Dr. Who - BBC New Series 48
Page 19
‘What am I going to do?’ she said. ‘I’ll have to go through adolescence all over again.’
At the door, there was the sound of someone clearing his throat.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ said the Doctor. ‘Lost track of time.’
Mostly, there were hugs.
At one point, Amy did say: ‘What took you so long?’
‘Took me so long? Jane took me back more than five
years, and broadcast an image of me several thousand years further back than that - I’ve had to wait around for all of you, passing time by defeating a few plots to destroy mankind but mostly waiting for all this to blow over,’ said the Doctor. ‘What took you so long?’
‘Time travel,’ said Rory ‘It’s confusing, isn’t it?’
And after they’d each told their stories there was only one thing left to deal with. The Doctor had a leather holdall with him. He put it onto the desk that had once belonged to Jane Blythe and looked at the hopeful faces of Sameera and Nadia.
‘I can’t give you any extra time, Sameera,’ said the Doctor sadly. ‘When you paid it back to Jane, she took it all, and it’s gone.’
‘Oh,’ said Sameera. She hadn’t known until he said it that she’d been hoping so certainly - that she hadn’t allowed herself to think otherwise - that this Doctor would be able to fix everything. And now, what, she was really 65 now?
The Doctor sighed. ‘Those contracts really were watertight. They even managed to add on extra interest after you thought you’d paid it all back - interest accrued on the interest yet to accrue. According to this,’
he produced a glass brick labelled Sameera Jenkins from his leather holdall, ‘you still owe ten years.’
Sameera looked at the brick, with its faintly glowing motion at the centre. The Doctor placed another one next to it labelled Nadia Montgomery.
‘And as for you, Nadia,’ he said, that broken watch of yours has done some very weird things to the contract. It seems to think you’re owed another thirty years. Which would take you back to before you were born.’
Nadia stuck her lower lip out petulantly. ‘So you can’t do anything? I’ll have to go through puberty again?
And try to explain to my parents why I’m 10 years old now?’
The Doctor chewed his top lip. ‘There is one thing,’
he said.
He looked at the two bricks, side by side. Then he touched the tops of them and, very gently, lifted off their glass lids. He grinned.
‘Turns out,’ he said, ‘only the owner can open them.
Clever, eh?’
He reached inside both bricks and pulled out the contents.
They were flowing liquid glass spheres, each covered in some strange moving writing, each beating softly like a heart.
‘Records of time. Time out of time, very hard to do.
Wouldn’t touch them if I were you,’ he said as Amy reached out a finger towards one. ‘Might get a nasty time-burn.’
He stared at the spheres, one in his right hand, the other in his left.
‘This one says you owe ten years, he nodded at Sameera’s sphere on the right, ‘and this one says you’re owed thirty, so how about if we…’ he crossed his hands over, ‘presto chango! Where’s a fez at a time like this?’
He dropped each sphere into the other brick very delicately, and popped the lids back on.
‘Show me your watches, he said, and Nadia and Sameera held out their hands. The Doctor took both their wrists, winked, and pressed the same button on each at the same moment.
There was a sort of sighing sound. Both of the beating hearts of the glass blocks dissolved. And, without any fuss. Sameera was suddenly 35 again, and Nadia was 20.
‘You’ll have a bit of trouble explaining that,’ the Doctor said to Nadia. ‘A 40-year-old with the body of a 20-year-old. I suggest you say you went to a very exclusive clinic in Zurich.’
Nadia looked at her reflection in the office window.
She grinned.
‘I tell you what I think,’ she said. ‘I think the London office needs a new Head of Operations, someone who really knows the business. I think I’m the right woman for the job.’
‘Just watch out for the credit crunch,’ said Amy.
‘The… what’s that?’ said Nadia.
‘Oh, nothing,’ said the Doctor. ‘If anyone knows how to manage boom and bust, it’ll be you.’
In the basement, Sameera and Andrew hugged the Doctor, Rory and Amy and watched them walk into the TARDIS.
‘Is that really a spaceship?’ said Andrew.
Sameera squeezed his hand. ‘They’re time-travelling aliens, why wouldn’t their space ship look like a police box?’ she said.
‘We’re not aliens!’ protested Rory.
‘No, Rory only you are an alien,’ said the Doctor, as the TARDIS door closed.
There was a vworp, vworp, vworp sound, and Sameera and Andrew were alone in Lexington Bank’s sub basement.
‘What do you want to do now?’ said Sameera.
Andrew shrugged.
‘We could go for that promotion again, I suppose.’
Sameera looked at him, smiled and raised an eyebrow.
‘What, endless competition against each other?
Sounds great fun if we’re all out of walls for us to bash our heads against.’
Andrew smiled. ‘What do you really want, Sameera?’
he said.
She took a deep breath, looked around her. ‘I know it sounds stupid,’ she said, ‘but I’ve always really wanted to run a deli. One of those places where you can get anything. In a seaside town maybe. I know it’d be hard work but it’d also be real, do you know what I mean?
Making something real, feeding people, sending them away happy. Something a bit useful in the world.’
Andrew nodded slowly.
‘What about you?’ she said.
‘I always wanted to be a teacher,’ he said at last, ‘maybe teach music. Or science. I wanted to train after university but my results were good and my parents said I should talk to the careers adviser about my options and he told me to go for Lexington’s and the money was so good that…’
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I know. You got stuck. Just one more promotion, just one more round of bonuses. Me too.’
‘So,’ he said.
‘So,’ she said.
And he put his arm around her shoulders and kissed her lightly on the lips. And together they walked out of Lexington Bank for ever.
*
Like most thieves, the traders of the Time Market did have a sense of honour. Of a sort. They vowed solemnly to track down what had happened to the remainder of Jane Blythe in time and space. It was impossible that she’d vanished entirely - the traces of her existence proved that she had once existed, and if she’d once existed there was no reason to think she didn’t still exist.
The Doctor had made them promise to find her.
But, bureaucracy being what it is, the business proved arduous, time-consuming and ultimately fruitless. She was gone from the Time Market, they knew that. But any good Time Harvester will leave themselves just a little time in reserve. Just enough to start up in business again, somewhen else.
It was the sad conclusion of the Committee for Restoration of the Time Market, therefore, that it was impossible to track the harvester Jane Blythe. They found it unlikely, they said, that she would have been able to leave Earth. A close eye should be kept on the time streams of Earth for this reason, and they recommended the establishment of a Monitoring Team, whenever funds should be sufficient to do so.
They sent a copy of this report, as promised, to the Doctor’s last known address - a storage facility under the Millennium Dome in London, Earth and, feeling that they had done all they could, went back to business.
In about 1985, just a year before the Big Bang changed the regulation of the London stock market and paved the way for the creation of previously unimaginable fortunes among the bankers of the City,
the TARDIS materialised behind an abandoned warehouse on the Isle of Dogs,
London. Elsewhere, the Doctor was in Foreman’s Yard, 76 Totters Lane, dealing with some unfinished business.
Once you can travel in time, being in two places at once is inevitable. And no business is ever finished.
The TARDIS door opened.
‘So did we stop Lexington Bank collapsing?’ Rory was asking.
‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘We just saved the Earth. The Bank will still crumble, but Nadia Montgomery will be able to rescue some of the business from the ashes. She’s a smart woman.’
‘And what about.
‘Just wait there for a moment,’ the Doctor called back into the TARDIS. ‘I’ll only be a minute.’ He stepped out.
The morning was bright and clear. The Doctor stuck his hands in his pockets and whistled a tune he’d learned a few centuries before as he sauntered towards a small door set into a warehouse wall. There was a piece of cardboard taped above a buzzer with a few words scribbled on it in black biro. The Doctor rang the bell and waited. Eventually, the door opened just a crack.
‘Good to see you again,’ said the Doctor.
‘And you, Doctor,’ said a smooth voice.
‘Or do I mean, of course, good to meet you for the first time? Always get confused about those two.’
‘It is all one. I let myself know you’d be coming,’ said the voice.
‘Did you let yourself know what I’d want too?’ said the Doctor. ‘I always seem to forget to give myself all the details, terrible habit, must try to keep a diary again.’
‘You have an item you’d like me to secrete among
another client’s belongings?’
The Doctor pulled a slim pen-like package from his pocket and handed it into the darkness.
‘I’ll be delighted,’ said the voice.
‘Did we agree some sort of… payment?’ said the Doctor.
‘Oh Doctor,’ laughed the voice. ‘You do continue to amuse. Please, think nothing of it. I’m assured that at a certain point you will become a very valuable client indeed.’
‘Right,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s… hmmm, that’s…
Right. Disturbing. Yes, best not to ask too many questions.’
From the darkness, there was a low and not entirely friendly chuckle before the warehouse door gently closed.
The Doctor started to walk back towards the TARDIS. He stopped, turned around, stared at the closed warehouse door. Took a pace or two toward it.
Stopped. Stuck his hands in his pockets. Wrinkled his brow. Turned back and walked into the TARDIS.
Epilogue
Heemstede, The Netherlands, 2636
Marieke Jansen tore off her headscarf and ran her hands through her hair in frustration. She stared at the young boy who had brought her the news. It was too late in the season for this.
‘What do you mean,’ she said, ‘no planters?’
The little boy wiped his dirty face with his dirtier hand.
‘It’s Mr Van Aerdenhout,’ he said. ‘He’s hired all the men in the village for double wages.’
Van Aerdenhout. She should have known. He didn’t need all those men; he’d probably hired them just to stop her getting her crop in the ground in the precious few perfect weeks.
Marieke and her husband had borrowed as many guilder as they could lay their hands on for the cargo of tulip bulbs. If they bloomed, if they produced offsets, this time next year they’d be able to sell the crop for fifty times what they’d paid for it. But only if the bulbs were planted in time. God in Heaven!
The boy was still waiting, winkling something unspeakable out of his nose with a grimy finger. She threw a stuiver to him, and he caught the coin handily, grinning as he left.
‘I bet you wish there were ten of you!’ he called back to her.
She did. She could get all those bulbs into the ground herself, if she had the time. It wasn’t a hard job, just a long one, and needed to be done quickly.
There was a quiet cough from behind her.
She’d been sure no one was there, but when she turned round two men were standing on the porch of her farmhouse. They were well-dressed in long sober black coats with slashed sleeves letting the white shirt underneath show through, heeled black boots with bows on the front. They wore loose ruffs at their throats and neat pointed beards, every inch the gentlemen of finance.
‘We hear you have a problem, Mrs Jansen,’ said the first. ‘You need more time.’
‘Yes,’ said the second. ‘And my colleague Mr Hoogeveen and I hate to hear of a woman in need of more time when we can so easily assist.’
‘Yes, my colleague Mr Verspronck and I have a little proposition for you, Mrs Jansen.’
‘One we think you’ll find it hard to refuse.’
‘Hard even to think of refusing.’
‘Hard,’ said Mr Verspronck, ‘even to imagine thinking of refusing.’
They laughed, in unison.
Mr Hoogeveen pulled a large pocket watch from his coat and held it out to Marieke.
‘Now,’ said Mr Hoogeveen, ‘this is all very simple to understand…’
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Epilogue