Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

by Alastair Reynolds

  Jo heard an indistinct: ‘Come in.’

  Irwin opened the door, and beckoned the UNIT party to enter. The room was small, with a single large window overlooking part of the platform, and then out to the restless grey sea. A tough-looking grey-haired man in a chequered shirt was sitting at the desk, with a bulky computer positioned at an angle before him. He was tapping keys with blunt hairy fingers, while referring to a spiral-bound folder opened out next to the computer.

  ‘Your guests,’ Irwin said.

  The computer the man was working on was a modern one, no larger than a television set, housed in a grey case with an integral keyboard built into it. Jo angled herself to get a better look at the data on the screen, the rows of flickering green characters. Computers were beginning to creep into UNIT operations but it was still fairly unusual to see one in an office.

  ‘That’s about all I can do for now,’ the man said, with a defeated air.

  ‘You did your best, Hopgood. Have them fly in a replacement circuit board as soon as possible. I can’t manage without this thing now I’ve got used to it.’

  The speaker was a woman. She had been standing at a row of filing cabinets off to the left of the door, so that Jo had barely noticed her presence when they entered. The woman slid a folder back into a gap in one of the cabinets, then closed the metal door.

  ‘Computers,’ she said, as the technician left the room. ‘A year ago, I barely knew how to switch one on. Now I’m beginning to think they might actually make a difference. Maintenance schedules, parts procurement, shift management, real-time weather updates and sea conditions – it’s all here. We even have a data link back to the mainland.’

  She slid into the seat recently vacated by the computer man, then tapped away at the keys for a few moments. The rows of characters faded away, replaced by a diagram representing some kind of complicated flow system, rendered in wiggling green lines. Jo presumed it had something to do with the rig’s functioning.

  ‘Very sorry,’ Yates said. ‘But we were hoping to speak to Eddie McCrimmon?’

  The woman slid a folder across the desk, studied the flow diagram, made a couple of felt-tip entries into the paperwork. ‘You are.’

  ‘Edwina McCrimmon?’ Jo asked, glad that she had thought to do her research before arriving. ‘I didn’t know you were based out at sea.’

  ‘Most of the time I’m not,’ McCrimmon said. ‘But I get out here as often as I can. It’s the only way to get a real sense for what’s going on. Feel the whirr of the drill under my feet, as my father says. And you’d be?’

  ‘Jo Grant. This is the Doctor, and this is Captain Mike Yates.’

  ‘I was about to introduce them,’ Irwin said.

  Edwina ‘Eddie’ McCrimmon was about twenty years older than Jo, although she still looked fit and able for her years. She was a tall woman, with ginger hair only just beginning to turn grey in places. She had tied the hair back with an elastic band, exposing a strong forehead. She wore work-stained trousers, a black knitted sweater. Over the sweater she wore a laboratory coat with the McCrimmon ‘M’ beginning to come unstitched from the fabric. She was missing a couple of fingers from her left hand, the one that she used to hold the felt-tip pen.

  ‘Miss McCrimmon,’ the Doctor said gently. ‘Forgive my rudeness, but we do have rather a short weather window. Unless you’d rather have five additional guests for the next couple of days?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve rather wasted your time,’ McCrimmon said, continuing to tick things off. ‘I had some concerns, I’ll admit, after what happened with the decommissioned platform. Reason I got in touch with your Brigadier chappie.’

  ‘Just like that?’ Yates asked, unable to hide his scepticism. ‘You just happened to have the Brig’s phone number?’

  ‘No,’ McCrimmon said calmly. ‘I have a friend I used to go to school with, who’s now pretty high up in the Ministry. I mean, the MOD. I spoke to my friend, and my friend, who knows your Brigadier indirectly – they go shooting grouse together or something – thought it might not hurt to have a wee chat with him. But after I’d had time to think things over, and have a proper talk with Pete Lomax, I realised this wasn’t a matter for UNIT.’

  ‘Well, you could have called the Brigadier again!’ Jo said.

  ‘I did, actually. Twice. Told him not to bother sending anyone out. And despite that, here you are.’ Like Irwin, McCrimmon spoke with a Scottish accent, but hers was softer and more mellifluous – Kirkcaldy rather than Glasgow. McCrimmon paused to look at Irwin. ‘Tom, I want that blow-off valve replaced by the end of the second shift, if at all possible.’

  ‘Already in hand.’

  ‘The centrifugal separator?’

  ‘Fixed and running.’

  ‘And the thrust bearing on the number two drill?’

  ‘It’ll hold until spares arrive from shore. We’ll get that draughty window of yours sorted, too.’

  ‘Very good. I think that’ll be all for the moment. You’ve got your pager on? I’ll buzz when our guests decide they’re not going to get much out of this visit.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Irwin said.

  He closed the door behind him. McCrimmon continued writing in her file for a few seconds, then pushed it away, placing the felt-tip pen next to the file. The desk was very neat, with everything except the computer arranged at strict right angles. The computer had been given a dispensation to sit at forty five degrees, but even then Jo suspected that it was an exact forty five degrees, measured with one of those plastic protractors you got in geometry sets.

  McCrimmon looked at her guests in turn.

  ‘I don’t want to be rude, but what I said to Tom Irwin was the truth: you really are wasting your time. What happened at Mike Oscar Four was deeply regrettable, I won’t deny that. Lives were lost, as well as valuable equipment.’

  ‘But you must have had some reason to contact the Brigadier,’ Yates said.

  McCrimmon tapped the tapped the index finger of her injured hand against the file: she’d lost the ring and little fingers at the knuckle. ‘I was mistaken. I’ve got good men working for me, and I trust their judgement. When my extraction specialists say that the likely cause was a rupturing gas cell, why should I doubt them?’

  ‘The Brigadier must have still thought there was something worth looking into,’ Jo said.

  ‘I’ll answer your questions, let you speak to Pete Lomax – if that’s what you insist on. But that still won’t alter the fact that you’ve come out here for nothing. This was an industrial accident, nothing more.’

  ‘A gas cell?’ the Doctor enquired.

  McCrimmon picked up her pen from either end and held it between her hands. ‘I’ll spare you the technical details. It’s pretty complicated and unless you’ve a doctorate in geophysics I’m afraid it won’t mean an awful lot to you.’

  ‘Very considerate of you,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘An accumulation of gases has been known to build up under the seabed, especially in proximity to complex multipenetration drilling sites. When one of these cells ruptures – breaks through to the water – it acts like a huge bubble. If that bubble rises directly under an already compromised structure, like Mike Oscar Four … well, I’m sure you can imagine the consequences.’

  ‘The rig collapses,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Or suffers severe damage. Either way, it’s not the kind of trouble we go looking for.’

  ‘If there’s a threat to British maritime operations,’ Yates said, ‘we need to know about it. Even if it is just gas cells. The sooner we have a word with this Lomax chappie, the better. Then we can all clear out and go back home to our Ovaltine.’

  ‘Ovaltine, Captain?’

  ‘Never mind,’ Yates said. ‘It’s not really my tipple anyway.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  The wind stiffening, Inspector Archie Hawes breasted the highest point of the dunes and began his descent to the beach. The sand was getting into his shoes. He squinted, shielding his eyes from th
e sting of the wind. He could see the hut now, tucked against the fence line where the beach ended and the dunes began. He came here quite often, on his beat. Now and then he’d knock on the door and there’d be no answer. He’d peer through the window just in case, but if McGinty was out there with his wheelbarrow, off gathering scrap, it was just too bad. Hawes would retreat to his panda car safe in the knowledge that he’d made an effort, while not having to put up with any of that vile-tasting tea.

  Not today, though. He could see a gentle glow coming from the hut’s window. The gas lamp was on.

  McGinty was home.

  Hawes completed his descent of the footpath, onto the beach proper. The tide had already gone out and where it had reached its highest point was a sketchy margin of deposited items. Lengths of rope. Old bottles. Fishing net. Wood and plastic. Flotsam and jetsam, Hawes thought. He had the idea that there was some boring technical difference between the two, that the one was very specifically something and the other very specifically something else, not that it mattered. The main thing was a nagging suspicion that McGinty would normally have cleared away this muck by now. He couldn’t be ill, could he? That would be a turn-up for the books. District nurse, GP, even the giddy prospect of an ambulance … It would almost be more drama than Hawes could take.

  He passed by the window on his way to the door, registering an impression of McGinty sitting at his table with a clean dinner plate before him. The yellow glow of the gas lamp almost made it look cosy in there, like a Dickensian Christmas card. Hawes wasn’t fooled. He’d been in that hut often enough to know it was about as cosy as a public urinal.

  Hawes stood at the door. He noticed that the word ‘nutter’ had been sprayed onto the wall to the right of it. Strange that McGinty hadn’t painted over it, or at least tried to clean it off.

  He knocked on the rough wooden door.

  ‘Pat. It’s me, Archie. Come for my brew.’ No avoiding that particular obligation, Hawes thought.

  There was no answer. He didn’t think McGinty was deaf, but perhaps he’d nodded off at the table after consuming a lavish banquet of cold sardines.

  He knocked again, spoke louder this time. ‘Pat! It’s Archie Hawes! Let me in.’

  He heard the scrape of a chair, as of someone rising. There was a shuffling sound, the scuff of shoes on rough floorboards. The door was unlatched and opened.

  McGinty stood in the doorway, still wearing his heavy oilskin coat. He was looking at Hawes, but also looking through him, out to the waves.

  There was a long moment when Hawes expected the other man to say something.

  ‘Pat?’ he asked doubtfully.

  ‘Hello, Archie.’ McGinty extended a welcoming hand. ‘Why don’t you come in? I’ve got something to show you.’

  ‘I see the kids have had a go at you again.’

  McGinty closed the door behind them. It muffled the draught, rather than excluding it completely. ‘Oh, don’t worry about the children. They don’t matter now.’

  Something was off key, out of tune. Hawes would never have called the beachcomber a friend. But he knew McGinty well enough to sense that something was amiss. He thought of the way he’d been sitting at the table, bolt upright with the plate in front of him. Like a man with nothing to do but wait.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Pat?’

  ‘I’ve never felt better, Archie. Please, have a seat.’

  There were only two chairs in the hut. Hawes took the one opposite McGinty’s seat. He studied the clean dinner plate as he lowered himself down onto the rickety platform. ‘There’s been a good tide,’ he offered.

  ‘And there’ll be many more, while this planet still has oceans and a moon. But that’s all behind us now.’ McGinty had his back to Hawes now, as if he was preparing the tea. ‘Here. I’d like to show you something.’

  ‘What, Pat?’

  McGinty reached up to relieve himself of his coat, freeing first the left sleeve and then the right. For a moment the coat hung on his frame like a cloak. Then he shrugged it the ground and remained standing with his back to the policeman.

  Hawes stared, at first unable to process what he was seeing. Something was stuck to Pat McGinty. It was clamped onto him, fixed with prehensile metal legs to the lower part of his neck. It was a thing of silver metal and glass, sterile-looking, like some strange surgical attachment. Green light came from different parts of it. Fluid bubbled around in the glass part, and there was something in that fluid, a thumb-sized blob of indeterminate form.

  ‘Pat …’ he said falteringly. ‘What’s that thing?’

  ‘Me, Archie.’ McGinty turned around slowly and smiled. ‘I am not Pat McGinty now. I am Sild.’

  Hawes’s mind flashed through the possibilities, but he could think of nothing that made sense of this. His only conviction was that it was wrong, dreadfully wrong, and that McGinty needed urgent help.

  ‘We need to get you to hospital, Pat. Someone’s done this to you.’

  ‘Not someone, Archie. Sild. I am Sild; we are Sild. And now you will become Sild as well, and then we will find him. Find the man called the Master. And bring him to join the others on the Consolidator.’

  ‘Consolidator? What are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s a spaceship, in the future. Orbiting a planet called Praxilion.’

  ‘Pat, have you been on the funny tea again? I told—’

  ‘Never mind, Archie. In a moment it will all be clear. Please stand by.’

  ‘Stand by for what?’

  That was when Hawes heard the scuttling behind him. He twitched around, just in time to see another of those things on the shelf behind him, crouched next to the red leather wireless set.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Pete Lomax was sitting on the edge of a made bed, dressed in shirt and trousers. He was a slight man with tousled fair hair, spilling out over the bandages wrapped around his scalp. His room was just large enough for the bed, a bedside table, a desk and a steel-framed chair. He was putting aside a drawing pad when they arrived. Some sketches, mostly of scenes in and around the platform, were fixed to the walls with blobs of putty and drawing pins. These were the only concessions to homeliness in the room.

  Eddie McCrimmon introduced them. ‘This is the Doctor, Captain Yates, and Miss Jo Grant.’

  Jo smiled. ‘We’re not here to make life difficult for you, Mr Lomax. It’s just that something odd happened and you’re our only witness.’

  ‘I can’t tell you much,’ Lomax said, barely raising his head as he spoke.

  ‘You managed to get to the wireless room,’ Yates said.

  At that moment a McCrimmon employee appeared at the door with a plastic tray laden with cups, jugs of tea, coffee and milk, and an assortment of stale biscuits. The drinks were distributed. Jo helped herself to one of the biscuits. Her appetite was coming back now that they were on firm ground.

  ‘I had to call for the chopper,’ Lomax said.

  ‘There wasn’t one on the rig?’ Jo asked.

  ‘It had come back here, to Mike Oscar Six. We worked shifts.’ Lomax spoke in a quiet Northumbrian accent that reminded Jo of a driving instructor she’d once known. ‘The chopper was due back that day anyway. When the thing happened …’

  ‘You said something about the sea disappearing,’ Jo said.

  The Doctor gave her an admonitory look. Perhaps he’d been hoping to steer around to that topic gradually.

  ‘What I meant was,’ Lomax said, his coffee cup rattling on the saucer on he spoke, ‘the sea conditions were rough. Seriously choppy. The waves were piling on top of each other. A trough opened up. It was like looking into a steep-sided valley, all black water and foam.’ He gave a little shudder. ‘I’ve seen some pretty bad seas, 50- or 60-foot swells, but that was the worst.’

  ‘Just a trough?’ Yates asked doubtfully.

  ‘Aye.’ Lomax looked annoyed. ‘What else would it have been?’

  ‘The transcript of your radio transmission,’ the Doctor said, ‘led us
to think you’d seen something rather different. You said it looked as if the sea had been scooped out, as if there was a hole where the water should have been. A great, hemispherical hole, open for whole seconds, right under Mike Oscar Four, before the water crashed back in on itself.’ Gently he added: ‘That’s what you really saw, isn’t it, Pete? Not just a normal sea event, but something that didn’t make sense at all?’ The Doctor nodded at Lomax’s drawings. ‘You’ve got an eye for detail, we can all see that.’

  They all caught it then: Lomax glancing at McCrimmon for an instant, as if seeking guidance or permission.

  ‘Whatever I said on the wireless, I know what I saw.’

  The Doctor nodded. ‘Then in your experience, nothing that happened was in any way inexplicable? Just an unfortunate coincidence of bad weather and a rig that was already structurally unsound?’

  Lomax frowned. ‘What I said, isn’t it?’

  ‘Thank you, Pete,’ McCrimmon said, her tone letting them all know that she considered that this interview had run its course. ‘You’ve been more than helpful.’ She paused and turned to the UNIT delegation. ‘Pete was hurt, as you can see. Concussion, possibly a fracture; we’ll know better when we get him back to the mainland. In the meantime, I won’t have him put through any more distress. He lost friends in that accident. We all did.’

  ‘Will you be returning to the rig?’ the Doctor asked.

  McCrimmon shook her head firmly. ‘Pete has my personal assurance that he’ll be re-employed on dry land, if that’s what he wishes. He’s been a good worker, an asset to McCrimmon Industries, and I wouldn’t want to lose him.’

  ‘I don’t want to be able to see the sea,’ Lomax said, in a half-mumble.

  McCrimmon swallowed tightly. ‘We’ll … find you something.’

  ‘It’s just the sea,’ Jo said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Lomax met her eyes. ‘It’s not just the sea.’ He seemed on the point of adding something to this statement, some amplification or clarification on the tip of his tongue. But after a moment he went back to the business of staring into his cup. He was still frowning slightly, as if he’d seen something in the coffee’s reflection, some brief swirling hint at an answer that might yet satisfy him.