shada (27 page)

They advanced down the corridor to a junction that led away to the right and into another dirty-looking corridor. There was a sign at the junction, a simple metal plaque on which was written in bold, unfussy lettering FOUNDATION FOR ADVANCED SCIENTIFIC STUDIES. Beneath that were another three letters, ASD.

The Doctor ran his fingers along the raised letters of the plaque, picking up a coating of dust. ‘Advanced Scientific Studies,’ he mused, ‘but apparently no cleaning lady.’

Chris ran his own fingers along the smaller row of letters beneath. ‘ASD,’ he said, thinking. ‘Advanced state of decay, by the look of it.’

Suddenly the Doctor raised a finger to his lips. ‘Ssh!’

Chris fell quiet. The Doctor silently and carefully advanced a few steps down the second corridor. He listened intently for a few seconds, peering into the shadows, then turned back to Chris. ‘Did you hear anything?’

More silence. The metal around them creaked like an old ship at sea. ‘Only that creaking,’ said Chris.

‘That’s nothing to worry about,’ said the Doctor. ‘Come on!’

They set off along the second corridor. A thought struck Chris. ‘How could I read that sign?’ he asked. ‘I mean, don’t tell me that everyone in the universe speaks and writes in English.’

‘Of course not,’ said the Doctor. ‘The sign wasn’t in English. But you’ve been in the TARDIS. She implanted a translation loop in your mind as a matter of course.’

‘Your TARDIS mucked about with my head?’ said Chris, slightly aggrieved. ‘What were you saying about mind control?’

‘It’s a small courtesy,’ said the Doctor, ‘nothing serious or evil.’

Chris boggled. ‘But a TARDIS can do that? Alter the perceptions of the people inside it?’

‘Only a very little and only if the pilot instructs it,’ said the Doctor. ‘And I’m the pilot, so it only does nice things.’

They had now reached a large steel door. The Doctor searched for an opening mechanism and couldn’t find one. He pulled out his sonic screwdriver and twiddled it. There was a small puff of smoke and the halves of the door trundled apart with a hydraulic wheeze.

‘You rely rather a lot on that thing,’ observed Chris.

‘It makes things quicker,’ said the Doctor as he stepped through the door. ‘I like quicker.’

Chris followed him into a large room that seemed to be some kind of control chamber. The walls were covered in a complex array of technology the purposes of which he could not even begin to guess at. In the centre of the room was a tall hexagonal cone, with a recessed man-sized alcove in each of its six facets. On top was a spike similar to the one Chris had seen next to the chair in Skagra’s ship’s command deck.

But here everything was inert. No flashing lights, no reassuring beeps and clicks from the machinery.

The Doctor approached the cone and stopped at one of the alcoves, reaching up to examine something by the headrest. ‘Aha! This is quite interesting.’

‘Quite interesting!’ spluttered Chris. He paced around the room, examining the dead displays and controls. ‘This is fascinating. Absolutely fascinating!’

The Doctor smiled. ‘It’s nice to see things through a human’s eyes now and then. All these questions.’ He poked Chris with a bony finger. ‘Go on, ask me another.’

Chris waved a hand around the room and across at the cone. ‘OK. Does all this mean something to you?’

The Doctor hesitated. ‘I think so. But it would be nice to have confirmation.’ He raised the sonic screwdriver and headed for a particular control panel. ‘I’m going to rely heavily on this thing again.’

He swept the sonic screwdriver across the panel. The console remained inert. This time no lights flashed, no electronics chattered.

‘It’s dead?’ asked Chris.

The Doctor huffed. ‘Very definitely. No power response, and even if there was…’ He tucked his fingers under the panel and it came loose easily. ‘The circuitry has decayed, the computation matrix, everything.’ He pulled out a set of what could, Chris thought, be circuit-boards. He exerted a the tiniest pressure and the boards shattered into dust. ‘Accelerated entropy.’

‘How can you accelerate entropy?’ spluttered Chris, again uneasily aware of the shifting creaking noises all around them.

Before the Doctor could answer there was a sudden, shattering crash.

Chris whipped round. Through a dark interior doorway he could see movement.

Something was creeping towards them out of the darkness.

Chapter 48

CLARE WAS FEELING a little better. Her watch had stopped, and the domed clock on the mantelpiece was, for some reason, running backwards and forwards and going up and down. But generally the world was beginning to look more real and solid and sensible again.

She accepted the teacup from the now solid and liver-spotted hand of Professor Chronotis as he sat down on the old settee across from her.

‘You said that you will be Professor Chronotis?’ she asked.

‘Did I?’ said the Professor. ‘Oh yes I wouldst have been going to have said that, I suppose.’ He sighed. ‘Goodness me, we Gallifreyans have never managed to come up with a satisfactory form of grammar to cover these situations.’

Clare sipped her tea. It was sweet and milky. ‘And what kind of a situation is it exactly?’ she ventured. She assumed that Gallifrey was a Greek island or somewhere similar. Chronotis sounded like a Greek name, after all, though his accent was definitely English.

The Professor supped at his own tea and waved his hand about the room as if the answer was obvious. ‘Timelessness,’ he said.

‘Timelessness?’ asked Clare. Much as she had taken to this nice old man, she was starting to worry for his sanity. She recalled Chris’s description of him – ‘barmy, senile’.

The Professor nodded. ‘Quite. Timelessness, as in standing obliquely to the time fields.’

‘Oh,’ said Clare. ‘That’s what we’re doing, is it?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the Professor. ‘Or sitting anyway.’ He leaned forward and patted her hand. ‘And I’m very grateful to you for arranging it, young lady.’

Clare shrugged. ‘Least I could do. Though all I did do was press a button.’

‘And by pressing that button, you activated the emergency program,’ said the Professor. ‘After a little gentle nudging in your perception field by my TARDIS.’

‘Tardis?’ asked Clare, looking past him to the outer door that led to sanity.

‘Yes, I know, barely call it a TARDIS, can you?’ said the Professor, looking around the room. ‘A Type 12 in fact, very ancient. I rescued it literally from the scrap heaps. I’m not officially allowed to have one, you know.’

‘Really, are you not?’ said Clare.

‘Still, it’s just as well I did,’ said the Professor, ‘or I’d still be dead.’

‘Still be dead?’ Clare had a jolting memory of how he had transformed from a ghost into a solid person. She dismissed it. She must have imagined it after that knock on the head. Then she looked at that upright bookcase. What knock on the head?

‘Yes, I’ve been killed,’ the Professor went on. ‘But the emergency program, which is a very naughty thing I’m not allowed to have either, means that you tangled with my time fields at the critical moment. You sent us into a temporal orbit, back through last Thursday night and into the vortex, I think. That’s why I’m dressed like this, you see, excuse the impropriety.’

Clare stared at him, amazed at the garbage he was coming out with. It must sound so real to him, she thought sadly.

‘You’re not following me, are you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Clare.

The Professor nodded. ‘Good. You just think of me as a paradox in an anomaly and get on with your tea.’

Clare finished her tea and put the cup down. ‘I think I’d better be going, actually, Professor.’

‘Oh, I’m afraid there’s absolutely no chance of that,’ said the Professor casually. ‘Not now, anyway.’

Clare made her way to the door. ‘I’d better find Chris, and the Doctor.’

‘Yes, we’d better had,’ said the Professor, ‘but you won’t find them out there, my dear.’

Clare turned the knob of the door that led into the little vestibule. It was firmly locked. ‘Please, Professor,’ she said, ‘open this door.’

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘And you certainly can’t.’

Clare squared her shoulders. ‘Come on, Professor, the joke is over.’

The Professor stood up and crossed to the nearest windows. ‘The joke is far from over, young lady,’ he said. ‘Would you care to see the punchline?’

He threw back the curtains dramatically.

Beyond them, Clare saw the twisting, howling blue maelstrom of the space-time vortex.

Chapter 49

SKAGRA STOOD LOOKING up through the observatory at the infinite stars. Romana, still under the guard of a pair of watchful Kraags, wondered what was going on in his head.

The Kraag Commander stomped through the mass of his fellows towards Skagra. ‘First wave of generations is complete, my lord,’ it said.

‘Good,’ said Skagra. He tapped the book in his hand. ‘I have found the key, as anticipated. You will make all necessary preparations for the entry into Shada, and then begin second generation for the activation of the Universal Mind.’

‘My lord,’ said the Kraag Commander. It stomped away.

‘The Universal Mind,’ scoffed Romana.

Skagra turned to her. ‘Exactly.’

Romana believed she still had one option available to her. It was something she had learnt from the Doctor. Irritating the enemy, exposing any weaknesses of their psychology. ‘Why don’t you just kill me, Skagra?’ she said.

‘Your reaction will interest me,’ said Skagra.

‘My reaction to what?’

Skagra tapped the book again. ‘Your reaction to meeting one of the greatest criminals in your history.’

‘Salyavin?’ Romana shook her head. ‘Salyavin died thousands of years ago. And even you can’t fly the TARDIS back across the Gallifreyan time stream to meet him.’

‘Tell me how Salyavin died,’ said Skagra.

Romana considered. ‘I don’t know.’

Skagra nodded. ‘A Triple Alpha-plus graduate of the Prydon College in the Academy on Gallifrey, and you don’t know? How peculiar.’

Romana thought back to Skagra’s earlier boast about the book and the role it had once played in the administration of Gallifreyan justice. Nowadays – or at least in the last few thousand years – the very few evil renegades about, such as Morbius and Zetar, had been sentenced to vaporisation. But she had no idea what had befallen the criminals of earlier generations on Gallifrey. For some reason, the impulse to wonder about it had never crossed her mind, and even now she felt a vague sense of apprehension at the question.

‘Perhaps,’ said Skagra, ‘the Time Lords wanted to forget. To assuage their consciences. They wanted to obliterate all memory of what they had done, wipe it from their history.’ He gestured to his collection of Gallifreyan texts. ‘But it was all in there, still intact, on Drornid.’

‘What was there?’ Romana felt an almost overwhelming impulse to fight her own curiosity, as if this was a question that should never be answered.

‘Can’t you work it out for yourself?’ asked Skagra.

‘The book of the law sentenced Salyavin,’ said Romana slowly, each word sounding a death knell deep in the back of her mind.

‘But what was his punishment?’ Skagra coaxed her.

‘Imprisonment?’ suggested Romana.

Skagra nodded. ‘Correct. In Shada, the ancient prison of the Time Lords!’

Romana shuddered. The words hit her like a physical attack. If this was true – and somehow she just knew it was – she could at last begin to guess at the ultimate nature of Skagra’s great scheme.

She pointed to the sphere. ‘The Universal Mind,’ she gasped.

Skagra nodded. ‘
My
mind.’

Chapter 50

CLARE’S HEAD WAS spinning again. She had a million pressing questions but didn’t know which one to ask first or how to understand the likely replies. She had established that Chris was probably safe, and probably with the Doctor and this Ramona girl. But the deeper details eluded her.

As far as she could begin to grasp it, the Professor’s suite of rooms was also an alien capsule for travelling through space and time, and the Professor himself was an alien. It seemed Gallifrey was not a Greek island after all but the home planet of a race called the Time Lords. Furthermore, the Professor’s space-time craft, which he called a TARDIS, was at present stuck in something called a temporal orbit, which had sent itself and both of them back to Thursday night, or as the Professor more accurately said, ‘a state of Thursday night-ness.’ She abandoned her last objections to this idea when she looked in a mirror and saw that the perm she had washed out on Friday night was well and truly back. ‘I suppose it’s a time perm,’ she said wistfully.

‘That is the correct technical term, yes,’ said the Professor abstractedly. ‘Unfortunately the temporal orbit did not bring the book back in here. I suppose it must stand outside time, or it couldst have must’ve did has.’