Barbara didn’t like the look of this at all.
‘What the hell?’ Fei-Hung darted past her and ran down the street towards the gates. One of the soldiers levelled his gun at him as he approached, forcing the young man to raise his hands.
‘It’s all right,’ Kei-Ying shouted, then repeated the words more calmly. ‘I won’t be gone long.’
Fei-Hung couldn’t take his eyes off the gun, wondering just how fast a bullet would travel. ‘Is this the thanks you get for-’
‘Never mind,’ Kei-Ying snapped. ‘There are issues here that I can’t explain. But the Doctor might be able to.’
‘The Doctor?’
‘I’ve put him in charge of the surgery. You know the training schedule well enough to handle it?’
‘Of course, but -’
‘No buts, son. Talk to the Doctor. He’ll explain.’
‘Those
gwailos
are a curse on us, Father.’ Fei-Hung could feel his fists flexing of their own volition.
‘Trust me,’ Kei-Ying said simply, and turned to step proudly into the carriage.
The men’s words had reached Barbara and Vicki faintly, but clearly. The women exchanged glances, each wishing to see whether the other comprehended the situation.
‘What’s happening?’ Vicki asked.
‘They said the Doctor would know, and he usually does.’
‘But Master Wong helped us.’
As Vicki watched Kei-Ying walk out under armed escort without showing any signs of being ruffled she could, for a moment, almost see a taller man in his place, proudly wearing the uniform of the Merchant Space Marine.
Lieutenant Commander Pallister would have responded exactly as Kei-Ying had. For the briefest of moments he was there, alive and on duty. Then he was gone, and Kei-Ying was boarding the carriage, and a tear was on Vicki’s cheek.
The abbot was walking down the gangplank even before it thumped on to the ground. He was glad to be on dry land again, and gladder still to be met by such a glorious sight.
Flame cleansed the buildings, while the ragged townspeople were being organised by his troops and formed into orderly parties, ready for work.
Zhao and Gao were already ashore, helmetless but in full armour, poring over a scroll they had unrolled between them.
‘Brothers,’ the abbot called out, ‘well done.’
Gao looked round and snorted. ‘The men of this age are weak, but they still have some fire in their bellies.’
‘Especially when motivated properly,’ Zhao added with a sly grin.
‘And the temple?’ the abbot asked.
Zhao became more serious. ‘The local priests we interro-gated say it burnt down 150 years ago. A new Buddhist temple has been built on the site.’
‘Raze it.’ The abbot took the scroll and spread it out on the ground. ‘How many of these sites do we hold?’
‘Directly or indirectly, more than half,’ Gao replied. ‘Most of the sites are not well guarded, or indeed guarded at all.’
‘I would still be happier,’ Zhao rumbled, ‘if we struck outward in concentric circles from the origin point. That way we could consolidate a perimeter -’
‘Which would continually expand until our forces were stretched too thinly all around it,’ the abbot snapped, disappointed at the answer to his query. He reached out to touch Zhao’s shoulder. ‘I have my reasons, my general. Have I led you false so far?’
‘No, my Lord.’
‘Nor will I.’
Zhao lowered his head apologetically. ‘I would never doubt my Lord. I merely thought to see you conquer that which you most desire, Lord.’
‘I know.’
‘Of the sites... What of T’ai Shan?’
The abbot grimaced, remembering another time and another life. ‘Ah, the sacred mountain...’ His eyes narrowed vengefully. ‘When the time comes, the gods there will not reject me this time.’ He smiled and looked down, turning his hands over in front of his eyes.
Quietly, so that only Zhao and Gao could hear, he added,
‘I’ve outlived them.’
The wooden floor and walls of the central hall at Po Chi Lam felt darker to Fei-Hung. Dark, cold and dead. It was like being trapped in the heart of a dead tree with no way out to the soft floor of the forest.
He was breathing too fast, and he knew it.
The Doctor was checking through the little case that Barbara had fetched from the TARDIS. Vicki had tried to speak to Fei-Hung but he had brushed the little
gwailo
aside.
The way he was feeling was all the fault of her and her friends. He clenched his fists.
‘We can’t leave my father in the hands of those barbarian
gwailos...
no offence, by the way. He wouldn’t let any of his friends rot like that -’
‘Indeed, and nor shall we,’ the Doctor said sharply. ‘But we can’t just go running around like headless chickens, now can we, hmm? What good would it do Master Wong if we all went and got ourselves jailed as well? Or worse?’
Fei-Hung glared at him, willing the old man to keel over. He was too sensible to pretend he didn’t know the Doctor was right, and young enough to be frustrated by this. ‘Then we should make sure we don’t get caught.’
The Doctor took up a lecturing pose. ‘And how does anyone give such guarantees? No, anything we do should be done with thought and civility.’
‘And what are you planning to do?’
‘First, I shall complete the job of healing my friend that your father started. Then I shall go and speak to the major who was here, and try to settle the problem with rationality and diplomacy, and not some kind of bash-and-dash nonsense that you young people seem to think is so important.’
Ian was immersed in pain, the skin boiling from his flesh and the flesh from his bones, with nothing to cool the water and restore him.
There was a strange smell of alien herbs in the air, and the sound of singsong voices. He didn’t wonder where he was -
he remembered they had arrived in nineteenth-century China
- but in a way this was a disadvantage. At least if he couldn’t remember what had happened, he wouldn’t constantly be reliving it in his head. Waking or sleeping, the beating had been an expert one by anybody’s standards, and he had all the pleasures of remembering every blow in intimate detail.
Then he opened his eyes and knew that the world was for the most part still a good and just place, because Barbara Wright’s face was the first thing he saw.
After an hour or so, Ian was able to sit up and take some soup and tea while the Doctor and Barbara filled him in on what had happened while he was unconscious. Barbara’s hand gripped his own with a crushing force throughout their story, but it was a discomfort worth having.
‘What I don’t understand,’ Ian said at the end, ‘is what those men had against me. I mean, if they just hated foreigners or white men... Well, it’s senseless but it happens.
Along with being red on the inside, and thinking that people who share the same views are right, a dislike for people who are different is one of the few things that makes all creeds and colours the same. But those men knew my name and singled me out.’
The Doctor was packing away his instruments into the medical kit from the TARDIS. ‘They knew your name and, yes, they seemed to hold some kind of grudge against you, though I’ve yet to make the inquiries that might give us a clue as to why.’
‘But it’s impossible!’
‘No, it isn’t. Not in the TARDIS. Disturbing, yes... Troubling, yes... But not impossible. It seems, young man, that you are going to make quite an impression on some future visit.’
Ian’s head was starting to get fuzzy. He could hear and see well enough, but surely the words were getting scrambled on the way to his brain. Was the Doctor talking about a journey in the TARDIS? Ian remembered the TARDIS, but wasn’t sure he recalled every trip he’d made in it. ‘Future visit? What do you mean?’
‘You’ll agree that those people clearly knew who you are, hmm?’
Ian winced as the bruises on his side tried to stretch while he put his shirt back on. ‘Demonstrably.’
‘Quite so, quite so... But you’ve never been to nineteenth-century Guangdong before, have you?’
‘Well, you’d know if we’d landed here before.’
‘Of course. So obviously you must return here on a future journey, but to a point in time some little time before today.
Those people have already experienced whatever it is you’ll do, but for you it hasn’t happened yet.’
Maybe it was the throbbing pain from the bruising around his skull, but Ian found himself less able to follow the Doctor’s explanation than usual. ‘I’m not sure I follow you, Doctor, but I think I get the basic idea. Not sure I can believe it, mind you.’
‘Well, I can believe it,’ the Doctor told him, and tapped his chest with a fingertip. ‘Now, you just be careful until we know more about how you will end up here.’
Ian shivered.
Barbara cleared her throat. ‘And what about our unbelievable little incident?’
She and Vicki had told Ian their story too. It had amused him and lightened his mood, which he supposed was their reason for telling it. Ghosts, indeed!
The Doctor, much to Ian’s surprise, was taking the story seriously. ‘It sounds to me, Barbara, very much like you’ve found yourself a stone tape. Yes, a stone tape.’
Ian and Barbara exchanged puzzled looks.
‘Stone tape?’ Ian echoed.
‘It’s an explanation for ghosts, young man. You have certain minerals and oxides on the surface of a magnetic recording tape, yes?’
That much Ian understood. ‘Yes, they form the pattern of the recording according to what electrical signals the tape machine receives. Then they’re decoded and the patterns are converted to electrical signals and played out through a speaker.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Now, Chesterfield, many of those same minerals and oxides are also present in brickwork and certain types of rock formation. And those can record electrical signals just like a tape machine and play them back, d’you see?’
Ian could see what the Doctor was getting at, but a brick was very different from a piece of tape on a reel. ‘But how?
You’d need a pretty big tape recorder to play a wall.’
The Doctor tapped his forehead. ‘The human brain, dear boy. It is simply an electrochemical machine, is it not? It generates signals that can be recorded, and so it can also decode existing recordings.’
‘I think I understand,’ Ian said doubtfully. ‘You mean if a brain reacts the right way with one of these stone tapes, it’s like putting a tape on a player? It plugs an image - a hallucination, I suppose - right into the brain?’
‘Precisely so. You’re learning!’
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Ian said dryly. ‘They say doctors make the worst patients, so I dread to think what sort of students teachers make.’
‘Ones who can’t be left alone for a minute without getting themselves into mischief.’
‘All right, I suppose I walked into that one, didn’t I?’
Ian grinned. Whether it was the medicines, the company, the food or just the Doctor’s acid humour, it had worked. Ian now found his mind turning over the Doctor’s theory about himself and the other Chesterton.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier, about me meeting those people again in my future but their past.’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, surely that means nothing can happen to us now. At least until we make that trip.’
The thought made him feel better. He might be hurting, but at least he could feel confident about walking around in this time and place, and not have to be constantly on the lookout for danger. Since boarding the Ship he’d become so accustomed to staying alert to the dangers they kept running into that he’d forgotten how much of a strain it could be. He had also forgotten how comfortable and relaxing it was not to be looking out for where the next trouble would come from.
The Doctor shook his head, clucking his tongue. ‘I’m afraid it isn’t quite as simple as that. For one thing, it’s only you who needs go back and meet those disagreeable fellows at a later date.’
‘But I can’t fly the TARDIS. Which means it can’t be just me.’
‘And nor can Barbara or Vicki, neither of whom those ruffians seemed to recognise.’
This sent a chill into Ian’s bones. Did it mean the girls didn’t make that trip - and if not, why not? He couldn’t imagine letting Barbara stay behind somewhere and travelling without her. The alternatives he could think of were worse.
‘In any case,’ the Doctor went on, ‘something could easily happen to you or me. We’re not indestructible, you know.
Time doesn’t make us invulnerable just because we appear to have an appointment somewhere else.’
‘But if anything did happen to us before -’
‘It would cause a paradox, and that could be a minor irritant to the universe, or a major catastrophe, but we should never know which if we’re fortunate.’
Ian had never been particularly superstitious. He didn’t care about walking under ladders, and could never remember whether a black cat crossing his path was supposed to be lucky or unlucky. If someone told him they had a feeling of danger when none was present - a premonition, he supposed he would call it - he would dismiss it as just a nervous fear.
None of which stopped a voice in his brain from screaming that Vicki and Barbara would be in danger here, and that they should get back to the Ship and leave as soon as they could.