Heart of Tardis

by Dave Stone

  ‘Oh, bollocks,’ said Slater, as visions of a tranquil afternoon spent smoking in the car and drinking tea from a Thermos went out of the window. ‘That’s torn it. I suppose we’d better show a bit of willing.’

  ‘I suppose we’d better had.’ McCrae sighed. ‘Oh well, by the looks of it, if there ever was anybody here, they’re long gone.’

  ‘There is that,’ said Slater. ‘I suppose.’

  McCrae started fumbling in the glove compartment, for the department-issue automatics that had hardly ever seen the light of day and never once been fired.

  ‘I told you I had a bad feeling about this,’ he said.

  They set off after Romana’s rapidly diminishing form and followed her into the block.

  The ground-floor reception area was actually nearing completion. As their footsteps rang around fake marble walls and floor, both Slater and McCrae felt decidedly uneasy. It was the feeling one could imagine having upon entering some brooding gothic pile in the middle of a thunderstorm, with cobwebbed suits of armour seeming to look at you and something hiding in the grandfather clock. The feeling didn’t seem to fit these ostensibly stylish and well-designed surroundings at all.

  In fact, what the pair were feeling was the perfectly natural terror of an animal taken from its natural habitat.

  subconsciously they thought the docklands should be mouldering old warehouses and derelict shipping cranes, and this ersatz finery dumped on top of it just seemed fundamentally wrong. They hurried on to catch Romana up, more for the comfort of the fact that she was another living being in this place than they would ever care to admit.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ McCrae said, in the tones of someone hoping this was true. ‘Whatever we’re supposed to be looking for, it’s gone.’

  ‘There’s something,’ Romana said, in tones of irritated concentration. ‘I can feel it. There’s something left here for us to find...’

  Finding things or not, however, rapidly became academic -

  because the things that had been left here suddenly found them. A number of doorways on the ground level had yet to be filled and had been sealed with grubby plastic sheets. Now, they split open with a sound like tearing skin and things came through them, black-clad semi-humanoid things, more than a dozen of them.

  They engulfed Slater, McCrae and Romana, and bore them down to the artificial marble floor before they even knew what was happening.

  In the UNIT barracks, Katharine Delbane was finding herself at something of a loose end. In police-procedural TV shows this was the sort of time that is conveyed by shots of customs officials carefully checking man-sized crates at an airport, uniformed bobbies looking around derelict factories with torches, tracker dogs straining on their leashes as handlers lead them around woodland areas for no good reason, and so forth.

  Such things were of course happening, somewhere, in the general sense, but the reality of the situation so far as she, Delbane, was concerned was that she was simply hanging around with nothing to do and nobody to talk to.

  The Special Branch men had long left to go about their business. Crowley was sequestered in the Brigadier’s office and the few other Provisional Department operatives he had brought in were busily examining this and itemising that as though they were pricing things for a clearance sale. The UNIT

  troops, to a man or woman, regarded her with cold blank disgust now that her true identity and purpose for being here were revealed. Sergeant Benton had turned his back on her in the canteen and continued his lecture to the other NCOs on the subject of how they had to hold things together until the Brig was back and these Provisional bastards were sorted out. Strangely, the prospect of a change in the administration of UNIT

  seemed more important and deplorable than semi-men in black coming into their barracks and shooting them.

  The upshot was that Delbane had more than enough time on her hands to think, and she was thinking that she’d made a big mistake. Not in any particular way, but in the vague sense that everything in her life and world was a mistake. Without realising it, she now saw that in the weeks of working here she had soaked up something of the UNIT family atmosphere, the sense of people working together for something genuinely fine and good. A sense of... well, the sense of working for something greater and more noble than one’s petty individual interests.

  Now that atmosphere had been spoilt, and Delbane had been instrumental in spoiling it. It made her feel... not dirty, exactly, but shoddy. Worthless inside.

  To take her mind off things she found herself following the Doctor, telling herself all the while that she was simply keeping an eye on him. There was still no absolutely positive identification and vetting on him, after all. The Doctor, for his part, just seemed to be generally and good-humoredly pottering around, reacquainting himself with the surroundings, chatting with old friends in the ranks (who studiously ignored Delbane) and taking in changes after a long time of absence. He seemed absentmindedly unaware of Delbane’s presence, but at least he didn’t actively shun her.

  It was his good humour, in the end, that got to her.

  ‘Don’t you care about your friend?’ she asked him, as he was happily scanning a notice board, in one of the dormitory huts, that detailed, amongst duty rosters and the like, a raffle in aid of the London Lighthouse and a sign-up for a rounders team.

  ‘Pardon me?’ The Doctor turned and regarded her with a friendly smile that, in the present circumstances, had her sternly stopping herself from bursting into tears.

  ‘I mean,’ she said quickly, to cover this up, ‘your friend the Brigadier. He’s been gone for hours and all you’ve done is... well, I suppose you’ve tried to find him, but now you’re doing nothing.

  The people who took him could be doing anything to him.’

  ‘Oh, I think that’s unlikely,’ the Doctor said, a little complacently Delbane thought. ‘Though I don’t expect you to believe me, I know for a fact that certain things will happen.

  Or have happened. Or will have happened.’ He paused, as if trying to work out that last statement in his own head, and then gave up. ‘Just take it from me that barring some deep and fundamental manipulation or disruption of, or in the very nature of, the...’

  It was as though his ears had suddenly caught up with what his mouth was saying. His face fell.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said.

  Haasterman put down the receiver that had connected him to Dr Sohn and regarded it broodingly Things were bad, very bad; it seemed that his role for the foreseeable future was to be picking up the phone and hearing how things were very bad, and getting worse.

  As if it had in some way read his mind, another phone began to bleep: the scrambler-phone hooked to the British Telecom system. Haasterman picked it up and spoke his name.

  It was Section Eight’s man in the UK. ‘Things are in motion,’ he said without preamble. ‘The girl is in our custody and she should be arriving with you imminently.’

  ‘Very well,’ Haasterman said. ‘Move into phase three of the operation. Remember to be careful - don’t let anything slip until we have the target under secure conditions. It could ruin everything if you gave the game away right now.’

  ‘What’s happening is this,’ said the Doctor, some forty minutes after his latest brainstorm.

  He was back in his workroom, trotting rapidly back and forth between the screens and consoles while Delbane watched him dubiously. was simply trying to interpret the data and come up with a meaningful pattern. I never anticipated that someone else might have been actively, consciously manipulating the data and imposing a pattern of their own...’

  ‘So how the hell would somebody do that?’ Delbane asked.

  ‘Manipulate chaos. Are you saying somebody made a school bus half an hour late, purely to jam up traffic at a certain time and throw your crazy calculations off?’

  ‘Essentially, yes,’ said the Doctor worriedly, seemingly oblivious to sarcasm. ‘If that someone knew precisely what he or she were doing and had
some insight into my methods, they could lay a trail for me that led straight into a trap.’ He typed on a console, and the sounds and flickering lights that filled the workroom suddenly changed their tone - Delbane had no idea what it meant, but the shifting of the composite was noticeable.

  ‘See here...’ said the Doctor. ‘Well, no, of course you can’t - but if you remove the falsely imposed trail, another becomes evident, leading somewhere completely different. The enemy didn’t leave here with the Brigadier and go to the London Docklands, they went to -’

  ‘Precisely, Doctor.’

  There was a moment of shock that seemed to turn the thunderous noise and light around them to silence. Then Delbane and the Doctor turned to see the voice’s source.

  It was Crowley. His face seemed subtly different from the one with which Delbane had come to be familiar; harder, and shedding its patina of urbanity. His eyes were very cold. In one hand he was toying with the little Lucite paperweight that Delbane had noticed earlier in the Brigadier’s office. In the other he held a massive American-made automatic pistol, of the gas-primed sort that could blow a hole through two-inch armour plate.

  ‘Bravo, Doctor!’ he said. ‘I knew you’d find the place eventually - if you were indeed the man you purported to be.

  The man whom, in one sense, this entire operation has been set up to snare.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Making Different Plans

  ‘Well, I have to admit,’ said the Doctor. ‘it hasn’t been much of a day for stopping the unstoppable forces of Evil. I have to admit I’m a bit stumped.’

  They were back in the car again, driving on what, Victoria gathered, was a freeway. A number of people in other cars had fired pistols at them, but they seemed to have been aiming to miss.

  ‘Do we really have to stop it?’ said Victoria, carefully, as if trying on a new idea for size.

  ‘Why, Victoria.’ The Doctor looked at her. ‘Whatever can you mean?’

  ‘It’s just that, well, this monster, or whatever it is, is preying on the people here in some way and that’s very sad and so forth, but it hasn’t really done anything to us, has it? You said that this wasn’t our world and doesn’t work by the same rules - so what if this state of affairs is perfectly natural for this world? What if there is no way to stop it, and all we’d achieve by trying is to be killed?’

  Victoria hoped she didn’t sound like a coward, because she really didn’t mean it in that way. The monster here, if such existed, seemed to kill in more intangible and distinctly more nastily messy ways than she had thus far encountered on her adventures with the Doctor, it was true... but, more than that, she had the feeling of being caught up in something complicated and vast. Something too big for her to comprehend in anything other than the most peripheral of ways; something with which she could simply not imagine herself, Jamie and even the Doctor being able to cope.

  ‘In your own world,’ said the Doctor, ‘on the Earth, it’s the natural order of things for the strong to crush the weak, for predators to eat prey, for time itself to bring nothing but misery, death and decay. And in certain senses, in the long term, that’s perfectly right. But in human terms, what is right is fighting such things even to the death. If we didn’t, we might as well kill ourselves the moment we’re old enough to be aware of the world. Riding out the shocks the flesh is heir to, kicking against the pricks, that’s what being human is basically all about.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Or so I’m told. Besides,’ he continued, in slightly less inflated tones, ‘if our chap hasn’t come for us yet, that’s just because he, or indeed she or it, hasn’t quite worked out what to do with us. It’ll come for us, sooner or later. These things always do.

  And I, for one, would like to deal with it before it does. We have to find it before it finds us.’

  ‘And how do you propose to do that?’ Jamie asked. ‘From what you say, this thing is a...’

  ‘An Entity, I suppose you’d call it,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Piezoelectromagnetically-based autonomic macroconstructs not really being my style at all.’

  ‘...an Entity without a body to call its own. It could be anywhere. How are we ever going to find it?’

  ‘It must have a... well, not a lair as such,’ said the Doctor,

  ‘but a point of convergence of some kind, a place of Power.

  Somewhere big and where people can congregate...’

  It was at this point that the car chose to stall. It spluttered and choked and freewheeled some way to a halt on the hard shoulder.

  ‘Now I wonder if that was an omen of some kind,’ said the Doctor. He peered at the extensive collection of dials and switches on the dash. ‘Oh. It seems that when I rented the car I forgot that it needed to be filled with petrol. Oh well. It looks like we’re on foot again. Is there anything around within strolling distance?’

  Victoria and Jamie looked at each other, forbearing to comment, and then both pointed wordlessly to the huge building that lay beyond the nearest exit ramp.

  ‘That’ll do,’ said the Doctor, looking at it. ‘It’s a place to start, anyway.’

  The Shady Pines Shopping Mall declared itself to be the Biggest in the World - and in the special circumstances of Lychburg this was literally true. With more than three thousand discrete businesses on a complexly variable number of levels, fifteen hundred of them actually in stores, it was inevitable that three unwary travellers would get separated from each other and lost within minutes.

  The Mind that lived, in one sense at least, in the very heart of the world and, in another sense, was the very world itself; had by now had time to think - if the term ‘thinking’ can be applied to conceptual processes that had all the relation to those of a human that an evil whelk has to an ice-cream stand. These three individuals were indeed different (the Mind thought) and quite unlike any other in the world. The Mind could not find a single way inside; It could not find a way to feed off them at all.

  The sustenance of the Mind had about the same relation to the chemical and physical energy transitions that characterise the feeding processes of almost all other life-forms - from carbon-based biological to what are misnomerically termed

  ‘energy beings’ - as the data-stream linkages between two computer networks have to a toaster plugged into a power outlet or the crude power supplies of the individual computers that make up the networks. The Mind was an Abstract Entity; the food that sustained It was the interplay of action and reaction and consequence, the constant exercise of Its own definition of Itself Thus It would take control of an individual mind and set it to kill another imbuing and subduing the victim with Its essence, becoming in a very real sense both the murderer and the murdered. There were other forms of interaction between individual minds and their bodies, to be sure, but none so intense as murder Besides, in the end, the Mind just liked to do it.

  So far as the Mind had an actual name, in the sense that one might think of oneself as identifiable other than simply as

  ‘me’, the Mind called Itself Continuity. Because that, apart from being just Itself; was what It ultimately was - perfect, self-referring and eternal.

  Now, that Continuity had been broken by the three strange individuals and the thing that had carried them. For years, the Mind had quite simply been unable to think in terms of any other outside world from the one It now inhabited, purely because there had been nothing to remind It that such worlds had or ever would exist Now, It was beginning to remember -

  although Its processes of memory were as similar to that of human recollection as the sound of a tuba is similar to a monkey in a little hat

  The Mind remembered that It had once lived Somewhere Else. There was another world, Somewhere Else, and these three new individual minds held the key to it The Mind was aware of them now, three points of unknown blankness in the world, delineated by the holes they made in it and the ripples of their passing through it The Mind considered matters for a while. If It couldn’t subsume them directly, as yet,
then It would just have to achieve Its end by other means.

  In the Shady Pines mall several hundred people, more or less at random, wondered what it would be like to brutally and horribly murder those nearby to them in the crowd. A second later, most of them forgot about this and started thinking about other things, like wondering why they suddenly had an impulse to buy a children’s doll, or something of that nature, and twist it into interesting shapes.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Festival of Masks

  The helicopter, though big enough to be a cargo craft, was sleek and black and packed with cutting-edge prototypical stealth technology - the technology that would be released to the public some decades later as state of the art. The fact was that, here and now, there was an orbital transcontinental shuttle service for those who knew about it, and man had set foot on Mars more than five years before. Admittedly, man hadn’t set foot on Mars again, on account of what he had found there. However, the fact remained that, with the exception of the occasional Airfix kit that got a bit too enthusiastic, and aside from computer-based informational technology which by its nature grows up in public, the basic technological level of Planet Earth was far in advance of anything dreamed of by the vast majority of those who populated it.

  Romana thought the helicopter looked quaintly baroque and archaic.

  When the black-clad, hooded figures had fallen upon herself and the two human men, Slater and McCrae, they had injected the three of them with an anaesthetic compound - much as, she understood, they had done previously to the soldiers in the UNIT barracks. The two Provisional Department men had of course succumbed, but due to her Gallifreyan biology Romana had merely felt a slight sense of disconnection. She had decided, however, to play dead (or at least unconscious) and let these people take her where they wished. The Doctor had after all told her to learn all she could, and this appeared to be the most direct available route to do so. She had no doubt that she could deal with anything humans might be able to throw at her, should the need arise.