by Dave Stone
And so, not to put too fine a point upon it, she screamed.
The creature turned at the sound and glared at her with an utterly vicious and entirely crazed animal hatred. It rocked back on its multiple haunches then sprang at her, uncaring as the wires ripped from its head, its suddenly fang-like, extensible teeth snapping as they sought the throat of this interloper. Its eyes positively flared with a brilliant, bluish light that seemed to make something inside Victoria die and lie still, waiting for the creature’s teeth and claws to tear into her, tear her to the innards and the bone...
Jamie’s dirk thunked solidly into the side of the creature, knocking it out of the air. With a thump the creature hit the ground in front of the... thing it had controlled, kicked its fifteen legs up in the air and expired.
The Doctor looked at the dead creature, aghast. ‘Jamie!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you realise you’ve just killed what was quite possibly the last Gallifreyan woprat left in the universe?’
‘Good riddance,’ said Jamie, shortly He walked over to the last remaining woprat in the universe, pulled out his dirk and wiped it.
It was at that point that a horrendous sound came from the... thing. A sound like gears clashing in an engine, the sound of sheering, twisting machinery that was bigger than the entire world. Lights stuttered and blazed on the remains of the console to which the creature had so recently been linked, and an oscillating wail began to issue from it.
‘Oh dear...’ The Doctor ran to the console and stared at the surviving controls and dials with a growing sense of alarm. ‘I think we should get out of here,’ he said with the quiet control of one who is only being quiet because he fears what he might sound like if that control were relaxed for so much as an instant. ‘I have the feeling that our real problems have only just begun.’
* * *
The monstrous, composite creature on the other side of the Lychburg Drive-o-Rama screen had collapsed. Fortunately, a little of the binding alien energy that had held it together and protected its individual components from physical harm had remained. The various citizens of Lychburg, however, had lain in unconscious piles, suffering from profound shock and only a very few of them had even begun to stir. When it began to collapse the Avatar had simply dropped the TARDIS which, in the way that TARDISes tend to do when dropped, had contrived to land safely without squashing anybody flat, and more or less the right way up.
After the death of the Avatar and the obvious malfunctioning of the... thing that it had controlled, every dramatic convention should have had the ground shaking under the Doctor and his companions and, quite possibly, the sky itself falling down around them. There had been nothing of that nature - but the Doctor’s sudden sense of utter fear and trepidation had communicated itself to Victoria and Jamie.
As they ran for their TARDIS, dodging the citizens who were falling from the monster and leaping over the fallen, the Doctor shepherding them urgently before him, Victoria had been convinced that the TARDIS would be in the same effective state as when they had left it: inaccessible, leaving them here with whatever cataclysm the Doctor seemed convinced was going to come.
As it transpired, though, the doors had opened and the only problem about getting inside was a minor log jam, as they all tried to get in at the same time in their haste.
‘The breaking of the woprat’s control must have opened up the dimensional occlusion that prevented us from getting inside,’
mused the Doctor. He stopped and thought about it for a moment, and scowled. ‘No. That can’t be right. That would be complete and utter idiocy, distorted laws of space and time or not.’ He scanned the readouts and controls. ‘Somebody’s been interfering with my console!’ he exclaimed indignantly
‘Taking liberties! What a cheek! They’ve even reversed the polarity of the... oh. Oh my word.’
This last was in response to a display next to which a light was flashing urgently. Text was scrolling down it too fast for either Victoria or Jamie, who had been alerted by his tone and had come to look over his shoulder, to read - and in a language they could not have hoped to understand, even if it had been slower.
‘What’s wrong, Doctor?’ Victoria asked, as the little man glared at the display intently, muttering to himself all the while.
‘It seems that the woprat controller was the only thing keeping this little world together,’ said the Doctor. ‘A crucial element, at least, like the lowest level in a house of cards, or the straw that holds the balls up in a game of Kerplunk.’
‘Kerplunk?’ said Jamie and Victoria together.
‘Never mind. The point is that in a matter of minutes - a quarter of an hour at the most - this world is going to collapse in on itself.’ He gestured urgently to a wallscreen showing the waking and confused Lychburg citizens outside. ‘And all these people are going to go with it.’
Victoria gazed at the screen, the enormity of the situation sinking in. ‘There must be a million people out there!’
‘Not at all,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s only two hundred and fifty thousand, four hundred and sixty-one, as it happens. I counted. Come on, you two, we have to do something.’ He ran for the TARDIS doors, which opened for him as he drew close to them.
‘Do something?’ Victoria said, incredulously ‘How can we do something in a quarter of an hour?’
‘Thirteen and a half minutes now,’ said the Doctor, absently.
Suddenly he turned, looked back at her and Jamie and gave them an evilly mischievous grin. ‘Oh, you know,’ he said airily. ‘We’ll sort something out. We almost always do.’
After the Doctor and his young companions had bustled out through the TARDIS door, the Doctor and Romana emerged from their hiding place under the console. They had been quietly shuffling around it in a complicated topological manner that allowed them to be on the opposite side to all three of the other people in the room at any time.
‘The Avatar!’ the Doctor exclaimed, slapping at his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘So that’s what happened during that business with the Avatar. I knew there was something odd about it, even at the time.’ He gave the back of his hand a slap. ‘That’s for fiddling with my console uninvited.’
Romana looked at him. ‘So I take it, since you’re still quite obviously alive, you were able to sort out the situation here without any help?’
The Doctor nodded happily. ‘As I recall, yes. And incredibly ingeniously, I think, even though I say so myself.’
‘So that’s it, is it?’ Romana said rather hotly. ‘We get through all this, and our function is simply to open the door to let you in for a grand total of two minutes before you run straight out again?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘It’s the little things that mean a lot, they’re what count - whether we’re talking about things in themselves or what people say, think or do. Sometimes, simply being there is enough. And talking of being here, I think we’d better be getting back. Big things are going to be happening, and it might be a good idea to move our own TARDIS out of the way.’
He glanced at the TARDIS doors. ‘Besides, I’ll be coming back soon and the last thing I want to do is meet myself yet again.
I’m a nice enough chap and all that, no question, but you can sometimes have rather too much of a good thing.’
* * *
The Doctor and Romana arrived back in the disrupted spaces of their own TARDIS not quite knowing what they would find.
When they had left, a battle between arcane Entities had been raging, and who knew what the outcome had been; which had been the victor and which the vanquished, and what state the TARDIS would be in? Were they looking at a spot of work with a dustpan and brush, Romana wondered, or a yawning rupture into the Dominions of Hell?
As it turned out, the dustpan-and-brush option appeared to be the more appropriate. They fell out of the temporal conduit to find the chamber into which it opened, in an approximately similar state to that in which they had left it. The charred remains of the body of Crowley lay to one
side, the living but pale and weakened body of Katharine Delbane to another.
The Brigadier was there, making Delbane comfortable. He was on the point of taking back a proffered hip flask of something which she had obviously refused, and taking a small nip from it himself.
Over in a comer of the chamber stood Slater and McCrae, their manner entirely casual and unconcerned as if it was quite by chance that one of the larger fragments of marble pillar happened to be directly between Delbane and themselves.
‘Hello, Doctor,’ said the Brigadier as the Time Lord walked over to him and Delbane. Long exposure to the man who had once been his scientific adviser had left him able to deal with people appearing out of apparently thin air with almost complete equanimity.
‘I don’t think you’ve been entirely straight with us, Miss Delbane,’ the Doctor said, with mock sternness after assuring himself that she was basically all right, in the physical sense at least. ‘Who exactly are you? Or should I say, what are you?’
‘I am of the Conclave of That ‘Which Shall Not be Named,’
her mouth said, the thing inside speaking through her. It made her mouth smile slightly. The Jarakabeth. You think of us as demons, as Evil, but that is not so. We merely wish to live. The one you knew as Crowley was an Aberration. I am one of those who were set to watch Him, to keep him from doing Harm. And now that task is fulfilled. The usefulness of the Delbane-construct has ended...’
‘Construct?’ the Doctor said. ‘You’re saying that Delbane is
- that you’re inhabiting a homunculus, like Crowley?’
The Delbane-construct is more sophisticated in its origin and nature,’ said Katharine Delbane’s mouth. ‘It has memories and its own thoughts which, although generic and incomplete, are remarkably detailed. Katharine Delbane thinks she’s real Now that her usefulness to the Conclave is ended, I shall bury myself deep, and she shall live out her natural life and never think of Me again.’
‘You could simply let the construct die,’ mused the Doctor absently, ‘and move on - not that I’m suggesting you do anything of the kind,’ he added as his ears suddenly caught up with his mouth.
‘The Jarakabeth are effectively immortal.’ said Delbane’s mouth, pointedly, ‘and as effective immortals we can afford to be kind. That was what the one you knew as Crowley failed to understand. Katharine Delbane shall live out what she thinks of as her life, however real that life might ultimately be.’
Delbane’s eyes closed.
Delbane opened her eyes.
‘What the hell’s happening?’ she said. ‘The last I remember, Crowley was pointing a gun at us. What’s happening?’
‘It might take some time to explain...’ said the Doctor.
A massive shock, from somewhere unseen and nearby, shook the room.
‘Time we don’t have at the moment,’ the Doctor said, gently but insistently helping Delbane to her feet. ‘We have to be going. Prepare yourself for something not a little strange. It’s time we got back to the console room, Romana...’
* * *
In the Golgotha Project command post on the edge of the Lychburg crater, Dr Sohn watched as the readouts and alarms went crazy. She was alone. Colonel Haasterman had told her to evacuate the post and she had sent the other Section 8 technicians on their way, but she could no more have abandoned her position than she could have abandoned her right arm - no, not her arm, her head and her heart.
Haasterman might have wanted her out of harm’s way, and his concern was touching, but this was... well, it was her post.
The gauges had long since gone off the scale. It didn’t matter. Sohn had actually felt and seen reality changing around her. ‘Through the lead-crystal viewing ports, before the blast shutters had racked themselves up, she had seen the Lychburg Discontinuity transform itself into what had appeared to be a small blue box. And then the box had transformed into a pyramid. And then the pyramid had changed to an hourglass, and then a big three-dimensional model of a ridiculously grinning purple dinosaur...
The lights went out; first the fluorescent strips that lit the room and then, one by one, the tell-tale lights of the displays. As Dr Sohn sat in the darkness waiting for the end, the unearthly screaming from the Discontinuity, even through the blast shutters and soundproofing, rose to an ear-piercing, unendurable pitch...
And then, quite simply, stopped dead.
Epilogue
But There’s One Thing
When the forces of Section Eight arrived at the site of the Lychburg crater, stopping to release one Dr Sohn from the locked-down observation bunker in the process, they found, instead of the crater they had been quite reasonably expecting, the ruins of a small city.
This was doubly surprising, since before the accident that had created the crater in the first place, Lychburg had been a small town of the sort that would be described as ‘rural’ by the kind and have the unkind making jokes about worried agricultural livestock.
The ruins contained more than two hundred thousand people - fifty thousand more than in the original experiment, as though some process had been operating to spontaneously generate them whole. All of them were unharmed save for the occasional minor injury no worse than a broken arm or leg, and all of them were in a state of extreme confusion. It was almost impossible to get coherent statements, and the details of their last hectic moments before the Lychburg Discontinuity turned itself inside out were merely another datum to add to an already chaotic list.
The sheer number of these ‘survivors’, made the more dramatic and draconian methods of keeping the events of which they were a part under wraps, unworkable. In effect, they were simply allowed to collect what possessions they had - or at least, those possessions of an unclassified nature - and let go. They disappeared into the great mass of Middle America, there to find - or fail to find -
jobs, homes and new lives. Lychburg was left utterly deserted, at least in terms that human beings can ordinarily perceive.
A Ghost Town.
Where are they now?
Dr Sohn is now teaching traditional weaving techniques at a small arts and crafts college in Minnesota. She has absolutely nothing to do with the hard physical sciences and - strangely enough for one with such an ‘arty’ avocation - nothing whatsoever to do with mysticism of any kind, even New Age mysticism.
The molecules of Colonel Haasterman, intermixed with the molecules of the decomposed subhuman minions who had eaten him, were swept up from the TARDIS floor and saved, with ecology-conscious rectitude, for recycling.
You just wouldn’t want to know what they were recycled into.
Katharine Delbane is now a captain in a revitalised and EC-supplemented UNIT which, at time of writing, is still commanded by Brigadier General Lethbridge-Stewart.
The entity that lived within her seems to be lying dormant, possibly busy digesting what remains of the entity that lived in the homunculic reproduction of Crowley. The real Aleister Crowley is, of course, long dead, and any resemblance to him and the homunculus is purely coincidental.
As for the Doctor, the Doctor and his companions of various age, sex and species...
* * *
Victoria lay back in the marble-sided bath that was the size of a small swimming pool and let the tensions of her recent adventures ease away. The unguent she had added to the warm, soapy water came from the twenty-second century, she knew, and she imagined all the tiny things in the apparently clear, pinkish liquid working themselves inside her skin and crawling over her muscles and tendons, chemically stripping them and replacing them with microscopic shreds of new material. All of a sudden, she didn’t feel like a bath any longer. She climbed out and towelled herself briskly, not feeling as if she were trying to get little things out of her skin at all. She wrapped herself in a bathrobe and padded out into the corridor that led to her room.
Jamie was sitting on a chair in the corridor, writing.
‘The Doctor told me to do it,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I thought I’d better go alo
ng with it. He seemed in a bit of an odd mood.’
Victoria glanced at the words painstakingly printed on the sheet of paper:
I MUST NOT STICK BIG KNIFS IN EXTINCT ANIMALS JUST
BECAUSE I DONT LIK THE LOOK OF THEM.
I MuST NOT STIK BIG KNIVES IN ESTINCT ANIMALS JUST
BECAS I DON’T LIKE THE LOOK OF EM.
I MUS NOT STICK BIG KNIFES IN EXTINCT ANIMALS JUsT
BECAUSE I DON’T LIKE A LOOK OF THEM...
...and so on, with the minor variations in spelling and punctuation of one only exposed to the joys of literacy in later life.
Victoria sighed and moved on; sometimes the Doctor was too like a supercilious old school teacher for words.
As she passed what was usually, in the strange spaces within the TARDIS, a cloakroom closet she heard within it the sound of a rather mournful penny whistle. She paused for a moment, considering, then opened the door.
The Doctor was hanging by his knees from a coat rail. On the floor of the closet were stacks of writing paper, each stack coming up to Victoria’s hips. The visible pages were covered with tiny, neat copperplate writing reading.’
I must not, through my own carelessness and conceit, allow the deaths of innocents that can in any way be prevented.
I must not, through my own carelessness and conceit, allow the deaths of innocents that can in any way be prevented...
The Doctor regarded her owlishly, and dropped the penny whistle. It fell directly into his breast pocket even though he was upside down.
‘I failed,’ he told Victoria, simply. ‘That man, Dibley, wasn’t evil, wasn’t in control of himself, wasn’t even there, and I was responsible for his death.’
He looked so forlorn that Victoria was moved to charity.
‘Things could have been worse,’ she said. ‘It was an accident, and nobody - even you - can guard completely against accidents. And think of all the people you saved. The way you managed to get all those two million people into the TARDIS
