by Doctor Who
There was a loud rip and the contents spilled into his lap. A shower of bills, travellers' cheques, a passport and other strange items were sent spinning across the room by his crudely kicking feet.
The passport hit the wall and fell open on the rear page just as Geoff wiped his eyes on his sleeve in an attempt to calm his heaving shoulders. Groggily, he stumbled to his feet and walked over, his thick fingers reaching down to pick it up. He stood looking at it for a few minutes, running his thumb over the tiny photograph of Albert. The passport had a different name and with it the chance of a different life.
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The promise he'd made to try and sort things out.
All gone now.
He folded the little navy book back into his pocket and blew his nose loudly into his handkerchief, turning once more towards the tinted glass to watch the golden sun as it moved steadily across an orange sky.
Then time stopped.
Fell apart.
Was rewritten.
168
Chapter
14
Colorado, 28 August 1981, 2.41 p.m.
The Doctor stood in the centre of the courtyard, his head snapping this way and that. His riding companion had been unloaded and stood, head hung low as a colonel spoke to him in an even lower timbre of hushed nonsense. The Doctor's guards had long since abandoned him and retreated to the borders of the compound, in the shadows beneath the large balcony, to steadily undress their wounds. The blood on their bandages seemed to evaporate as they steadily unravelled and folded the white cotton into small tin cases.
The Doctor didn't know what to do, and the steadily increasing pain in his chest was beginning 169
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to distract him from his train of thought. He walked over to one of the bodies, out of the way of the precisely lined regiments the unloaded citizens of Appletown had been organised into. 'Those things must be quick, impossibly quick,' he muttered.
'There's not a scratch on them.'
Kneeling down he idly placed two fingers on the soldier's neck, feeling for a pulse, but there was none. He counted the corpses.
'Thirty-seven,' he whispered. His voice soon rose to an anguished shout as the impact of what he was about to have to witness became more and more profound. 'This can't happen, how could this happen? I don't want to have to see this. Please!'
As if in response to his cry, the Doctor's fingers twitched and he looked down at the young man's face.
Where before there had been nothing but cold skin, there now appeared warmth and the faintest of pulses began to tickle at his fingertips. The ground around his knees became dry and coarse once again as the wounds on his legs closed, and the Doctor looked around nervously. 'It's about to start.'
As he stood up once more he realised that the soldiers had almost finished laying the androids out in a complex pattern around the courtyard, a broken fan, radiating out from a central point. The Doctor ran over to it, his keen mind taking in 170
NUCLEAR TIME
every detail of the scene and the one person out of place - Albert, now hunched in a corner, beside a tarpaulin. Sharp exhalations of breath began to chorus around him and his walk sped up to a run as all around him the soldiers began to ignite with tiny sparks of life.
A broken crate was lying in pieces just outside of the shadow of the balcony, and he dropped to his knees to investigate it, nearly losing his balance as the stabbing pain intensified. His palms and wrists were aching like hell. Through gritted teeth he examined the debris. 'An EM generator. They can't have activated it in time... How was nobody prepared for this? Why wasn't it already operational?'
He looked up at the railing above him. The colonel who had been overseeing the unloading now rested his elbows on the metal bar of the first floor and looked back at him with cold, steel eyes. A man who had lost everything.
'No,' said the Doctor, lifting his head and railing against the sky. 'It doesn't have to end like this. Just because I've seen the future doesn't mean that's how it has to be! I change things all the time! My actions, anybody's actions, can divert the course of history, how can it matter which direction I approach it -
there can't be only one outcome, there musn't!'
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The pain in his chest was almost unbearable now and it took the entire force of his will not to fall to the ground. But there was another sensation building now, a familiar, tingling sensation on the backs of his hands —an itching.
Behind
him,
an
android
twitched.
The
electromagnetic
flash
was
echoing
now,
intensifying, focusing into a tight wave of energy that was hurtling into the crate. Splinters of wood, nails, bits of wire zipped past his face as they slammed into the slowly reforming box. The final bullet fired returned to the barrel of its gun with a loud crack.
'No!' the Doctor screamed once more. 'This can't be how it ends!'
Then, suddenly, as if in reply, time stuttered once more.
And the Doctor could see it all.
Frozen, in the final second of the massacre, bullets and blood and bodies suspended in space, dying screams silent in their throats, the Doctor could see everything.
The great white path of the future, the one he had been travelling along all this time, the path of least resistance, the future in which the Time Lord had interacted the least. It burned his mind like a bulldozer, the force of time, desperately trying to flatten the effects of that one man who had dared 172
NUCLEAR TIME
to contradict the laws of cause and effect, to make him tiny and insignificant in a universe where action always must precede reaction, because this was the way it should have been had he never arrived - and in this version the Doctor was relegated to the position of observer only.
But it wasn't the only way. And mere observation was definitely not the Doctor's style.
He might have been blinded by it if he hadn't been so outraged. But now he concentrated and focused and fought the feeling that his head was going to explode until finally he managed to dim the blazing light in his brain, lowering the brightness that made everything else seem unreal and insubstantial.
With the greatest of efforts he spotted the tiny, hair-thin paths that blossomed and branched off that central path like strands of a web, billowing and splitting in a breeze of dynamic interaction. The paths of the alternative, the futures he could have travelled if only he'd done something. There was still time.
He took a deep breath, checked his watch and stepped out onto a strand.
The frozen moment skipped forwards and reversed. And the Doctor screamed in agony as every cell in his body was reconfigured into sync with the flow of the universe. He collapsed 173
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to his knees and crawled agonisingly across the open space of the courtyard as the sound of dying erupted all around, deafening him. He rolled out of the way of the stomping boot of a soldier as the man made a dash for the exit, only to be cut down metres before he reached the iron gates. The Doctor looked at his watch. 'Three minutes? That's it? Three minutes into the past? I'll revert back before I can do anything! I need something bigger, something more drastic, something big and annoying and against the laws of physics. I need half an hour at least!'
Then he remembered: the person out of place. He scanned the courtyard, dodging his head between the moving bodies, android and human alike until he could see Albert, still in his corner, still huddled against the tarpaulin. He mustered his strength and began to drag himself forward.
There were now only two minutes left before he reached the point at which he had crossed over. Two minutes left before he resumed his backwards journeying from the beginning of the loop. He reached out a trembling hand to the scientist and Albert grabbed it in sympathy, pulling him the la
st short distance into shelter.
'Are you OK?' Albert asked. 'That was quite a fall.'
'No time for chit chat,' the Doctor panted back.
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'You need to tell me now - what happened? Why did this start? What caused it?'
Albert tried to turn away, but the Doctor grabbed his face and turned it back until he was staring deep into the man's terrified eyes.
'I said there was no time! Now tell me!'
'It... it was me,' Albert stuttered. 'I did it, I walked with Isley to the dead zone and someone shouted something. I shouldn't have done it, but I wanted to see her one last time while she was conscious. I love her!'
The Doctor released his grip and laughed desperately. 'That's it, that's all I needed to know.' He looked at his watch. 'And thirty seconds to spare!'
He began to back away, moving over to the landing site of the crate, now being lifted down in the balcony above by the colonel. He snapped his head around quickly. 'I just need something to make sure I'm in sync for that moment. I need to find out what's going to happen next and change it, boot myself into the past even further to keep myself flowing forwards!'
He looked back at the scientist and raised his eyebrows, but the man simply looked at him with surprise as the hands on the Doctor's golden wristwatch reached their original starting point and his time line reverted once more. He was 175
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scooted three minutes into his future, to the starting point of the loop and the apex of the pain.
One side of the Doctor's face smothered itself in grime as he collapsed prone to the sandy ground. 'The fall,'
he gasped as he realised. 'Albert said he'd just seen me fall!'
Suddenly the Doctor experienced a feeling he had never felt before. His legs, chest and arms picked themselves up from the desert ground and began to soar into the air, his head and hands crooked downwards by the still-present force of gravity. 'I'm falling upwards.' He murmured to himself, the pain vanished now that the impact was yet to come. 'This is it, my one chance.'
He twisted in the air, mind racing. If he was falling he must have been pushed, and if he'd been pushed it must have been from the balcony that was rapidly drawing level with his head. He grinned to himself as he tensed his entire body. He set his jaw and growled. 'But if I don't reach the balcony,' he said, '1
can't have been pushed.'
At the last minute he kicked out his foot, hooking the toe of his boot under the textured lip of the iron floor above him, the force of his future battling the brute strength of his body. Time shuddered and ground to a halt, a movie reel with the cable unplugged. The Doctor became suspended, the nexus in a storm of conflicting
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NUCLEAR TIME
pathways and alternate time lines, laughing, triumphant. 'An impossible trajectory!' he yelled, before plummeting into the past.
177
Chapter
15
Colorado, 28 August 1981, 2.23 p.m.
'Sorry sir. We've brought you the, ah, Health and Safety guy.'
The Doctor cannoned onto the floor of the observation room, his guards immediately rushing to haul him up to his feet. 'I have got to stop doing this,' he croaked.
Geoff stepped forward. 'Well, well, well, what have we here?' He rubbed his palms. 'My stress reliever has arrived.'
But rather than looking scared, the Doctor merely dismissed the statement with a wave of his hand. 'Yes yes yes. Can somebody please tell me the exact time?'
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Geoff stopped and stared at him.
'Sorry, sorry, introductions - I'm the Doctor, health and safety something something. And you are?'
'Colonel Geoffrey Redvers - project leader.'
The Doctor looked decidedly unimpressed. 'Good stuff. And you.' He turned his attention to the scientist. 'I've met you before although you haven't met me yet.'
'Dr Albert Gilroy.'
'I know, now - time anyone? Before you interrogate
me?
Please?'
He
looked
around
desperately. The nervous sergeant next to him checked his watch.
'Two twenty-five,' he said.
The Doctor grinned. 'Twenty minutes, good.
Nothing's set in stone yet.' He looked at Albert and Geoff. 'We -' he waggled a finger between the three of them - 'have some things to sort out.'
'No,' said Geoff. 'I have some questions to ask you.'
'Really?' said the Doctor. 'Like how I know about you transporting your androids to the courtyard as we speak, despite having never entered the compound before? Like how I know that you're about to populate the village out there,' he gestured towards the tinted window, 'with killer robots that are programmed to think they
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are human before you drop a nuke on them? Like how I know that there are fifty distinct models of androids, but some duplicates? Like how I know that two of them are made to act like a happily married couple called Mr and Mrs Sanderson?'
There was a shocked silence.
'Well, they're not happily married,' Albert interjected finally. 'That would be unrealistic. They just make do.'
Geoff set his jaw. 'How do you know all this?'
The Doctor straightened his bow tie and adopted the swagger of someone who was on top of the situation, in the hope that it would persuade the others that that was the case.
'This is going to be impossible for you to believe,' he said, 'but I am living backwards through time.'
A snort of derision echoed around the room.
'This is no laughing matter,' the Doctor scowled. 'And if you don't take me seriously you will all die.'
Geoff stopped laughing. 'Is that a threat?'
'No, it's not a threat; it's a fact. A series of events are about to unfold which will result in an almost one hundred per cent mortality count for you, Colonel.'
Albert was fascinated. He moved towards the prisoner and touched the sleeve of his jacket as if 181
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expecting it to explode. 'But how can you be living backwards through time?' he asked with an air of disbelief. 'You're responding to everything we say. If you know the future then you must surely know how this conversation is going to proceed. It's not possible.'
The Doctor sighed. 'Time is complicated, but its processes are based upon simple, fundamental rules —namely that the actions I perform in the future must have some cause in the past. But if I do something, or create a situation that is impossible to produce from the already determined set of events that have happened to you up until that point, then the time line shunts me into your past long enough for me to manipulate those causes so that such a situation can occur. If it's a small thing, then I only live forwards a few seconds, but bigger events need more interaction and so I have to reorient for longer to create the necessary chain of events.'
Albert looked around mockingly. 'But if that is the case and you do revert, then surely your backwards self must also be wandering around somewhere.'
'Good question!' the Doctor beamed. 'OK, I can see that what we need here are my props.' He pulled a piece of string from his pocket and laid it carefully on the map-table beside him. 'This here, 182
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is time,' he said. 'You're experiencing things from left to right: cause and effect, cause and effect. I'm experiencing things from right to left: effect, cause, effect, cause.'
He produced a pair of scissors from his pocket with a flourish. 'If I change something here,' he jabbed at a spot on the piece of string and snipped it with his scissors, 'the string to the left of this cut no longer connects because the causes don't match the effects of the right-hand section. So what happens is this —we find the beginning of the necessary causes that need to be changed on the left —' Another jab and another snip — 'and I flip this middle bit of string over, because fo
r this section of string I am travelling forwards through time. Like I am now.' He flipped the middle section of string and began tying it back onto the end pieces.
'If I do things correctly then this right-hand knot here should be a smooth transition that now all makes cause-and-effect sense, and all you chaps will see is that I walk and talk backwards from left to right up until the first knot, then suddenly I'll start talking normally for a while whilst I alter the future until, suddenly again, I begin talking backwards once more.
'A linear progression for you, but from my point of view I go backwards along the string until I hit 183
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the right-hand knot, then I jump to the left-hand knot and go from forwards for this middle section, until finally I jump back to the left-hand knot once more to continue
my
backwards, right-to-left journey,
thereby avoiding any overlap. Happy?'
'It's an interesting way of looking at things.' Albert scratched his stubble and thought carefully. 'But what if, during your forwards progression, the causes don't add up to the effects on the final strand?'
'Then the final strand ceases to exist altogether, a new piece of string is tied on instead and that becomes the new future. That's it in basic sort of terms. In reality, it's more of a ripple, running along the final piece of string and changing it into a different colour to signify a new future. Or a different texture... This analogy is confusing me now.' He grabbed the string from the table and quickly bundled it back into his pocket.
Albert sniffed and lost interest. 'OK, now I know you're insane. I just wanted to be certain. Geoff, he's yours. I'll leave you to it.' He moved towards the exit, but the Doctor grabbed him by the arm.
'What? But I thought you understood!'
'Like I said, it's a nice theory - but it's not exactly practical, is it? You're just showing off to try and buy some time.'
