Dr. Who - BBC New Series 48

by Borrowed Time # Naomi A Alderman

  Sameera bumped into Dan as he was leaving his office.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry for what?’ said the Dan who was sitting at his desk. She spotted another one across the atrium, his burly frame bent forward, eagerly talking to a senior saleswoman. How had they all got so careless so quickly?

  And how had none of the people in charge spotted it and stopped them? It was as if the higher-ups didn’t want to know. As long as they kept making money for the Bank, that was all anyone cared about.

  ‘Dan,’ she said, ‘I have to talk to you, it’s really important.’

  Dan’s phone rang. She noticed him instinctively reach for his watch, stop himself, pause.

  ‘Sameera, great to see you, brilliant, but listen I’ve got to take this phone call. Could you wait outside for a moment?’

  She stood outside and waited. If he borrowed another few minutes to get that phone call on the first ring, so what? After a little while Dan popped his head round the door - he had that look she recognised, flushed with a combination of pride and worry.

  ‘They’ve asked me to work on GCXP Holdings! I’m moving into analysis!’ he said. ‘It’s the break I’ve been waiting for. I’ll really be able to show them what I can do!’

  Sameera nodded. ‘We really need to talk, though, Dan, it’s really…’

  He grinned. ‘My wife’s going to be so proud,’ he said. ‘I can’t wait to tell her. Look, let’s have a chat. Just wait a second, there’s something I’ve been meaning to do and I really don’t want to put it off any longer.’

  Sameera thought he was going to phone his wife. She watched through the office window as he crossed the room and sat down at the desk. It took her a moment to realise that he wasn’t picking up the phone, he was moving a dial on his watch.

  ‘No!’ she shouted. She opened the door, burst into the room.

  But it was too late.

  Excited and proud, Dan had evidently decided to pay back all the time he owed.

  He fell, quite peacefully, forward onto his desk, his face a mass of wrinkles and his body a light, frail husk.

  Sameera checked for a pulse, but it was as if he’d been dead for twenty years.

  Chapter

  15

  ‘We’re going to have to take her with us, wherever we go,’

  whispered the Doctor. ‘It’s the only way, for now.’

  ‘How far do you think they’ve spread, Doctor?’ Amy whispered.

  They were loitering by the entrance to Bart’s Hospital, waiting for their moment.

  ‘In space or in time?’ whispered the Doctor. ‘What about that one?’

  He pointed to an elderly man being wheeled in through the doors in a wheelchair.

  ‘We can’t steal it from under him, Doctor, can we?

  Anyway, what do you mean space or time?’

  ‘The more time they gather,’ he muttered, ‘the more fluid they become in time. The further back they’ll be able to go. Soon we won’t even have had time to hear of them. What about her?’

  A pregnant woman in a wheelchair seemed about to get out of it and walk into the hospital but then let out a loud groan of pain and sank back in and allowed herself to be pushed through the doors.

  ‘No good. Couldn’t we just use the TARDIS, to go back before that?’

  ‘Not if the timeline’s already been rewritten,’ said the Doctor. “The TARDIS won’t keep travelling back to an altered point in time, safety features. What about this?’

  A nurse wheeled a woman with a broken leg through the door; he waited while her boyfriend helped her hobble into the waiting taxi. He turned round, pushed the chair back through the automatic doors and left it parked by the wall.

  ‘Perfect,’ said Amy. ‘Come on.’

  They marched towards the chair, both reaching for the handles at the same moment.

  ‘I thought you were going to be the patient,’ said Amy tetchily, trying to push the Doctor away from the handles.

  ‘Have you never heard my name, Pond? I am never the patient, I am always the Doctor,’ said the Doctor.

  Their scuffle made some of the people waiting patiently in A&E look over at them.

  ‘Doctor, just sit in the chair and let’s go. There’s clearly nothing wrong with me.’

  ‘There’s clearly nothing wrong with me.’

  ‘Is there a problem here?’

  A security guard had walked over very casually. Amy and the Doctor were both quite tall, but this man was taller still and quite a lot broader than either of them. He looked like he had balls of muscle in unexpected places like the tops of his shoulders and the backs of his arms.

  ‘No problem,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m the Doctor and my patient here—’

  Amy reached into the Doctor’s jacket pocket and pulled out the psychic paper. She flashed it in front of the security guard. ‘I’m Dr Pond,’ she said, ‘and this man is my patient.’

  ‘No,’ said the Doctor, ‘I’m the Doctor and—’

  ‘I’m afraid this man is a danger to himself,’ Amy said. ‘He’s suffering from a delusion that he’s a Doctor.

  I just need to get him into this wheelchair and take him to my… clinic.’

  The security guard looked between them and then at the ID badge ‘Dr Pond’ was holding in her hand. His eyes locked on to it - that, he seemed to be thinking, was at least comforting, familiar, certain.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said Rory, undoing the buckles, ‘is why they tied him down.’

  ‘It was for his own protection, wasn’t it, Doctor?’ said Amy, removing the blankets swaddling the Doctor’s legs. He was seated in a very comfortable wheelchair.

  One of the ones with special Velcro restraints on the arms and legs and a nice tight seatbelt over his middle.

  The Doctor glared at her. ‘I could have got away. I didn’t have to let them do it. I chose to because I, you see, am the bigger man.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Doctor,’ said Amy, helping him out and helping Nadia sit down on the comfortable padded seat. ‘Whatever you say.’

  Sameera and Andrew watched while the medical technicians prepared to take Dan’s body away.

  ‘How many people do you think have died here in the past six months?’ Sameera asked.

  Andrew stretched awkwardly. ‘Let’s see, there was Brian Edelman, and Sara Hu, and that woman Linda from human resources and—’

  ‘Do you remember Nadia Montgomery? Used to be Head of Marketing? Just disappeared one day?’

  ‘Hmm, yeah, if you count all the people who disappeared…’

  They stood in silence for a while as the people from the hospital loaded the sad frail body onto the wheeled stretcher.

  ‘Maybe nine or ten? In the past six months?’ Andrew said at last.

  ‘That’s quite a lot, isn’t it? Even for an office this size, it’s quite a lot.’

  Andrew nodded.

  The struts of the wheeled stretcher clicked into place.

  They stood aside as the body in its bag was rolled out of the room.

  ‘Even one person dying in the office should have made us think about what we were doing,’ said Sameera.

  ‘We never thought about it in the years before all this, like all those times someone had a heart attack, do you remember? Remember Bob Leith?’

  ‘Those weren’t heart attacks, they were heart events.’

  ‘He had four though. All at the office. Before his wife made him retire.’

  Across the atrium, the lift dinged. They were taking Dan away.

  ‘We have to find out what’s going on,’ said Sameera.

  ‘Before this happens to anyone else.’

  *

  Pushing Nadia in her wheelchair, it was easy to sneak in the back entrance of the Bank. They settled down in an empty meeting room, planned to wait there until Andrew and Sameera reported back.

  Rory switched on the television to watch the news.

  No reports of aliens, of course. No sudden mass
deaths or sudden rapid ageing all across London, that was good. But there was something…

  ‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘look at that newsreader’s arm.’

  He was right: there, under the jacket of the man reading the news, was the tell-tale bump.

  They watched the rest of the news in a sort of dazed horror. The watches weren’t just in the UK. They saw one on the wrist of the mayor of a South American town, who was talking about how he managed to stay one step ahead of violent gangs. A surgeon in Oregon describing her invention of a life-saving new procedure which had to be administered within minutes of injury was wearing one. A team of scientists in Iceland who’d made a breakthrough in geothermal energy all had them on, not even covered by a sleeve.

  ‘It’s all good news, though, Doctor,’ said Rory. ‘Look at everything that’s been done.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘You can do a lot of brilliant things with extra time. You can do a lot of brilliant things with a fourth arm, too - doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to grow one, even if you are on a planet where it’s all the rage. I should have remembered that, very hard to get your suits re-tailored for a fourth arm… Where was I?’

  ‘But if w e - ‘

  ‘Rory. That’s the trouble with borrowing. It makes everything look good. No one wants to see what’s going on underneath because the surface is just so shiny. But there’s no point - he rounded on Rory, his eyebrows raised, his arms flailing - ‘there’s no point making everything shiny, if your whole species is going to die out the moment they call in those debts, is there?’

  Amy nodded slowly. ‘We have to find a way to warn them,’ she said. ‘And I think I know when well have the perfect opportunity.’

  A Symington and Blenkinsop pair was walking along the corridor. Andrew and Sameera watched them from behind the potted plants on the tenth floor. They marched, in perfect unison, at an even, steady pace, like the ticking of a watch.

  ‘Why did we never think of seeing where they went before?’ asked Sameera.

  ‘We were too busy competing with each other,’ said Andrew. ‘Didn’t have any attention for anything else. I bet if aliens had announced they were going to blow up the planet, we would just have carried on working.’

  Sameera grinned. ‘We’d have issued competing memos on it.’

  ‘Both of us trying to make a more complete analysis of alien life than the other,’ said Andrew, smiling.

  ‘In the hope that one of the aliens would promote us!’ said Sameera.

  Andrew laughed and then shushed himself.

  Symington and Blenkinsop knocked in unison on the door of Vanessa Laing-Randall, head of the London office. They didn’t wait for a response but walked straight in.

  Sameera and Andrew waited for a long time to see if

  they’d come out again.

  ‘What’s happened to them?’ hissed Sameera at last.

  ‘Long meeting?’

  ‘They never take that long selling anything to anyone.

  What do you think they’re doing in there?’

  ‘Well, if Laing-Randall’s really their boss…’

  ‘She did arrive at the same time that all this weird stuff started happening.’

  ‘You mean, our amazing 300 per cent increase in productivity?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sameera. ‘You know who’d know?’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Come on,’ said Sameera, leaving the cover of the pot plants and walking towards Vanessa’s office.

  Jane Blythe sat behind the most efficiently organised desk Sameera had ever seen. The pens were perfectly lined up on a side return, with a mosaic of sticky notes in different colours in tessellated order. There was a wall calendar behind her on which each event had been typed on a label-maker. The pins on the pinboard were arranged by colour. Nonetheless, Jane Blythe was distraught.

  ‘I’m so glad someone’s finally asked me about those weird men,’ she said, on the verge of tears. Her shoulders shook in her business suit jacket and the pearls around her neck trembled.

  ‘They come in here, they go into Vanessa’s office -‘

  she pointed to the door at the far end of her own office - ‘and they never come out! I don’t understand it. And then they come in again, and again, and again.’

  Sameera and Andrew nodded sympathetically. It

  hadn’t taken much to get Jane to talk to them; it was as if she’d been waiting for someone to share her fears with.

  ‘Have you ever seen what they do in there?’ asked Andrew.

  Jane shook her head. ‘I’m under strict orders from Vanessa never to go into the office when she’s not there… She’s very serious about it. I’ve never had a boss like her before. All the other executives I’ve worked for liked it when I rearranged their offices, you know -‘ she motioned to her obsessive-compulsive stationery arrangement - ‘neatly. And answered their letters, and dealt with their appointment diaries…’

  “There’s something in there she doesn’t want you to see, obviously,’ said Sameera. ‘We’re going to take a look.’

  The door wasn’t locked, that was the odd thing.

  Vanessa Laing-Randall had obviously thought that her strict instructions to her assistant were enough to keep her out. And there was no one in the office at all.

  ‘Where did they go?’ asked Sameera.

  Jane Blythe, hovering nervously at the door, said, ‘I never know. They never come out.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Andrew muttered to Sameera, too low for Jane to be able to hear, ‘they travel back in time instead.

  That’s why we didn’t see them. They left before we arrived.’

  Andrew and Sameera checked through Vanessa’s filing cabinet and laptop quickly. There wasn’t anything obvious, no files labelled ‘Top Secret Evil Alien Plans’

  or even ‘What I Plan To Do With Everyone’s Time Once I’ve Collected All Of It’. There was a locked door at the far side of her office, though.

  ‘What’s through here?’ asked Sameera.

  Jane was standing just over the threshold, clearly terrified to be in the room without permission. ‘I, um, I… I’m not allowed in there.’

  ‘Come on, Jane, surely you know where she keeps the key? PAs know more than their bosses, we all know that,’ said Andrew.

  Jane hunched her shoulders with anxiety. ‘Did you…

  I mean… um, have you spoken to anyone else about this?’

  ‘A few of us have talked about it,’ said Andrew, hunting through Vanessa’s desk drawers for a key.

  ‘And do any of you know what’s going on?’ Jane’s voice was high-pitched with nerves.

  ‘There’s this one guy,’ said Andrew distractedly, trying to peer behind a cabinet. ‘The Doctor? He seems to know most about it all. Keeps going on about aliens, if you can believe it.’

  Jane giggled nervously. She obviously didn’t believe it at all. Then she said, ‘Oh,’ very quietly. And then again, louder. ‘Oh.’ With a jangle of terror in her voice.

  Andrew and Sameera looked up.

  Standing behind her were a Symington and Blenkinsop.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Symington.

  ‘Well said,’ said Mr Blenkinsop.

  ‘I do believe that these young people…’

  ‘So young, so naive, so full of promise.’

  ‘Indeed, Mr Blenkinsop, indeed, I do believe that these naive young people are attempting to steal private property.’

  ‘To gain access without permission.’

  ‘A serious crime.’

  ‘And as they well know,’ said Mr Symington, ‘committing any such crime will cause the immediate withdrawal of all loaned time.’

  ‘What a terrible, terrible shame,’ said Mr Blenkinsop, opening his shark mouth very wide.

  Chapter

  16

  Jane Blythe acted more quickly than Sameera or Andrew would have believed possible. Seeing the hideous transforming faces of Symington and Blenkinsop behind her, she jumped forward into Vanessa Lai
ng-Randall’s office and slammed the door hard behind her. She locked it and turned round, staring wildly at Sameera and Andrew.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh.’ Her eyes rolled back, and she crumpled to the floor.

  Something crashed into the door. Symington and Blenkinsop were trying to get in. They were charging into the door, banging into it, trying again and again and again.

  Sameera patted Jane’s face gently. Jane’s eyelids flickered.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Sameera.

  Jane opened her eyes slowly. ‘Those really are…

  aliens, aren’t they?’ she said.

  Sameera nodded.

  ‘Before I fainted, I thought they were turning into sharks. Were they turning into sharks?’

  Sameera shrugged. ‘Maybe not actual sharks? Maybe just that they look a bit like sharks? I guess nature finds the same useful patterns in a lot of different places.’ She paused. ‘Aliens,’ she said to herself.

  ‘And… Vanessa has something to do with them?’

  ‘We think she’s their boss,’ said Andrew.

  Jane blinked very rapidly.

  ‘I know it’s a shock,’ said Sameera quietly, ‘but we have to find some way out of here. They’re going to get in eventually.’

  ‘No.’ Jane shook her head slowly. ‘It makes sense.

  Ever since Vanessa took over running the London office, these terrible things have started happening. Like… have you noticed how sometimes you see the same person in two places at the same time?’ She laughed slightly hysterically. ‘I thought I was going mad.’

  ‘We’ve seen it, too,’ said Sameera. ‘Everyone’s seen it, they’ve just been ignoring it because it was easier than trying to work out what’s going on.’

  ‘You know…’ said Jane, slowly, ‘Vanessa always keeps the key to that door…’ She nodded towards the door at the back of the room. ‘She always keeps that door locked, always has the key with her. But once I saw it open - I wasn’t supposed to be here, I was working late. And it was full of… I think it was full of green glass bricks? Isn’t that weird?’

  Sameera and Andrew exchanged a look.

  ‘Not weird at all,’ said Sameera. ‘Not even a tiny bit weird. We need to let Amy and her friends know, though.’