Amy rather wished the Doctor hadn’t told her any of that. She realised that she’d half known it instinctively since she came through the door - that’s why looking up was even worse than looking down - something felt very wrong. She stared very firmly at the rail that she was holding and her hands on it. She noticed a small cockroach crawling along the gantry by her foot.
Strangely, this made her feel calmer - just the familiarity of seeing a normal, good old Earth cockroach felt like something safe to cling to.
‘Can I go now, Doctor?’
The Doctor frowned. ‘I think that’s probably not a good idea. Stick together, we won’t have to be here for long. Yomalet-Ram, I don’t suppose you’ve got any anti-nausea pills Amy could take, something to ease the discomfort?’
The Doctor reached out to touch the Yomalet-Ram’s coat. There was something odd about the gesture, but Amy couldn’t work out what it was.
The Yomalet-Ram shook its head sadly and moved out of the Doctor’s reach. ‘We find that the worst of the symptoms pass away after a few minutes,’ it said.
‘Perhaps if you’d care to inspect the contents of your own storage container, the young lady might find the view a little less intimidating?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Good idea, good idea indeed.
Take us to my storage container.’
The Yomalet-Ram smiled thinly. It was not a comforting smile or one with a great deal of warmth behind it. ‘I’m sure you remember the protocol, Doctor.’
‘Oh, ah, yes, the protocol, of course the protocol, yes silly of me, sorry. Just remind me?’
‘I cannot accompany you to your storage container, Doctor. You must input your unique identification number onto the pad.’ The Yomalet-Ram pointed its cane towards a numbered keypad welded to the rail, which Amy wasn’t at all sure had been there until he pointed to it. ‘The system will do the rest. Provided, of course, aheheheh, that you have the right palm print. As I’m sure you do.’
‘Oh yes, all comes back to me now, silly thing -
change of bodies, rattles the memories. Lose my own head if it weren’t screwed on.’
The Yomalet-Ram smiled even more disconcertingly, if that was possible, made a tapping gesture with its cane and vanished. They were alone on the gantry.
‘Do you… know that alien?’ said Rory.
The Doctor shook his head. ‘Not yet, definitely not yet, probably will sometime in the future. Hmmm… If I had to choose a unique code then there’s really only one number I would have chosen…’
His hand hovered over the numbered keypad, which, when Amy looked, contained about twenty different digits only some of which she recognised.
‘I wonder if I should just see if I’ve left anything for me. It’s just the kind of thing I might do.’ He frowned.
‘But then, of course, it might not have been me at all.
Lots of people going around the universe pretending to
be me. Or I might have left a practical joke for me, that’s just the kind of thing I might be going to be the sort of person to do, too…’
He chewed his upper lip thoughtfully, staring at the keypad.
‘Doctor,’ said Rory at last. ‘Shouldn’t we, you know, go and find the Lexington Bank storage locker? The one they’re paying £454,909 a month for?’
‘Mmmm?’ said the Doctor.
‘You remember, Doctor, that’s why we’re here?’
‘What? Oh yes, good idea. Andrew, have you got that invoice?’
Andrew Brown - who, Amy was irritated to notice, wasn’t suffering any ill effects at all from the miniaturisation process - pulled the paper from his pocket and unfolded it. Along the top, under the name of the Bank, was a long string of numbers and symbols.
‘Very good!’ said the Doctor. ‘Well remembered! OK, let’s just type in the number and—’
‘Wait, Doctor,’ said Rory. ‘How are we going to get into the locker? They said we’d need a palm print?’
‘Quite right, Rory, well need a palmprint, and that would be a terrible problem if -‘ the Doctor fished around in his jacket and produced a slim silver object like a long thin fish that wiggled slightly when he touched it with his index finger - ‘if I hadn’t picked the Yomalet-Ram’s pocket for the master key when he wasn’t looking. Come on!’
He turned back to the keyboard and punched in the number.
Chapter
12
There was a horrible whooshing sensation. Amy noticed the feeling - and how nauseatingly awful it was - before she realised what was happening, which was that the gantry they were standing on was falling, very fast, towards the centre of the basin.
She tried not to scream but didn’t quite manage it.
The Doctor was holding on to the rail, the wind blowing through his hair, grinning. ‘Nothing to worry about!’ he shouted. ‘Perfectly safe! Controlled freefall with inertial compensators, look!’
He pointed behind them. And she saw that the gantry hadn’t actually broken off, leaving them falling into the miles of empty air. They were still attached to the outer edge of the basin, it was just that they were being swept down past the two hundred storeys of stacked storage containers, each with its own individual door. They started to slow as she watched. The flat bottom of the basin was still rushing towards them but it felt less like a terrifying fall and more like a ride now she knew they
were safe. The gantry lurched suddenly to the side and zoomed them around the outside of the basin.
It stopped abruptly, facing a bank of forty or fifty doors. Above the whole bank of doors was the long number from the invoice. On each door was a metal plate with a space for a hand print, as well as several spaces for tentacle, pseudopod, leaf, paw and various unidentifiable appendage-prints.
‘But which one is it?’ said Andrew.
‘Perhaps you’re just supposed to know which one’s yours,’ said Rory. ‘Like added security?’
‘Right!’ said the Doctor. ‘Shall we take a look in a few?’
‘Can we do that, Doctor?’ said Rory. ‘I mean, isn’t it a bit… immoral? Looking at people’s stuff?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Rory, you’d be surprised what useful, not to say universe-saving things you can find out by taking a quick rummage through people’s possessions. Don’t worry, well put everything back where we found it.’ He pulled the little silver fish-key out of his pocket and walked over to the first door.
‘Better let me go first. You never know, there might be some kind of defence system.’
Ignoring the handprint space, he placed the master key close to the door. It wriggled and flowed outward, filling one of the handprints with its silvery liquid self.
The door clicked and unlocked. As the Doctor began to gingerly open it, a flurry of snow blew outwards and landed at his feet. Amy saw another cockroach scuttling through the snow.
‘Hmm,’ said the Doctor. He poked his head round the door. A snowball came sailing above his head and
crashed into the gantry’s safety rail. There was a sound of hoof beats and a hunting horn. He hurriedly closed the door and peeled the key off the lock.
‘Definitely not that one,’ he said, striding over to the next door.
‘Was that…?’ began Rory.
‘No, Rory. That was absolutely not Narnia. Where do you get these ridiculous ideas from? Next!’
Nadia tried pulling the glass bomb off the door, but it wouldn’t budge. And every time she came close to it, it set some weird mechanism off in her own watch - she could feel herself starting to age again as she grappled with it.
There had to be another way, though. She looked at the faces of the Symingtons and Blenkinsops - their rapt, worshipful expressions. She’d seen bankers look like that when they contemplated an enormous trade.
What was in this box that they wanted so much?
‘There’s a displacement system,’ said a Symington.
‘No matter,’ said a Blenkinsop. ‘Our device will radiate back in time. It w
on’t escape.’
Nadia knew, with complete conviction, that it would be a bad idea for the Symingtons and Blenkinsops to get their hands on anything they wanted so much.
The slow ticking sped up. There must be something that she could do. And then she realised.
There were a lot of doors. Amy rapidly began to lose count of how many they’d checked, although she knew she’d never be able to forget some of the contents. There was the room apparently filled with soap bubbles, and
another completely full of string-like yellow roots, as if of a vast tree somewhere else entirely. One, when the Doctor opened the door gingerly, blew wide open. The storage container was totally empty but there was a huge gale coming from it, without any apparent source at all. The wind was so strong that it knocked Andrew clean over, and it took all four of them to slam the door closed again.
After a few doors, the Doctor became more cavalier and let them try some. Amy got a room full of mirrors which reflected her back to herself with differences which were at first subtle and then, as she looked, became more and more obvious. There was a reflection in which she was older, with a wise and kind expression, as if she knew a thing or two. There was one where she was scarred and dirty and far too thin. There was one where she was fighting off monsters - they were just off the edge of the mirror, she only saw the odd spider-like leg come into view - like a superhero. And another where she was tinkering with a piece of machinery that she knew instantly was alien technology - she was expertly wielding a white-beamed sonic screwdriver with five split beams. Amy took a step towards her reflections.
‘Best not look too long,’ the Doctor closed the door in front of her. ‘Enough to enjoy in this dimension without getting confused by all the others. And just think,’ he said, ‘to some of those people, Leadworth would look incredibly exotic!’
Amy stood and stared at that door for a bit, while Andrew found a room staging live re-runs of I Love Lucy, and Rory got one made of mucus.
Mostly, though, the rooms were full of alien
technology. There were ray guns and missiles, there were drifts of what the Doctor told them were computers the size of Amy’s thumbnail, and transmat stations and purple-striped telepathy hats. ‘Definitely not cool,’ said the Doctor.
They found quite a few spaceships. ‘Makes sense,’
said the Doctor, ‘parking in London’s a nightmare. And have you seen the fines they give?’
One room looked disturbingly familiar. In the centre, there was a six-sided console, half finished with wires coming out of it and some parts completely missing.
A glass time-rotor in the middle of the console looked wrong somehow - lopsided and fuzzy. Several red-metal robot men were working on the console with soldering irons and yellow laser cutters, some of them consulting a book which looked as if it had been burned and retrieved, half-charred, from a fire.
When the door opened, the robots turned to look at the Doctor with what Rory could have sworn was a guilty expression.
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘Don’t think I can’t see what you’re up to.’ He closed the door and muttered, ‘Note to self: must come back and destroy that later.’
And then there was the room with all the shelves.
The Doctor opened the door. The huge room beyond extended back about fifty metres and was about ten metres tall. Floor to ceiling, it was lined with shelves.
And on each shelf was a green glass box, about the size of a house brick. Each brick was labelled, and inside each one there was the faintest trace of movement.
‘Well,’ said the Doctor, ‘I think we’ve found it.’
*
Amy followed the Doctor into the storage unit. It was quite beautiful. The rows of green glass bricks shimmered with a faint internal light - it was like standing inside a cabinet made of ice with fading sunlight tricking in from the outside. In the centre of the room was something that looked a bit like a dentist’s chair with a restraint around the waist and a monitoring screen next to the head. The Doctor touched the screen.
‘Nasty,’ he said. ‘Time Harvesting chair, very hard to get out of, you never have any time to make your escape.’
He ducked his head down to look under the seat, blinked a couple of times in a puzzled way.
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Interesting.’
Amy ran her fingertips along a row of bricks.
‘Be careful with those,’ said the Doctor, standing up.
‘Each one of them’s a person.’
Amy looked more closely at the glass boxes. The label on the front of each one was someone’s name. She glanced at a few: ‘Ismael Habibi’, ‘Dr P. McCormick’, ‘Emma Taylor’, ‘Alexandra Li’, ‘Philip Doyley’, ‘Benny Har-Even’, ‘Sydney Jane’.
‘But there are thousands here, Doctor,’ she said.
‘Hundreds of thousands. More people than work in the Bank, definitely.’
‘I think it’s spread out from the Bank,’ said Rory, pointing to one of the glass blocks.
Amy looked over his shoulder. ‘But that’s… isn’t she in the Cabinet?’
Rory nodded.
‘Look over here,’ said Amy. ‘He was on X-Factor, wasn’t he?’
All around the room the little bricks shimmered, each one with its faint, almost indistinguishable tiny movement at the centre, like a transparent creature’s minute heartbeat.
‘So these are… the stores?’ asked Amy. ‘This is where they’re keeping the time they’ve taken from everyone? They transfer it here from the watches, like, wirelessly? Like the internet? So if we broke all these blocks, everyone would get their time back?’
‘Hmm,’ said the Doctor. ‘Hmm.’
‘What?’ asked Rory.
The Doctor closed his eyes and stretched out his arms to the side. His fingers were moving as if he were touching the glass bricks, but he wasn’t near them. He went very quiet and still. He murmured something under his breath. He snapped his eyes open.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Makes no sense. The thing is, Rory, you see, the thing is, time is a very volatile substance.
Very dangerous to store, very hard to use, very hard even to keep track of. I mean, how do you have the time to work out how much time someone has borrowed, do you see what I mean?’
Rory shook his head. The Doctor ignored him.
‘And they’re doing something a lot more difficult than just storing. You’re rather lucky, Rory, that you’ve got someone here whose physiology makes him sensitive to ebbs and flows in time, don’t know what you would have done without me.’
Amy rolled her eyes. She looked around for Andrew and saw that he was reading his way along the names on the glass blocks, examining the tiny movement deep inside them. She noticed a cockroach crawling along
one of the rows of bricks. It was quite a big one, about as long as her thumb. Amazing, she thought, they get everywhere.
‘So you see,’ the Doctor was saying, ‘if this room were filled with all the time that they’ve taken from everyone, I’d be able to feel it. These are more like…
the accounts. Each one protected, sheltered by these containers from the flow of time so that they can keep accurate records. Villains, Rory, real villains always like to feel that they’re doing things by the book. They want records of exactly how wrong they’ve been. I remember Al Capone telling me that once. Or was it Genghis Khan?
But there’s something else.’ The Doctor waved his arms at the walls of green-blue-grey glass. ‘This is all very…
showy… even for time-storage standards. It’s almost -as if they want to… show them off? Or maybe even…’
He spoke more quietly, asking the question to himself rather than anyone else, ‘sell them on? But that trade’s been dormant since the Time War, it’s…’
‘So these are just… everyone’s bank statements?’
interrupted Amy.
The Doctor spun on his heel, took a deep breath and said: ‘Bit more complicated than that, bit more difficult
to arrange when you’re talking about time. But basically, yes.’
Amy shrugged, ‘Isn’t it the same then, Doctor? If we destroy them all, no one will owe anything any more.
End of story.’
‘Or if we destroy them all, everyone will instantly pay back whatever they owe right now.’
‘Oh,’ said Amy. ‘Right.’
‘Or nothing will happen, or they’ll destroy the
universe. Hard to tell without knowing what’s going on inside them.’ He shrugged. ‘But they’re so pretty, aren’t they… I wonder who they expect to see them…’ He drifted off again.
Andrew Brown had been quiet for a long time. He was standing in front of one of the shelves of glass bricks, staring at one particular block, gazing at the tiny beating heart.
Rory went over to him, looked over his shoulder.
The brick Andrew was staring at was labelled with his own name: Andrew Brown, Lexington Bank.
Rory put his hand on Andrew’s shoulder. ‘Oh, mate,’
he said. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, that’s—’
Andrew shrugged the arm off. ‘I did it to myself,’ he muttered softly. ‘No one else to blame.’ He reached out and picked up the brick, held it in his two hands. ‘No one else to blame,’ he said again.
Rory stood silently by his side, watching a really massive cockroach - about as long as his index finger -
scuttle across the floor.
‘So what should we do now, Doctor? If we’re not going to just -‘ Amy motioned punching one of the glass bricks - ‘smash them all?’
The Doctor bent over slightly to examine one of the blocks. The name on it was Lee Frakes, Wandsworth, London. Inside, there was the same light as all the others, the same faintly flickering movement.
‘Doctor…’ said Rory.
‘Just a moment, Rory,’ said the Doctor. ‘Look at this, Amy, do you see that?’
Amy looked at what the Doctor was pointing at.
There was a faint hairline crack all the way around the
glass brick, near the top. Now that she was looking, Amy saw that all the bricks had a similar faint line around them.
Dr. Who - BBC New Series 48 Page 11
