Shada

by Douglas Adams

  Romana stood firm. ‘You’ve lost, Skagra. It’s all over.’

  But Skagra did not reply. Instead he pointed to her, his lips moving silently.

  ‘What did you say? “About time”?’ he said at last. He swung back to the console. ‘Time! Yes, I should have seen that. A Gallifreyan code would have to include the dimension of time!’

  Skagra replaced his hand on the sphere. ‘Concentrate,’ he ordered, fixing all his attention on the screen. ‘Find me the Doctor’s last reference to time!’

  Chapter 45

  ‘OH COME ON, Ship!’ called the Doctor. ‘What’s taking you so long?’

  ‘These docking safety procedures are very important,’ said the Ship haughtily. ‘Though frankly, I don’t know why I’m being so careful as we’ve all long since shuffled from this mortal coil. Habit, I suppose.’

  There was a loud clang as the ship finally docked with the space station.

  Chris’s attention was elsewhere. He sniffed the air. ‘Can you smell burning?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said the Doctor. ‘Right, let’s go.’

  He hurried over to the door and pressed the panel marked OPEN. The door opened.

  A huge burning figure stood before him, eyes glowing like a furnace. It spoke with a deep rumbling voice, forming words as if for the first time. ‘Who… are… you?’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Doctor. ‘No cold callers thank you!’

  He reached for the button marked CLOSE. As the door started to slide back into place, the creature strode forward and ripped the door apart with its powerful claws, as if it were made of polystyrene.

  The creature stalked through the door. Chris could feel the intense aura of heat radiating from it. He dashed to join the Doctor as he attempted to sidle past the creature.

  ‘What on earth is it?’

  ‘How am I supposed to know?’ said the Doctor. ‘And what’s Earth got to do with it? Ship, what is it?’

  ‘It is a Kraag,’ said the Ship. ‘It was formed automatically when I took off without my great lord Skagra aboard. Standard emergency procedure.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ exploded the Doctor.

  ‘You didn’t ask,’ said the Ship with what it obviously considered sweet reason. ‘Anyway, it hardly matters, does it? It can’t do us any more harm. We’re dead, and it must be too.’

  ‘You are… intruders…’ said the Kraag.

  The Doctor shrugged. ‘Well actually, I’m the Doctor and this is Bristol.’ He gestured to the smoking trail left by the Kraag. ‘That’s what I call a carbon footprint.’

  ‘You trespass on my lord’s ship,’ said the Kraag. ‘You shall die!’ It raised one arm which ended in grotesque lumpy claws. The tips of the claws glowed red hot.

  ‘So there are some aliens that don’t look like us,’ said Chris. It was the only thing he could think of to say, and even as he was saying them he realised what incredibly rubbish last words they were.

  ‘K-9, what’s keeping you?’ shouted the Doctor.

  K-9 shot forward, nose blaster extruded. The powerful red laser beam shot from it, blasting the Kraag square in the centre of its chest.

  The Kraag reeled back. Chris had a moment of relief. Then the Kraag growled terribly and raised its arm again. ‘You – shall – die!’

  ‘Silly thing, we’re already dead,’ said the Ship. ‘I always thought those Kraags were a little slow on the uptake.’

  ‘K-9, continuous fire!’ shouted the Doctor.

  K-9 blasted his laser again, and this time the bright red beam was sustained, beating the Kraag back.

  ‘Good boy, K-9!’ called the Doctor.

  The laser beam started to sputter and weaken. The Kraag roared, flailing its arms in anger.

  ‘Master!’ called K-9 urgently. ‘This unit cannot contain Kraag creature with blaster at maximum power – battery depleting!’

  ‘Hold on K-9!’ The Doctor knelt down and ripped off the side casing of the robot dog. ‘We need a power feed,’ he shouted to Chris over the roar of the laser. ‘Any power feed!’

  Chris grabbed at the tangle of fibres from the exposed panelling. ‘Will these do?’

  The Doctor grabbed them and shoved the bundle roughly into a small socket inside K-9. ‘He’s supposed to be universally compatible – but let’s find out!’ He called upwards, ‘Ship, channel power to K-9, please!’

  There was a crackle of energy along the length of the tangled fibres. With a whining, buzzing noise K-9’s blaster beam returned to full strength. The Kraag was held frozen, its powerful form trapped in the red glare.

  ‘There we are,’ said the Doctor. ‘All better.’ He turned to Chris and indicated the door. ‘We’d better get on.’

  ‘But we can’t just leave it like this,’ protested Chris. ‘Poor K-9.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll be fine,’ said the Doctor airily, ‘won’t you, K-9?’

  ‘Master,’ groaned K-9.

  ‘But what are we going to do about it?’ spluttered Chris.

  ‘I’m sure I’ll work something out,’ said the Doctor, ‘when we get back.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we work something out now?’ asked Chris.

  The Doctor coughed. ‘Listen, I have a way of dealing with such situations, it’s very complicated and very impressive and I can’t go into it now, will you just trust me?’

  Chris nodded. ‘OK.’

  ‘Then let’s go!’ The Doctor skirted carefully around the burning Kraag and led the way through the smashed door and into the corridor that led to the airlock.

  Chapter 46

  ‘NOT ONLY IS this not a book,’ said the Doctor’s voice from the holo-screen, ‘but time is running backwards over it.’ The screen showed the book in the Doctor’s hand from the Doctor’s point of view, with Clare looking anxiously at him beside the wrecked spectrograph.

  In front of the screen, Skagra held the actual book in one hand, the sphere in the other. He turned to Romana. Any hint of his earlier emotional display had been wiped away, and he was as smooth and casual as he had ever been.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You have helped to give me the answer. It is, of course, about time.’ He indicated the TARDIS. ‘You will enter.’

  The Kraags jostled Romana towards the police box. She had never felt so desperate and so alone.

  The control room, usually a place of humming warmth and security, now seemed cold and alien, despite the heat emanating from the two Kraags that guarded her.

  Skagra followed and stood before the console. He held the book out towards the time column and turned the pages.

  Nothing happened.

  Romana gave a sigh of relief. ‘Looks like you were wrong again. Time for Plan B? Or is it Plan F by now?’

  Skagra paused for a moment. Then he closed the book, and opened it again at the first page.

  He turned the page.

  The central column wheezed into life, jerking upwards. A cool green light came from deep beneath the column, something Romana had never seen there before.

  Skagra turned another page. The exterior doors slammed shut. The lights dimmed, turning the same pale sickly green colour.

  Skagra turned another page. The navigation input panel burbled into life, and a lever slammed over by itself.

  Skagra smiled. ‘Exactly. The Doctor knew the answer, and so did you, buried deep in your subconsciouses. Time runs backwards over the book. So I turn the pages within the time field of this machine and the machine operates. And turning the last page will take us to Shada!’

  Chapter 47

  THE AIRLOCK DOOR irised open. From the clean cool interior of Skagra’s ship, Chris looked through into a dank, dingy corridor that matched the shabby exterior of the space station.

  The Doctor marched through the door and into the corridor. ‘Come on!

  Chris hovered in the doorway. ‘I suppose I ought to say something special. I mean, I am the first human being to travel into outer space.’

  The Doctor shook his head.

 
‘I’m not the first?’

  ‘Not even close, sorry. Now come on!’

  Chris followed him. The corridor was rusted and decayed, illuminated only by dim, caged wall lights and there were occasional creaking noises, like the sound of rending metal, that reminded Chris uncomfortably of just how close he was to millions of miles of vacuum.

  ‘I suppose it’s safe?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, of course it’s totally unsafe,’ said the Doctor, his long legs taking him past doors marked SHUTTLE BAY 1 and SHUTTLE BAY 2 and into the belly of the station, his big booted footsteps thunking on the gridded metal plating of the floor and echoing away into the darkness.

  Chris hurried after him. ‘It’s so hard to believe we just travelled hundreds of light years.’

  ‘Why?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘I always understood that you cannot travel faster than light,’ said Chris.

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Says Einstein,’ said Chris.

  ‘What?’ The Doctor stopped and put an arm around Chris’s shoulder. ‘Do you understand Einstein?’

  Chris wasn’t sure where this was going. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What?’ gasped the Doctor. ‘And quantum theory?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chris. He basked in the Doctor’s astonishment, on firmer ground at last.

  ‘What?’ gasped the Doctor. ‘And Planck?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chris.

  ‘What?’ gasped the Doctor. ‘And Newton?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Chris.

  ‘What?’ gasped the Doctor. ‘And Schoenberg?’

  Chris paused. Was it a trick question? He recalled reading about the crisis of tonality. He thought he’d caught most of it, so he answered proudly, ‘Yes. Of course.’

  The Doctor whistled, apparently impressed. Then he said, ‘You’ve got an awful lot to unlearn, Bristol.’

  Chris sagged. Back to normal, then.

  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 ha
nd. ‘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.’