‘B?’ suggested the Doctor.
‘C?’ suggested Romana.
The process was agonisingly slow. After all, Romana reflected, a Time Lord brain for all its marvels was still a brain at the end of the day, subject to eventual age and decay. The Doctor was nothing like as old as the Professor, as he had just had cause to remind her, and even he could be infuriatingly forgetful and erratic at times.
The Professor continued to run through the alphabet as far as he remembered it, pausing between each letter to consider. ‘P, Q, R, X… X again, T, B, Y…’
Suddenly he snapped to attention. ‘Y! Young!’
‘He’s called Young?’ exclaimed the Doctor.
‘Yes,’ nodded the Professor. ‘Young Christopher Parsons!’ The revelation seemed to shake the Professor and he stood upright and rigid, eyes screwed tight shut. ‘Born 1952, graduated 1975, honours degree in Physics, currently researching sigma particles.’ He sighed as if this had been a great effort, opened his eyes and beamed over at the Doctor and Romana. ‘There we are! I knew it was in there somewhere.’
‘Where would this Chris Parsons be now, Professor?’ urged the Doctor.
‘Er – the physics lab, I should imagine,’ said the Professor. ‘You can borrow a bike from the quad. Then you’ll have to take the first left out of the gates and then—’
The Doctor interrupted him. ‘Yes yes, Professor, you took me there one afternoon, remember?’ He was already heading for the door. ‘We spent a very nice afternoon bashing some atoms about and then calling them names.’
‘Oh yes,’ said the Professor, smiling. ‘Well, I suppose this calls for tea.’ He set off back into the kitchen.
‘I’ll be two minutes,’ the Doctor called after him.
Then he turned to Romana, looked her right in the eye and whispered urgently, ‘If I’m not back in two hours, you and the Professor lock yourselves in the TARDIS with K-9. Send out an all-frequency alert direct to Gallifrey, and wait. Don’t come after me!’ He pulled his scarf tighter around his neck and made for the door.
‘Wait!’ called Romana.
The Doctor turned. ‘Yes, wait! Wait and don’t come after me!’
‘No, I meant wait as in “wait a second”,’ said Romana. She leaned in close to him. ‘Send a signal to Gallifrey? Is it really that important? That you’d ask for help from the Time Lords?’
‘I hope not,’ said the Doctor gravely, and then he was gone.
Chapter 16
SKAGRA ADJUSTED THE collar of the shirt he had taken from the dead human. ‘My appearance?’
‘It is perfectly correct in every detail, my lord,’ the voice assured him. ‘I have cross-referenced your new vestments with local video signals. You will be able to pass for an ordinary human with no difficulty.’
Skagra nodded. ‘Excellent.’
‘And may I say, my lord,’ added the voice, ‘your magnificence is barely dimmed by such dowdy garb.’
Skagra found this flattery unnecessary and rather irksome. He had programmed his Ship to obey his orders unquestioningly. He had refined its personality matrix to worship and honour him, as this was obviously the most efficient relationship for getting things done in life. Unfortunately the Ship sometimes went too far, making irrelevant observations – how amazing you are, my lord or only you could be so wonderful, my lord. These observations were true enough, of course, but they were not strictly necessary. They were so obvious they were not worth vocalising.
‘I am going to retrieve the book,’ he said, picking up the carpet bag containing the sphere and turning to go. ‘I shall return immediately.’
‘Of course you will, my lord,’ said the Ship.
Skagra left the Ship and slipped into the stolen ground-transporter.
He turned the keys in the ignition and the car roared off back into Cambridge.
Chapter 17
CHRIS PEDDLED FURIOUSLY through the streets of Cambridge back towards St Cedd’s. His head was full of theories about the book. Could it be the only remnant of some lost civilisation? Then again, it didn’t look very old. Then again, it didn’t look particularly new. It was hard to tell how old it was, it was hard to tell anything meaningful about the blasted thing —
His head was so full of thoughts about the book that he nearly collided with another cyclist. He rang his bell angrily at the bloke who was pedalling furiously in the other direction. In fact, thought Chris, it was very hard to ring a bicycle bell angrily. However hard you tinged it, it sounded bright and cheery.
Irritatingly, the other cyclist tinged his bell happily back at Chris.
In normal circumstances, Chris might have stopped and given the bloke a piece of his mind – or, more probably, tutted. There were two factors that stopped him. Factor A was the urgent business he was engaged upon. Factor B was that the bloke on the other bike looked eccentric. He was tall, with a mop of untidy curly brown hair and a ridiculously long multicoloured scarf that flapped after him in his slipstream.
Chris had had quite enough of eccentricity today. He was determined not to give the strange bloke another thought.
Chapter 18
WILKIN CHECKED HIS watch, though there was no need. He could tell from the angle of the slowly setting sun over the courtyard that it was nearly five o’clock. His stomach gave a small rumble, right on time. The agreeable prospect of scrambled eggs was looming.
He heard crisp footsteps coming over the cobbles through the gate and turned to see the insolent fellow he had encountered earlier. At least he was now wearing more suitable clothing, though still a little too casual for Wilkin’s taste. The carpet bag was still clutched in his hand. The man gave Wilkin a broad smile. It was blatantly insincere, thought Wilkin, but at least now the fellow was trying.
‘Hello,’ said the stranger. ‘I have returned, as you see. Is the one known as the Doctor still with Professor Chronotis?’
Wilkin was forced to repay politeness with politeness. ‘No, sir. The Doctor left a few minutes ago. You’ll find the Professor in Room P-14.’ He indicated the way.
The stranger’s smile faded. ‘Thank you, gatekeeper,’ he said icily and strutted over towards the entrance Wilkin had indicated.
Wilkin looked after him, shaking his head and tutting. In all his years at St Cedd’s, and in all his dealings with undergraduates, graduates, dons, chancellors, deans, masters and, much more rarely, red-faced girls trying to sneak past him in the early hours of Sunday mornings, he had never before felt such a strong sensation of having failed in his duty as porter, of having allowed an enemy into his stronghold.
Wilkin shook the feeling off. The fellow was probably from Oxford.
‘More tea, my dear?’ asked the Professor, inevitably.
Romana had cleared the books away from what she had suspected was a comfortable chair. She sat down and stretched, trying to appear calmer than she felt. ‘Lovely! Two lumps, and no sugar.’
The Professor smiled and tweaked her on the nose. Romana would have resented such an action from anybody else, but he seemed such a nice old man.
As he slipped back into the kitchen, Romana gave up on her attempt to relax. The chair wasn’t nearly as comfortable as she’d hoped anyway. She idly twitched a corner of curtain and looked through the window onto the back of the college, leading down to the river. The sun had almost set, its last rays picking out the bare branches of the trees in shades of copper. The clouds had moved on now, mostly, and she could see a crescent moon low in the sky.
She shivered. The reassuring sounds of the Professor pottering about in the kitchen, seemingly without a care in the universe, were small consolation. She kept thinking of those voices she’d heard earlier, the whispered screaming of souls in torment. The Doctor’s forbidding mood had unnerved her even further. For him even to consider an appeal for help to the Time Lords, the situation must be desperate.
Perhaps he was just being grand and portentous. After all, on the surface of it, all that had happened was that some human had a
ccidentally wandered off with an old book that was probably completely harmless.
But as she looked at the moon, and remembered those voices, Romana shuddered again. She thought of those ancient scourges of the Time Lords – Subjatric and Rundgar, Lady Scintilla, Salyavin —
Suddenly the Professor was looming over her. ‘Oh dear,’ he was saying.
Romana snapped out of her reverie instantly. ‘What’s the matter?’ she demanded, perhaps a little overdramatically.
‘I’ve run out of milk,’ said the Professor sadly.
Romana laughed. ‘I think that’s the least of our problems.’
The Professor leaned in closer, concerned. ‘You’re shivering, my dear. Are you cold?’
‘No,’ said Romana. ‘It’s just a silly feeling. No scientific basis for it. Those voices we heard, I can’t stop thinking about them. I’ve given myself the creeps.’
The Professor sighed. ‘Oh dear. A cup of tea will make you feel better.’ He turned to the kitchen and stopped. ‘Ah – no milk. I’ll just pop out and get some. There’s a little shop around the corner, very convenient, who doesn’t love a little shop?’ He bustled over to the door.
Romana, remembering the Doctor’s dire warnings, jumped up from the chair and barred his way. ‘I don’t think that’s an awfully good idea, Professor.’
The Professor blinked. ‘Why not? It’s the only way I know of getting milk. Short of keeping a cow.’
Romana nodded to the TARDIS. ‘Don’t worry. We’ve got plenty.’
‘Ah, splendid!’ The Professor peered over his spectacles at the police box. ‘Yes of course. It’s a Type 40 TARDIS, isn’t it?’
Romana opened the door of the TARDIS. ‘Yes. They were on the Vintage and Veteran Vehicles syllabus at the Academy. It’s amazing this one’s still going.’
‘I remember when they first came out, you know. When I was just a boy.’ He chuckled and reached out, stroking the wooden shell with affection. ‘That’ll show you how old I am. A vintage veteran myself.’
Romana leaned down and tweaked the Professor’s nose. ‘Nonsense. As they say nowadays on Gallifrey, “6,000 is the new 4,000”. Anyway, the milk – I won’t be a moment.’
‘Oh yes you will,’ said the Professor. ‘That was one of the problems with the old Type 40 design. The kitchen’s much too far from the control room.’
Romana smiled. ‘I’ve never known the Doctor to use the kitchen anyway,’ she said, and slipped inside.
Professor Chronotis stood for a moment looking at the TARDIS, seeming to stare back into days long gone. ‘Hah, good riddance, good riddance to the lot of ’em…’
His thoughts were interrupted by a babble of voices from the corridor outside his rooms. ‘Tsk. Undergraduates,’ he muttered darkly.
There was a sharp, single knock on the door.
‘Come in, then!’ called the Professor automatically, and equally automatically he headed into the kitchen to prepare tea for these visitors, whoever they were.
Skagra entered the room, and winced. He was seeking one book. Here there were many, but they had all been scattered carelessly around in no particular order, with creased and cracked spines, dog ears and – most horrifically of all – many, if not most, of them were adorned with dark brown ring-shaped stains, as if some beverage vessel had been placed on top of them. It was a place of vile untidiness and confusion.
‘It’ll have to be lemon tea, I’m afraid,’ called a scratchy, ancient voice from an adjoining room. ‘No milk at the moment, the girl’s gone to get some.’
Skagra noted the tall blue container in a corner of the room. He recognised it from the video-texts he’d scanned earlier as the Doctor’s TARDIS. He was tempted to try and gain entry but realised this would be a long and complex process with no guarantee of success. Furthermore, it was not a necessary course of action.
Only the book mattered.
Skagra opened the straps of the carpet bag and the voices grew louder, more insistent.
‘How many of you are there, for heaven’s sake?’ called the Professor’s voice, slightly tetchily. ‘I’ve only got seven cups!’
‘Professor Chronotis!’ barked Skagra.
The Professor appeared in the kitchen doorway, carrying seven cups on a tray. Skagra was not impressed. So this is what becomes of a Time Lord at the end of his days, he thought. All that power, all that genius, frittered away into dust and darkness.
The Professor blinked and looked around. The babble of voices grew louder still. ‘Where are the others?’ For the first time, Chronotis seemed to grasp that something was very wrong. He peered intently at Skagra. ‘Who are you?’
‘I am Skagra. And I have come for the book.’
‘Book?’ the Professor bluffed desperately. ‘What book?’
‘You know what book,’ said Skagra. ‘Give me the book.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said the Professor. ‘I haven’t got any books.’ He corrected himself hastily. ‘That is to say, I have lots of books. Lots and lots of books. What book would you like?’
‘The book you stole from the Panopticon Archives,’ said Skagra simply.
The Professor’s grip on the tray slackened and it began to wobble. ‘What do you know of the Panopticon?’
‘The book, Professor! You are to give it to me!’
‘On whose instructions?’
‘Mine,’ said Skagra. ‘Give me the book.’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ said the Professor, clearly trying to sound casual but betrayed by the rattling of the cups on the tray, ‘but I don’t know where it is. Honestly, I don’t know!’
Skagra inclined his head and fixed Chronotis with his iciest stare. ‘If you will not give me the information voluntarily, I will deduct it from you. I am sure there is much else in your mind that will interest me.’
He opened the bag wide and the sphere rose angrily from inside, the babble of voices reaching a crescendo. Before the Professor could react, the sphere zoomed towards him and fixed itself to his forehead like a limpet to a rock.
The Professor cried out in pain and dropped the tray with an almighty crash.
His arms waved frantically in the air, trying to reach up to remove the sphere.
‘Do not fight the deduction, Professor,’ Skagra advised him coolly. ‘Do not fight it or you will die.’
He watched calmly and dispassionately as the old man’s frail body buckled and he collapsed on to the threadbare-carpeted floor.
Chapter 19
CLARE CLOSED THE blinds over the windows that looked out onto the little grass courtyard and shivered at the memory of that fiery face.
It was hard not to feel unnerved, being alone in here with that book. Under the lab’s strip lighting it looked so innocuous, as harmless as the other books on a nearby bench. Idly, Clare wandered over and inspected them. It occurred to her that these were the books Chris had gone to St Cedd’s to borrow. They were clearly aimed at impressing her. And she was impressed, not because of the books – she had read them all several times over under the covers in her tiny teenage bedroom, and hid them in public behind My Guy annuals – but because of the thought that had gone into their selection. It was just possible that shoving a few books about carbon dating under her nose was Chris’s idea of a romantic gesture.
But this was silly. The strange book was just a book. A strange one, admittedly, but just a book. She walked straight over to it and opened it again.
She was kissing Chris – not a peck, a full-on snog – and she heard herself saying ‘I suppose a police station is as good a place to start as any –’
Suddenly she was brought back to here and now as the lab door burst open and an extraordinary figure burst through it. He was an almost unfeasibly tall and imposing person, with a long, dark-brown coat, a mop of curly hair, checked trousers stuffed into buccaneer boots and a stupidly long scarf. He should have looked ridiculous, and yes, in a way he did, but Clare was immediately overpowered by feelings of gene
rosity and trust, as if she’d known this stranger since childhood and he was as familiar as Father Christmas or Winnie-the-Pooh.
She only had a second to feel like this, however, as he shot Clare a look of surprise and immediately burst back out again.
A second later he burst back in again, as if the first burst hadn’t happened at all.
‘Hello!’ he said in a deep dark voice that was unlike any voice Clare had ever heard. ‘I’m looking for Christopher Parsons.’
‘You’ve just missed him, I’m afraid,’ said Clare.
The stranger’s extraordinarily bulging blue eyes passed cursorily over her and fell upon the book on the bench. He raised a finger and said, ‘Aha!’
Clare found this ‘Aha’ much less offensive than Chris’s ‘Aha’s. This man, she thought, had somehow earned the right to be pompous and odd. ‘Can I give him a message?’ she asked.
The stranger leaned over, his large beaky nose almost touching the book, and examined the cover, that curious scroll design. Then he straightened up and turned his probing stare to Clare once again. ‘This isn’t yours.’
Clare had the oddest feeling that he was studying her, weighing her up as a potential enemy. A part of her was screaming inside Who the hell are you? How did you get in here and what’s all this to you? but it was muted by the part that felt the sudden warmth for him, which for some strange reason was shouting, much more loudly, TAKE ME WITH YOU!
‘No, it isn’t mine,’ she said, trying to sound calm and normal. ‘Is it yours?’
‘It belongs to some friends of mine,’ said the stranger, carefully, his eyes still not moving from her.
‘It’s a very strange book,’ said Clare.
‘I’ve got some very strange friends,’ he said. ‘And very careless.’ A thought seemed to strike him. ‘Strangely careless…’ He looked into the distance and then suddenly snapped back to her. ‘Why did you take it?’
‘I didn’t take it,’ said Clare.
‘I know,’ said the stranger.
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