Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  And he leapt, high off the ground.

  His momentum carried him forward in a great bounding arc towards Phee, who stood there and stared. But the flight through the blackness seemed awfully slow, and he could see that mound was starting to crack up under her, like the shell of some monstrous egg. Suspended, he heard his heart beat, his breath rasp. All he could do now was pray he hadn’t got his timing wrong. And that he didn’t smash his head on the side of the hill. Or go sailing too far over Phee to reach –

  No! Here she was, just below him, approaching fast. He twisted so his hands were dangling, and she was reaching up towards him. ‘Take hold! We’re only ginna get one go at this—’

  The contact was messy. He grabbed one of her wrists, she grabbed one of his. She wasn’t so heavy, but their masses, suddenly joined, made them spin head over heels, making it even harder to hang on. But as he whirled over the mound he saw its surface cracking open, falling away from where she’d been standing, and great billows of ice particles came washing up.

  They landed short on the mound’s lower slope, in a tangle of limbs. Jamie was first on his feet. He dragged her away as the last of the mound crumbled, and they ran off through a hail of ice shards. And here was Sam, grabbing their arms, helping them to the cover of the big ice blocks at the end of the valley.

  Huddled under a wall of ice, Phee was panting hard, eyes wide. ‘Thank you,’ she said to Jamie. ‘I froze up there – I stopped thinking, just for a second – and then the surface started giving way and I couldn’t move—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jamie said, and he let her brother hug her. ‘Ye’re safe now.’ And so is your amulet, he thought, but he put that thought aside as cynical. He stabbed a gloved finger at Sam. ‘You. Take better care o’ your little sister in future. And now we’re gonna go check everyone else is all right, and after that we’ll pack up and go back to the scooters, and we’ll gan on home. Is that all right with you?’

  Sam nodded mutely.

  ‘And we’re gonna talk to them, back on the Wheel. Tell them what’s happened. Can I open yon comms link from this suit?’

  Phee, recovering, pulled away from her brother. ‘Yes. There’s a control on your chest panel…’

  As soon as Jamie opened a channel to the Wheel, his ears were filled with clamouring voices. Somebody had blown up a mining machine, and Florian Hart was on the warpath.

  15

  ON THE MORNING Jamie was due back from Enceladus, Zoe had spent a sleepless night in Sam Laws’ house, trying to analyse the data on ring resonances and patterns she had extracted from MMAC’s memory banks. It was a nice problem, and a novel one, with such a strange data set. But she felt hamstrung by the primitive computer technology of the Wheel of Ice.

  ‘Doctor, it’s like trying to do tensor calculus on an abacus!’

  ‘Now you mustn’t exaggerate, Zoe. It’s a bad habit you’re picking up from Jamie. Look on it as a challenge to your computational skills. I’ve every faith in you. And do wake me if you find anything of exceptional interest.’ And with that, he’d taken himself off to bed.

  Well, any vague plans Zoe had had for a nap before the start of the colony’s working day were quashed not long after dawn, as the bubble’s artificial lights slowly brightened to a full simulacrum of an Earth morning, and she smelled strong coffee, and heard raised voices downstairs.

  She knocked, and crept into the Doctor’s room. Curled up in bed, he was snoring so loudly it was a wonder he didn’t wake himself up.

  For a moment she looked at him fondly, with his black hair tousled on the pillow, his battered old coat hanging on a door knob. He had been a wanderer far longer than she had been, and she liked to see him, if only briefly, at peace. Or perhaps, as Jo Laws suggested, an old soldier herself, it was just that he had learned the soldier’s knack of grabbing sleep wherever and whenever he could.

  She touched his shoulder gently. ‘Doctor.’

  ‘Mmph… mm… wassa? Victoria?’

  ‘No, Doctor, it’s me, Zoe. I think you’d better get up. All hell is breaking loose downstairs.’

  He raised his head, opened one eye, and cocked an ear. ‘Hell can wait.’ And with that he pushed his head back down into his pillow, and within a couple of breaths was snoring again.

  Zoe, too shy to face the others by herself, crept back to her own room.

  The day was a good deal more advanced by the time the Doctor finally rose, and Zoe followed him downstairs.

  ‘Good morning, good morning,’ the Doctor said brightly, apparently oblivious to the lined faces and tired eyes of Jo Laws and Sonia Paley. ‘And how are you today? Is that coffee fresh?’

  ‘Ish,’ said Zoe, checking. ‘I’ll pour you a mug.’

  He sat at the table. ‘I gather you’ve some trouble.’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Doctor,’ Jo Laws said bleakly. ‘More disruption.’

  Sonia said, ‘And this time it isn’t a question of a few components being nicked.’ She took a data slate, tapped its surface, and showed him an image.

  Zoe peered to see. The slate showed a heavy-duty truck with a giant screw tip mounted on its prow, and tractor treads on its hull and roof. ‘This is evidently a mining craft,’ she said. ‘Some kind of shaft-cutter? It’s been adapted for low gravity with those wall-gripping treads.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Sonia said. ‘But look more closely.’

  The craft’s mid-section was badly disrupted, ripped open by some kind of explosion.

  ‘Ah,’ said the Doctor sadly. ‘Not the sort of thing one can turn a blind eye to.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Sonia said. ‘What’s worse, this took place up in one of the workshop bubbles in the Industrial sector – on the Wheel, not down in the mine. Obviously it’s not just property damage we’re dealing with here but a threat to human life as well.’

  ‘Of course. So what are you doing about this?’

  ‘Florian Hart has been pulling rank,’ Sonia admitted. ‘She does have tough contractual clauses on her side. I’ve had to agree to a kettling.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s an old British police term—’

  ‘A containment, Doctor,’ Jo Laws said. To Zoe, she looked distressed and embarrassed. ‘Getting all the potential troublemakers in one place and containing them there until the problem is resolved, and they can be processed.’

  ‘“Processed”. And where is this “kettling” going on?’

  ‘In Trinity Bubble, here in Res Three.’

  Zoe frowned. ‘Isn’t that the one that was smashed up by rioting?’

  Jo sighed. ‘Well, at least they can’t make it any worse.’

  The Doctor asked impatiently, ‘But who are “they”? Hmm? Who exactly are these potential troublemakers you are “kettling”? I think I have a suspicion. Once again you people are turning on your own children, aren’t you, Mayor Laws?’

  ‘Not all of them,’ Jo admitted miserably. ‘Just between the ages of fifteen and—’

  ‘Shame on you,’ the Doctor said sternly. ‘Are you so much under the sway of Bootstrap and this wretched Florian Hart woman?’

  Sonia held her hands up. ‘It’s a delicate situation, Doctor. Bootstrap has its own guards here.’

  He eyed her. ‘Whereas you—’

  ‘I’m on my own here, Doctor, in terms of resources from the ISC. I have to rely on my deputies, who are all citizen volunteers.’

  ‘You’re outnumbered. Is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘That in itself is a provocative remark, Doctor, and I wouldn’t use such language.’

  ‘Oh, how very temperate of you!’

  ‘Go easy, Doctor,’ Jo Laws pleaded. ‘My own children are swept up in this. Not little Casey. But the others—’

  Zoe asked, ‘Sam and Phee?’

  ‘The party returning from Enceladus came in overnight, and was diverted straight to the Trinity holding tank.’

  ‘What!’ The Doctor stood immediately. ‘But Jamie’s with them! Well, that’s where we mu
st go, forthwith. Come along, Zoe.’ He was already heading for the door. ‘And bring my coat!’

  16

  THE HATCHES AT either end of the Trinity bubble were locked and manned by Bootstrap operatives, tough-looking guards in black coveralls with company logos on their sleeves. The Doctor and Zoe weren’t allowed through, and found themselves stuck in a neighbouring space hulk, a fuel tank from an old XK5.

  Sonia Paley had followed them here. ‘Order is being kept,’ she assured them.

  ‘Oh, is it?’ snapped the Doctor. ‘And what irreparable damage do you imagine is being done to the souls of the children in there while your “order” is “kept”? Well, at least we can get Jamie out of there; he’s no child…’

  That turned out to be harder than Zoe might have expected. Jamie was not an inhabitant of the Wheel, he was not formally suspected of any misdemeanour, and he was too old to be categorised with the rest, as the Doctor had pointed out. But he was, with the rest of the TARDIS crew, still under vague but unresolved suspicion. And Jamie himself was reluctant to come out. He seemed to have become attached to the youngsters he had jaunted to Enceladus with. He didn’t want to leave them to the mercy of ‘yon Bootstrap redcoats’, as he called them, a vivid insult, Zoe thought, if suffering from chronologic inexactitude.

  He was grumpy when he was finally escorted out through the hatch, carrying a folded-up pressure suit, and another unexpected package. ‘Got me sprung agin, did ye, Zoe?’

  Zoe snorted. ‘Thank Sonia, not me. And, Jamie, after all our travels I shouldn’t be surprised by anything you do, but surely only you could visit a lifeless moon of Saturn and come back with a bagpipe!’

  He glanced down. ‘Och, it’s not a very good bagpipe.’

  The Doctor led them away. ‘Oh, do stop bickering, you two, and let’s find a quiet corner to talk. We must decide what to do next.’

  ‘Leave,’ said Zoe firmly when they were alone, tucked behind a corroded bulkhead. ‘I’ve had enough of this awful place and its rules.’

  ‘I know how you feel, Zoe, but until we’ve resolved the conundrum of the Relative Continuum Displacement Zone that brought us here in the first place, the TARDIS won’t let us leave, believe me.’

  Jamie perked up. ‘Aye, well, I’ve got some news about a’ that.’ And he quickly related his conversations with Phee about her amulet, and its strange provenance. ‘I always had my eye on tha’ wee trinket.’

  ‘Jamie, you’ve done very well.’

  Zoe admitted, ‘I’m not sure I follow all this, Doctor. What is this “amulet”?’

  ‘I rather suspect it’s an allohistorical lure, Zoe.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Jamie, a seasoned time traveller compared to Zoe, and he grinned and pointed at her. ‘I knew it.’

  Zoe snorted again. ‘You’re not fooling anybody, Jamie, you haven’t got a clue. Go on, Doctor.’

  ‘Well, it’s an old trick but a dirty one, and it does depend on time-travel technology of a limited sort. Let’s suppose, for example, that you are stranded on a moon of Saturn, from which you badly want to escape, and you have such a gadget. You can’t use your time machine to save yourself, you see, it’s not powerful enough for that, but you can use it to send tokens – small objects – to the Earth. Or rather, to the Earth’s past.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To manipulate history, Zoe.’

  ‘The history of humanity?’

  ‘Or of any sentient creature that evolves there. What you do is to plant a device, a legend, a signpost, a promise – you can lie all you want – but the point is it must be implanted deep in humanity’s past, and it must direct humans to your moon. It must make them want to go there. And so humans, attracted by this lure, whatever else they might have achieved with their civilisation, distort their own history to build a space programme to get to this Saturnian moon. And once there they find—’

  ‘The fisherman,’ Jamie said. ‘Waiting for a lift.’

  ‘Precisely, Jamie. The great thing about it from the fisherman’s point of view is that the rescue ought to show up as soon as the lure is cast! There may have had to be thousands, millions of years of rewritten history to bring about the rescue party – but none of that matters to the fisherman. Cast your lure in the morning, pack up to be rescued in the afternoon! As I said it’s a not uncommon practice, but it is regarded as rather unethical. Even by my own people, and that’s saying something.’

  ‘So that explains why the prospectors came to Saturn first,’ Zoe said. ‘Not to Jupiter, which would have been a much more obvious choice.’

  ‘Quite so. You have it from Phee’s account. The motivation was planted deep in the past in the Laws’ family history.’

  ‘But there’s a lot that still doesn’t make sense.’

  Jamie rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t worry, if you keep travellin’ with us ye’ll get used to that.’

  She wouldn’t be deflected. ‘You say that Phee’s story is that this great-grandmother found the amulet in a fossil – in the claw of a dinosaur? Why, that might have been formed, oh, a hundred million years ago. Certainly before the dinosaur extinction. And long before humans were more than a theoretical evolutionary possibility!’

  ‘Well, it is rather chancy, Zoe, this business of the allohistorical lure,’ the Doctor said. ‘You can’t be sure that the people whose attention you’re trying to attract will do what you want them to do. And nor can you be sure that you’ll catch the eye of the right people in the first place. By which I mean the right species. There have been intelligent races on Earth before humanity, Zoe.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yes. There may have been a strain of intelligent reptilians who survived the main dinosaur extinction event; I’ve seen some evidence of that… But even they vanished many millions of years ago.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow all that.’

  ‘I think I do,’ Jamie said. ‘Suppose the fisherman was himself around millions of years ago. He sees these smart rapscallions on Earth.’

  ‘Reptilians, Jamie.’

  ‘Tha’s what I said. He goes fishin’ for ’em. But he overshoots. He sends his lure further back, where it gets lost in the time o’ the dinosaurs. And then when it’s their time the rapscallions miss it.’

  ‘Rep – oh, never mind.’

  ‘And millions of years after that, it’s picked up by humans. Maybe it was never meant for us in the first place!’

  The Doctor beamed. ‘Well done, Jamie! Yes, I think the course of events could well have been something like that.’

  Even Zoe was impressed. But she had to ask, ‘Doesn’t that mean that this – fisherman – must have been waiting around for millions upon millions of years?’

  ‘Well, that’s not impossible, Zoe. Machines can be put into dormant mode, after all. And there are certain species of bacteria which can survive for millions of years as spores—’

  ‘All this is guesswork. Do you have any evidence that all this was initiated millions of years ago?’

  ‘But you know we have, Zoe – in the rings of Saturn! It takes a great deal of energy to achieve time travel. It may not feel like it when we ride the TARDIS, but then she is the result of an ancient and mature technology. A great deal of energy indeed. And we have seen clear indications of a very energetic event, and a destructive one, having taken place in the vicinity of this planet some fifty million years ago, have we not?’

  And Zoe saw it. ‘The formation of the rings. The explosion of a moon! You’re saying it was the by-product of some kind of experiment with time travel?’

  ‘Yes. Quite possibly. And the moon we know, Mnemosyne, is a mere fragment of a much larger body that was all but destroyed, long ago.’

  But Jamie’s practical mind was turning to more immediate issues. ‘So what’s all that got to do with lockin’ up kids, and blowin’ up mining engines?’

  ‘Those are excellent questions, Jamie, which we will only answer by visiting the scene of this so-called “sabotage” ourselves.
Come along, come along.’ The Doctor turned to lead the way out of the rocket hulk.

  Zoe followed, but Jamie hung back. ‘Jamie? What is it?’

  ‘You go,’ Jamie said stiffly. ‘Let me stay an’ go back through yon hatch. Those kids – they’re not evil, or criminals. They’re just mixed up. And if that woman Florian Hart starts gettin’ stuck into them—’

  ‘Jamie, Jamie. You mean well. But we can’t save everybody, you know. We have to let these people sort out their own problems.’

  ‘Aye, I ken. But I might be able to stop a few noggins being smashed in the process.’

  The Doctor hesitated. Then he grinned, and patted Jamie’s cheek. ‘You’re a good boy, Jamie McCrimmon.’

  ‘Boy? Hmph. A good granddad, mebbe.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  But Jamie had already grabbed up his bundles, his skinsuit and bagpipe, and was making his way back to the hatch.

  The Doctor sighed. ‘Now come along, Zoe, let’s get on with it…’

  17

  THE WRECKED TRACTOR was in a bubble called Garage 4-4, in Wheel sector four, Industrial.

  It took the Doctor and Zoe some time to complete the short journey around the Wheel from Trinity, for Florian Hart’s rather sinister Bootstrap guards blocked every hatchway. But as they passed through Industrial’s more technical modules Zoe looked around with interest, at the power plants, the resource processors, the air and water recyclers and scrubbers. One bubble, called the Print Shop, housed a bank of heavy-duty matter printers. Such a device would spray out raw material in carefully shaped designs, molecule by molecule, building up a machine part layer by layer. This was a typical mass-saving space colony application; given the right raw material these printers could produce any part you desired.

  Garage 4-4 was one of a number of specialised modules devoted to manufacturing and maintaining equipment for the mining operation. In 4-4 itself, finished vehicles were stored: a range of fantastic engines designed for the extraction, processing, storage and transport of materials from a mine on a moon of Saturn. Zoe glimpsed tremendous angular hulls, forests of manipulator arms like MMAC’s, huge lightweight wheels of metallic mesh, and harpoons and pitons for anchorage in the low gravity. All these great machines were stamped with the logos of Bootstrap Inc. Some of them were shiny and new, waiting for their first deployment, but others brought back for repair showed the scars of hard service in buckled plates, scorched nozzles, snapped manipulator arms and blistered paintwork. When she walked past these veterans, Zoe smelled the tingling, burned-metal scent of materials that had been exposed to the vacuum. She felt oddly thrilled.