by Dave Stone
For more than forty years Haasterman had lived in a world of duplicity, but he had tried to retain some measure of honourable conduct, managing to avoid the out-of-hand black-bag and wetwork so beloved of more conventional intelligence concerns. The kidnapping of a high-ranking officer of a friendly power and, from what he gathered, some completely innocent and uninvolved woman, merely to use them as bargaining chips, rankled. It was not, quite simply, the act of the man he thought himself to be. It was not as if, he reassured himself, there was any intention of actively harming them if things went well, but...
But what if things did not go well? One step leads to another, one compromise of principle to another. What if the lever of mere threat didn’t work? What then?
Ah, well, at least that was a question for some future point.
For the moment the detainees, and Haasterman’s slightly shaky principles, were entirely safe.
* * *
‘You must be feeling tired,’ said Lieutenant Major Derricks, ‘after all you’ve been through.’
‘Not particularly,’ said Romana. ‘And will you please stop fiddling with that pocket watch. It’s becoming inexpressibly annoying.’
Derricks put the watch back in his pocket. He tried to do it smoothly but Romana saw a slight, embarrassed hastiness in the movement, like a small boy caught doing something he shouldn’t. She had not for one moment taken this man’s threatening manner seriously, but now it occurred to her that on some level he couldn’t quite believe in it himself.
‘Now you come to mention it,’ she said, ‘I am feeling a bit worse for the wear. I didn’t notice it before, but now I -’
Derricks glared at her suspiciously as her voice broke off and she stared straight ahead, completely immobile, her eyes wide and her pupils dilated. He waved a hand in front of her face.
Her eyes remained still and unblinking.
‘Some kind of allergic reaction...’ he muttered to himself.
‘Reaction,’ said Romana, precisely but tonelessly. Only her mouth moved: it was as if every other nerve impulse in her body had been physically cut.
Derricks relaxed slightly. ‘You are feeling happy and relaxed. You are feeling warm.’
‘Warm,’ said Romana.
‘You are with a friend,’ he said, sinking to a crouch until their heads were level with each other. ‘I am your friend and you are with me and we are talking.’
‘Friend,’ said Romana. ‘My friend.’
Lieutenant Major Derricks put his face close to hers. ‘You are telling me about why you were brought here.’
‘Here.’
‘Why were you brought here? Why did Section Eight bring you here?’
‘Well, it certainly wasn’t to have you breathing all over me like that,’ said Romana, reanimating her face. ‘What have you been eating? And just what is this Section Eight you’re telling me about?’ She smiled brightly. ‘Is it a secret?’
In Hangar 18, Haasterman turned to one of the technicians manning the comms link. ‘Is it coming down?’
‘It’s coming.’ The technician indicated a screen down which the hexadecimal gibberish of machine code crawled. The collected data had no immediate use, due to the time-lag of transferral, but it was useful to have a comprehensive backup copy should anything happen to Sohn and her team - now, hopefully, in the process of evacuating.
Haasterman watched the scrolling alphanumerics for a while. ‘They were meaningless to the unaided eye, of course, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the visual rhythm had a kind of beat to it, and that the beat was accelerating, building up a sense of tension...
‘Colonel Haasterman!’ an operator called suddenly It was the man throwing yarrow stalks. He was picking them up and throwing them, rapidly, over and over again. Even before Haasterman reached him, he saw that they were falling in the precise same pattern. Over and over again.
‘Chapter twenty-four,’ the technician told him worriedly. ‘I remember because, uh, it’s an old Pink Floyd song.’ He quoted:
‘A movement is accomplished in six stages, And the seventh brings return...’
‘Sir?’ another operator said. ‘Something’s happening...’
On the computer screen, where she had apparently been playing random hands of poker, every single card was coming up a joker.
Haasterman realised that the sense of increasing pressure he was feeling wasn’t psychosomatic, but physical - he had been thinking in abstract terms for so long he had forgotten to think in concrete ones. Now he felt the pressure resonating through him, smelt the tang of ozone in the air like an oncoming electrical storm.
‘Take your positions!’ he shouted to the hooded, armoured troops who were already mobilising, discarding their cards (Haasterman wondered if they had all somehow turned into jokers, like the virtual cards on the operator’s screen) and reaching for their weapons. They ran for the chalk-and-pig’s-blood pentagram inscribed on the hangar floor, as something appeared in its centre with a shock-smack of displaced air.
After the interrogation, Romana was taken to a different cell from the one to which she had first been brought and which had contained the Brigadier. she supposed this was because her captors had originally thought her unconscious, and now they did not want to take the chance of any collusion between the two of them.
After the failure of the drug he had administered, the officer
- Romana simply thought of him as a soldier of some kind, being ignorant of the specific distinctions - had bombarded her with entirely vague questions on the level of who she was, where she had come from and why she was here. The non-specificity of the questions had left them open to any and all kinds of answers, which Romana had duly supplied until the man had tried to hit her. It was easy, with the pre-emptive reflexes of a Time Lady, to manoeuvre herself out of the way and the man had ended up injuring his hand quite nastily on the back of the interrogation chair.
By the time Romana had finished telling him precisely what she thought about people who seemed to feel the need to assay completely unprovoked physical assaults upon seemingly helpless females, the officer had been white-faced and shaking with an impotent mix of anger and humiliation at certain of her rather generalised personal comments, which had apparently hit home. Romana feared that he was in the process of some incipient nervous collapse. Fortunately, the man seemed to be under orders from his superiors not to harm her permanently The fortune in this case was his; while Romana would never ordinarily countenance the use of superior Gallifreyan strength and ability in the form of violence against lower species, her patience had been wearing more than slightly thin.
In the end, the officer had called in two of his men to take her away, simply to get her out of his sight.
The feeling was mutual, so far as Romana was concerned.
Local colour was all very well, but enough of a good thing was a healthy sufficiency.
The new cell was almost precisely similar to the old one, save that one of the bunks was folded up and stowed in a comer. The other had been freshly made and a neatly folded towel and a little paper-wrapped cake of soap lay on it. It was us if these people thought of this place as some hostelry, and she as a guest. The effect was defeated, however, by the fact that there was nowhere to wash except in the toilet bowl.
Romana wandered about the cell soaking in the structure of It - becoming, in a sense, one with it.
It wasn’t a question of examining the hinges of the door and peering at the minute cracks between the breeze blocks: to her the cell was a temporally dynamic structure, from the processes that had gone into its building to the flow patterns of people coming in and going out and moving around. Rather like the Doctor’s attempts at constructing a data field, Romana extended her senses to take in the cell as a gestalt, abstract whole, looking for any useful pattern that might emerge from that whole; some set of circumstances she might take advantage of, manipulating their dynamics in a manner that would ultimately result in her escape.
T
he problem was, the only viable dynamic pattern she could see at the moment was waiting until somebody else opened the door and let her out.
‘There you are at last!’ a voice snapped bad-temperedly.
‘Time might have no meaning to such as us, but are you aware , of how long it’s taken to find you again?’
In her abstracted mental state Romana found that she was actively surprised by this intrusion, taking place as it did in a spatial dynamic which in conventional terms made it completely impossible.
She turned to see the hologrammatic apparition standing in the middle of the bunk so that its sour-faced, berobed form protruded up from its centre. It was, of course, Wblk from the Gallifreyan High Council.
I’ve been incorporating and disincorporating across half of this benighted planet looking for you,’ he said. ‘And I must say, I haven’t exactly been impressed by what I’ve seen. The locals
, seem particularly unevolved, I must say. I can’t see what the attraction is to you people.’
‘That’s the Doctor,’ said Romana, who was damned if she was going to make excuses for a planet that seemed to be entirely made up of incarceration facilities and people sticking needles in one, ‘not me. He tells me it’ll grow on me.’ While having no particular reason to like Wblk the High Councilman, a brightening thought occurred to her. ‘Have you come to take me out of here?’
Wblk looked at her, then rather pointedly stuck his hand through the wall and waved it around with no resistance.
Romana’s preternaturally acute hearing thought it could hear the horrified yelp of a cell inmate on the other side of the breeze block and soundproofing.
‘Fair enough.’ she said. ‘Then why are you here?’
‘When the Doctor and yourself left us so inconsiderately,’
said Wblk, ‘we could have pulled you back at any moment.
We’ve known about that particular method of breaking free from null-time for centuries - we just never thought that somebody would be mad enough to try something so foolhardy and dangerous. We let you go because you were heading for the place and time in which we wanted you to be...’
‘I had my suspicions,’ said Romana. ‘I know that there was something going on behind all this, something more than meets the eye. I just wish I knew what it was.’
‘That’s precisely why I’m here,’ said Wblk the High Councilman. ‘There are certain things, if reality as we know it has any hope at all, that it is imperative you know.’
And he began, at last, to explain.
Chapter Nineteen
Everything Must Go Before the Dark
The Mind looked at Its work and congratulated itself upon Its invention. It had been easy, simply by applying Its influence, the correct degree of redirection here and there, to split the three strangers up. Now it had two of them, and the third would surely soon follow. Detaching a number of pieces of Itself to deal with the taking of the captives to Its place of Power and make them ready for Conversion, the Mind returned the majority of Its attention to hunting the third.
This third individual was strangely elusive - the Mind, though not entirely comfortable with the distinctions between individuals other than Itself had formed the Impression that this particular individual was more powerful and far trickier than either of the other two - but the Mind was confident that this tricky individual would be found before the Darkness Time, when the Mind would, alter years of somnambulic forgetfulness, unlock the doorways of the World.
The Doctor was enjoying himself. True, he was here looking for clues as to some intangible horror the like of which, effectively, would give the murders of Jack the Ripper a run for their money.
True, his young companions seemed to be nowhere to be found, and might at this very moment have found themselves in dire and extreme peril... but it didn’t do to let such things prey on your mind. If you simply lived in and enjoyed the moment, it left you confident and relaxed to deal with whatever it was that moment might bring.
The Doctor, in himself, was of course completely unaware of the levels of his mind that were, in themselves, entirely aware of the invisible tendrils with which some other Mind was probing, attempting to find a way around the shields and defences and get in. He couldn’t afford to let himself be aware of it, he thought: his unawareness was the whole reason why the probing tendrils couldn’t find a purchase, and slid off.
He had wandered down to one of the lowest areas of the mall, a cavernous but brightly lit basement space given over completely to an ice rink. For a while he had enjoyed the unconsciously collective ballet of skaters of varying degrees of proficiency skating together, the avoidances and near misses and occasional collisions. After a while he had tired of just watching, pinched a pair of skates from a young lady who was looking the other way, and taken to the ice himself.
After reducing the ice rink to complete and utter chaos, he had taken an elevator up several floors and wandered into a music emporium, where he had sat down at a miniaturised electronic piano and in the space of a few minutes found several Lost Chords - all of them, unfortunately, extremely cacophonous, the last one of which had shattered the store window and, by some abstruse means, fused all its lights.
Now he was standing outside a store called Fractured Planet. In the window were plastic replicas of monsters and robots and rows and columns of garishly coloured comic books, every single one of them depicting a mesomorphic man extraordinarily pulchritudinous young woman in the sort of leotard that would have one arrested, like as not, if one wore it in real life. The Doctor recalled seeing super-hero books (he believed they were called) like this before, on his travels to the Earth, and had rather enjoyed the innocence a otherworldliness of them. He was therefore slightly dismayed to see that every single man and woman now had huge guns and were industriously blasting away at all and sundry.
Inside the store, a fat man with a beard was talking on the telephone behind the sales counter.
‘Worst episode ever,’ he was saying with lordly contempt. ‘As we all know, Mr Enigma can only regrow parts of his body if more than half of him remains in one piece. So unless...’
Here the fat, bearded man gave a snuffling laugh intended to convey to the world in general its utter and irredeemable stupidity.
‘So unless there has been some cataclysmic change in the nature of space and time so that you can have more than 100 per cent of a thing, you can’t have more than one Mr Enigma running around, let alone five or six. And the planet of the Bottersnikes was destroyed in the Replicant Wars - so how could it be destroyed again? And plus it was one of the Heathcoate Dwibbler Mr Enigmas, and we all know that the Heathcoate Dwibbler Mr Enigmas were utterly crap compared to the...
excuse me? That is not a toy. That is a hand-painted scale replica of the Evil Lieutenant Whopley confronting her heroic twin with her sonically vibrating pulse-pump.’
This last was directed, pointedly, to the Doctor, who put down the model and smiled apologetically. ‘I beg your pardon.’ The Doctor wandered over to the science fiction section of the store and scanned the collection of books, noting that there were any number of paperbacks concerning this Mr Inigma whom the clerk had been on about, from several publishers and with titles ranging from Mr Enigma and the Creature of the Celestial Temple, to Mr Enigma Does Some Stuff, to Mr Enigma Travels Smugly up Himself. There were rather more books about the EarthFed Space Patrol, though there were fewer writers’ names on the spines, and a smattering of generic books about dragons, unicorns, dolphins And sub-Tolkienesque fantasy lands of the sort that would have Baron Munchausen turning into a realist in disgust.
There were also a few science fiction anthology magazines.
One of them was called Astonishing Stories of Unmitigated Science!, which gave the Doctor a little thrill of recognition.
He had once, in other times, been an Astonishing! subscriber, and even an occasional contributor under an assumed name, but he’d had no idea that the publication had survived past the 1950s -
assuming that its appearance here was not, in fact, merely yet another example of the temporal mishmash that was Lychburg.
He picked up the magazine and, after assuring himself that the fat clerk was looking the other way, utterly spoilt its resale value by actually opening it to read.
For the fraction of a second that, to a human observer, would be an odd little man simply rifling the pages of a magazine, the Doctor allowed himself the pleasure of entering a world where all the issues were simple, every problem could be solved by a jut-jawed man of iron will and technology was a friend that would have us all living in power-domes on Mars within the decade.
After a moment’s happy nostalgia, however, he paused, opened the magazine to one page and watched it closely. ‘Oh dear.’
Shifts in basic reality take a bit of time and acceleration until they become generally noticeable. Who cares whether, for example, one of the discrete molecules that make up an apple on a tree three miles away is present or missing? The short answer is that we all will care, a little later, when the universe unravels around us like a knitted scarf caught on a nail, but for the moment we don’t. In the same way, a physical artefact like a book or a magazine will stay, in physical terms, pretty much the same. It is the information it contains, the words on the page, that change. Books, and their languages and attitudes, become meaningless not just through cultural and generational drift - they are a reflection of how the universe itself is changing all around us on the subatomic level.
Here, the change was visible to the naked eye. The Doctor looked at the words as they squirmed and transformed on the Astonishing! page and came to a decision. Mental defences that have one acting and thinking as if one doesn’t have a care in the world are all very well, but they assume the fact that the world will continue to be there not to have a care in, for the good and the monstrous evil alike.
