City of Death

by Douglas Adams

‘But we’ll need coordinates!’ Romana protested.

  The Doctor threw open the doors of the Château and they tumbled into the street, the Doctor talking and running in a way that left Duggan open-mouthed with exhaustion, annoyance and admiration. ‘Scaroth will leave a faint trail through time. We can possibly, just possibly, follow it if we get to the TARDIS in minutes.’

  ‘Have you parked it nearby?’ That, thought Romana, would be a help. So long as it wasn’t back in that art gallery on the other side of town.

  ‘It’s back in that art gallery on the other side of town,’ the Doctor admitted, starting to weave through traffic.

  ‘Oh, wonderful.’

  Romana and the Doctor found themselves stranded on a small heap of concrete between lanes of cars.

  They’re mad, sighed Duggan, they’re absolutely mad.

  * * *

  There is a universal law that says that, the more you need a taxi, the less likely you are to be able to get one. This applies even more so in Paris. The rules that govern Paris taxis are fairly simple. If you’re very lucky and the taxi drivers happen not to be on strike, then they will certainly be driving very, very fast. It’s the only way to drive in Paris, and does not really allow for the troublesome slowing down and stopping involved in picking up passengers.

  Your chances of being noticed will decrease even further if your driver has had a bad day and just doesn’t fancy stopping for a tourist. Tourists in Paris often think the best way to get directions is to flag down a taxi driver and ask them. They assume this is a free service which the taxi drivers are only too happy to provide. This is based on no evidence whatsoever. Guidebooks have been scoured by exasperated taxi drivers and nowhere does this advice ever appear in print. What makes it even worse is that these tourists ask the most bizarre things. The taxi rank by the Eiffel Tower echoes to groans of despair as tourists constantly ask for directions to the Eiffel Tower. It is a state of affairs which is both miserable and also unsustainably improbable.

  When people say they know all about unsustainable probability waveforms collapsing, they either understand these things instinctively, or they’ve been to the library, looked them up, and wished they’d bought a bigger brain. The people who understand these things instinctively are the kinds of people who go out to bars, have a good time, always get a table, rarely spill a drink, and never miss whichever bus they decide they’re going home on.

  One of the reasons they lead such a charmed life is because they have assessed (with blackboards) what would happen to their evening if at any point they talked about probability theory, quantum mechanics, waveform reduction, or eigenstate vectoring. The simple reason is that, if they did, they would then be definitely getting the bus home alone.

  If you cornered these people in a bar, and the bar happened to be in Paris, and you told them that the entire timeline of Paris was about to enter a thermodynamically irreversible interaction with a classical environment then they would grab their hat and start running. They would not even bother to try and catch a bus.

  * * *

  The Doctor was standing at a bus stop. He had given up on trying to hail a taxi. Duggan found this behaviour baffling. If the universe was ending, why were there no signs of it? Secondly, did Paris even have buses? He guessed it proved that the Doctor and Romana were English after all. Only the English would queue at a time like this.

  Apparently the world was ending. The Doctor and Romana could talk of little else as they stood waiting patiently for a bus at what Duggan was fairly sure was just a lamp post.

  Out of nowhere a taxi pulled up.

  The Doctor beamed in delight and was effusive in his praise for the taxi drivers of Paris.

  A little old man came out of nowhere, pushed past the Doctor, announced curtly, ‘This, m’sieur, is for me,’ stepped inside and the taxi drove away.

  The Doctor said some words. They weren’t French.

  They carried on standing at the bus stop. It started to rain.

  ‘Do you know what, Romana,’ the Doctor announced eventually. ‘I don’t think there are any buses in Paris.’

  They started running again.

  * * *

  Duggan didn’t have the heart to tell them that a few seconds after they had started off a bus had pulled up. He just pelted after them.

  It is exactly a kilometre from the Arc du Triomphe down the Champs-Élysées. Duggan knew this because a teacher at his school had told him. He’d said that it was a useful fact. His teacher had been a tank commander during the liberation of Paris. He was defending the Arc du Triomphe when a German tank rolled into view at the end of the Champs-Élysées. Speed was of the essence. It would take time to target, sight and focus the tank gun properly. But Duggan’s maths teacher remembered that it was exactly a kilometre from the Arc du Triomphe to the end of the Champs-Élysées, and so, before the enemy had had a chance to fire, the tank was reduced to scrap metal. It was a useful fact to know.

  Although, Romana would have pointed out, a little breathlessly, that, actually, the distance between the Arc du Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées was 1.3 kilometres. It’s an agonisingly slow run if you’re weaving through traffic, have probably pulled a tendon by kicking in a door, or are worried that at any moment the world may end.

  Eventually they hared off down a section of streets that a man in less of a hurry to save history would have paused in, just for a moment, to catch his breath and gasp at the beauty of it all. But Duggan didn’t pause. Instead he carried on around the corner.

  To find the Doctor and Romana leaning against a kiosk, catching their breath and just taking in the quaint, untidy beauty of Paris before it was all swept away.

  ‘This really is very pretty,’ gasped Romana.

  The Doctor nodded.

  It was a very lovely day. The sun was shining like there was no tomorrow. Which there wasn’t.

  A taxi bumped along the cobbled street. The Doctor waved desperately at it. The driver shrugged and drove off.

  The Doctor looked around hopelessly. ‘What’s the matter?’ he wailed. ‘Is nobody interested in history any more?’

  * * *

  Only the Doctor would try and save the planet by taking them to an art gallery. That much Duggan was certain of. They finally reached the right sort of street. It was filled with tourists, all clutching bags of shopping and bunches of flowers and looks that determinedly said, ‘We are enjoying dawdling and will not allow ourselves to be bustled out of the way. Not by anyone. We have quite enough of that at home. We have come to Paris for a saunter.’

  Consequently, the Doctor, Romana and Duggan’s progress down the street was not fast. But, judging by the Doctor’s frantic pointing, they were nearly where they wanted to be.

  Duggan had a nagging worry in his head, though. What was a TARDIS anyway?

  * * *

  In their mad dash, the Doctor, Romana and Duggan failed to notice the street artist.

  Normally, Bourget earned enough from sketching tourists to stop his landlord from screaming at him. It was demeaning work, but his landlord could shout very loudly.

  Stood in front of him were a family of Americans. They were all grinning broadly and saying howabout that, we’re going to become a genuine work of art. It’ll be a masterpiece, the father was telling them all, like a painting by Renault. He was already talking about how much he would spend on the frame, surprising as he’d haggled adroitly about the fee. Perhaps he’d noticed Bourget’s hands were shaking.

  Bourget tried not to look at the paper, each swift stroke cooed over as he smoothly drew the family, a little thinner, a little taller, and with fewer shopping bags. He avoided the faces. Surely it could not happen again, thought Bourget, it just couldn’t. He started work on adding in a hint of the Eiffel Tower to the background. The enraptured gasps grew quieter.

  ‘Don’t worry, kids,’ said the man. ‘He’ll d
o the faces in a moment. All part of the technique. Say, you will do the faces in a moment, won’t you?’

  Bourget finished the Eiffel Tower and idly wondered about drawing a second one. No, there was nothing for it. He had to start on the faces. He knew what would happen. He started on the head of the father first. Surely, this time it would be all right. A few strokes in and he relaxed. No clock face was appearing. Instead, yes, absolutely the head of a man. He frowned. There was something wrong about it. The jaw a bit heavy, the brow hirsute. The overall effect was oddly primitive. Apelike. He hastily started on the children. The faces appeared, all normal, stroke after stroke giving them eyes and mouths, transforming their blankness into something approaching character. And then, between one line and the next, shading became dials and the clock-hands sprouted from their noses. That’s when the screaming started.

  * * *

  Elena was looking at Harrison, expecting a reaction from him. She was, she thought, pretty much at the end of her tether. She had shown him every beauty that Paris had to offer, and she’d known that, for some reason, the magic of it all had passed him by. Also, these heavenly little shoes she’d picked up were pinching abominably. She decided to give it one final go before writing this off as a noble attempt at an entente cordiale. She had, and no one could say that she hadn’t, tried. Surely there’d be something in this gallery that would speak to him?

  She brought him up before the last exhibit and waited for a reaction.

  There was a silence which dragged, just a little.

  ‘Well, for me,’ Harrison began, a trifle uncertainly, ‘one of the most curious things about this piece is its wonderful . . .’ He coughed and stumbled to a halt. He stared again at the work of art. He found it strangely reassuring. Suddenly he found he knew exactly what to say. ‘Its wonderful afunctionalism.’

  ‘Yes, I see what you mean.’ Stunned, Elena rewarded him with a coaxing nod. ‘Divorced from its function and seen purely as a piece of art, its structure of line and colour are curiously counterpointed by the redundant vestiges of its function.’

  Exactly. It made Harrison think of home. And yet made him feel even more happy to be here. There was something about its sheer incongruity that was somehow tremendously cheering. He beamed, the words tumbling out of him. ‘Since it has no call to be here, the art lies in the fact that it is here!’

  Elena had brought him to M. Bertrand’s gallery. At first, he’d been quite distant and mumbling, but something about that final exhibit had given him pause. Imagine that, riveted by a wooden blue box! A police box, of all things.

  As they stood admiring it, three people ran past them and into the box. Which, with a snort, vanished.

  ‘Exquisite, absolutely exquisite!’ Elena gave a little gasp and clapped her hands.

  Harrison nodded. Finally he’d found something in Paris that was truly beautiful.

  * * *

  Duggan had run into the TARDIS before he’d even had time to work out what it wasn’t. Standing inside it, he was dimly aware that it wasn’t entirely the shape or size he’d been expecting it to be, but there was a large bit of his brain that had simply stopped caring.

  Apparently, the Mona Lisa had been stolen by a squid who was currently travelling through time to end the human race and they were chasing after it in a phone booth. Yes. Well. Fine.

  Anyway, he’d just discovered the Doctor had a robot dog and that was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen in his life.

  The Doctor and Romana busied themselves in shouting around and at a large computer thing. Duggan left them to it and made friends with the Doctor’s robot dog.

  ‘Hello little feller, what’s your name, eh?’

  ‘K-9.’

  ‘K-9, eh? That’s brilliant.’

  ‘Query brilliance,’ said the robot dog, sounding strangely pleased, as though it had just bought a new hat.

  ‘What tricks do you do, doggy? Do you beg?’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Do you fetch?’ Duggan picked up a book and threw it. The robot dog did not move.

  ‘Doctor, I think your robot dog’s stopped working,’ said Duggan.

  The Doctor looked up from untangling a lot of cable. ‘No, no, he just bores easily,’ he said and threw himself to the floor, scrabbling for some screws.

  ‘Oh.’

  Romana flashed Duggan a weak smile. She was hurriedly trying to lock the TARDIS coordinates onto the fluctuating energy signal from Scaroth’s transit. It was like trying to find where a stone was thrown in a lake a long time after all the ripples have gone and the lake’s dried up. What made it worse was that the Doctor was helping. As the Doctor’s attempts to help normally involved setting course for the nearest supernova, it was all rather vexing. She glanced at K-9 who looked back at her with all the sympathy that a robot dog could muster.

  * * *

  The TARDIS hurled itself through time, the six thousand streets of Paris collapsing behind it. Shiny office blocks crumbled, boulevards fell apart, the Metro system heaved itself out of the ground, the romantic waters of the Seine boiled and the Eiffel Tower itself tumbled away. The present was falling into a state of uncertainty which would have got quantum physicists quite excited if there was still such a thing as quantum physics.

  Every single achievement apart from one, placed itself on hold. The TARDIS fell back through time, causality unravelling like unfinished knitting, row after row of history pulling itself apart, events burning away like the fuse on a cartoon bomb, heading towards the very start of things, the one achievement that Scaroth had yet to undo.

  It actually made navigating history surprisingly easy, simply because there was nowhere else left to go.

  For once the TARDIS fell silent.

  18

  À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

  There was no vegetation on the surface of the world, just a bank of mud beside a thick, lugubrious sea. It was more of a sluggish soup than a sea. It refused even to reflect the sky, because that would have been too exciting, preferring instead to glow with a deeply boring grey green. The sludge was the only dull thing about the world. Above it, the sky burnt magnificently, clouds ominous with fire. It was a Tuesday.

  All in all, it was a unique landscape. One that wouldn’t be seen again until it somehow sneaked from the dreams of Leonardo da Vinci and into the background of his most famous painting. Lightning skied down mountains and plunged into desolate valleys, tossing pumice into the stew-pot air.

  It was a marvellous spectacle, and a real shame that there was no one there to see it.

  Except that all of a sudden there was.

  A man—well, almost a man—stood there, looking laughably dapper, wearing a neat white suit which quickly became flecked with ashy smuts.

  Scaroth looked around himself, pleased. He still had a little way to go but, at last, he was back where he belonged.

  He set off across the rocks.

  * * *

  Some minutes earlier, the TARDIS had set itself down at a slight angle on the very edge of the only certain bit of Earth’s history remaining.

  Duggan still wasn’t exactly sure what had just happened. But it all seemed a little bit unfair. If you’re going to walk into a box, however wonky it is on the inside, things outside it have a duty to be the same when you leave it again.

  He failed to come up with any theories as to where Paris had gone. ‘What happened?’

  When that didn’t get him an answer, he went for ‘What is this place?’

  The Doctor and Romana swapped grins. There were clearly going to be a lot of questions.

  Idly, Duggan picked up a stone and threw it across the plateau. The Doctor had long ago noticed that, when a human being is confronted by a sight they don’t understand, they usually throw something at it.

  The Doctor swept his arms across the sullen, glowering horizon and the vast
plain.

  ‘This is, or will be, more or less the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.’

  ‘But . . .’ There was quite a long pause. ‘We’re standing on land.’

  Romana realised that, in every way possible, Duggan was out of his depth.

  ‘Duggan . . .’ The Doctor put on his most reasonable tones. ‘I promise you we are where I said we would be. Four hundred million years in Earth’s past.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Duggan, testing the ground underneath his feet uncertainly.

  ‘You can see why the Jagaroth wanted to leave.’ Romana wasn’t enchanted. ‘Where is Scaroth?’

  ‘Oh, he’ll be here soon,’ muttered the Doctor. ‘After all, there’s the Jagaroth ship.’

  He pointed. Almost hidden in the shadow of a mountain at the edge of the plateau sat a ship like a metallic insect. You almost couldn’t notice it because the mountain was so very big and looming. And yet, once you saw it, there was no looking away from the ship. There was no way in which that spaceship was even pretending to be good news.

  They strolled briskly across the plain, walking on land that seemed to be torn between being rock and mud. ‘That ship is the last of the Jagaroth. A vicious, callous warlike race. The universe will be well rid of them.’ The Doctor did not say ‘the universe won’t miss them’. That seemed a bit rich. Right now he was painfully aware that time was busy working out if it could do without the human race, and figuring that it was a bit of a shame, but it could probably get by at a pinch. The Doctor also thought it would be a bit of a shame. Every innovation that Scaroth had given humanity would be wiped out. They’d have to start with a blank slate. Would they manage quite so well without on their own? To be or not to be? That was the question.

  As they crunched and squelched nearer to the ship, Romana became coolly unimpressed. ‘You can see why it must have exploded.’ She pointed. ‘Its atmospheric thrust motors are disabled. The idiots must be about to try to take off on warp drive.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Doctor agreed. In their shoes he’d probably have given it a shot. But . . . ‘Try doing that in an atmosphere and . . .’ The Doctor stopped speaking and started looking very worried indeed.