by Adam Roberts
‘Cake mix?’ the Dr tried. ‘I mean, I suppose as well as whisking eggs you could whisk up some lovely cake mixture with that whisk?’
‘AFFIRMATIVE!’ barked the Garlek.
‘Do you know my favourite bit of baking cakes?’ the Dr asked. ‘Licking the mixture off the whisk afterwards. Getting your tongue in between the metal wires of the whisk to lick off all the . . .’
This seemed to make the Garlek very cross indeed. ‘LICKS TERMINATE!’ it shrieked. ‘LICKS TER-MIN-ATE !’
‘Alright, keep your hair on,’ said the Dr. ‘I daresay Stavros doesn’t permit people to lick the bowl, or the whisk, in his kitchen.’
‘He’s pretty mean, that Stavros,’ Linn agreed. ‘I mean to say. Wanting to turn us into hideous half-garlic monstrosities. That’s pure meanness, I’d say.’
‘EXTRA MEAN!’ agreed the cyborg, with pride, adding at once ‘WAIT!’
We had arrived at the top of a staircase, leading down into the bowels of the complex. ‘So what do we do now?’ asked the Dr. ‘I mean, I’m sure a staircase isn’t going to stop you. I’m assuming that you’re fitted with some kind of stair-floaty-uppy-downy device?’
‘AFFIRMATIVE!’
‘Is that fitted as standard, then? Or does that come as a fitted extra?’
‘EXTRAS INNATE,’ screeched the metal being, for some reason getting very excited, and quivering from side to side on its fat round base. ‘EX-TRAS INNATE! EX-TRAS INN-ATE!’
‘So in effect,’ said the Dr, ‘you can fly?’
‘DETERMINATE!’ the creature cried. ‘-edly’ it added, and to prove its point it lifted from the floor and floated through the air.
It shepherded us down the stairs and into a cluttered laboratory; exactly the sort of space you might associate with an evil dictator with a penchant for unspeakable experimentation. There were benches cluttered with all sorts of test-tube-racks, microscopes, colanders, chopping boards and sabatier knives. There were large microwave ovens, and away at the back were a series of glass tanks lit with a sickly green light. Inside these strange and monstrous creatures slithered and slid. I had no desire to examine it too closely, and indeed I was not given the chance.
A second Garlek was standing to attention over by one of the benches, and the first Garlek marched us over to this.
‘Well,’ said the Dr. ‘This is - this is not good.’
‘Indeed not,’ I agreed. ‘What can we do?’
‘Do?’ came Stavros’s voice. ‘You can get transmuted into Garleks, innit.’ He wheeled out of the shadows and into the centre of the laboratory.
‘How did you get down here so quickly?’ the Dr demanded.
‘I took the service elevator, innit,’ said Stavros. ‘You! Garlek number one!’
The Garlek that had escorted us flipped its egg-whisk up in salute.
‘You can go, innit. Go back to the surface and coordinate an attack upon the Dhals. I want ever-a-one of them slottered, OK?’
‘AFFIRMATIVE!’ shrieked the Garlek. It wheeled about and scooted away, leaving us with the evil genius, the second Garlek, and a laboratory full of dangerous implements.
‘Right,’ said the Dr, eyeing Garlek number two nervously. ‘So, here we are.’
‘What I wanna know,’ said Stavros, lighting up a cigarette, ‘is what you doing here, innit.’
‘Well, we were just passing through, you know . . .’ said the Dr, vaguely.
‘Passing through?’ asked Stavros.
‘Yes.’
‘On your way somewhere?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And not, I-dunno, sent here by the Council of Time Gennlemen to destroy my Garleks before they can dominate the galaxy, innit?’
‘Oo no,’ said the Dr, glancing nervously at Garlek number two. ‘Nothing like that.’
‘Cause, you see,’ said Stavros, ‘that would suggest to me that my Garleks are destined to become the greatest threat the galaxy has ever seen. Innit.’
‘We-e-ll,’ said the Dr. ‘I’m not sure I’d go quite that far—’
‘It’d be pretty gratifying to me to think so,’ said Stavros.
‘Excuse me, Mr Stavros, sir?’ put in Linn.
‘Chef, innit,’ said Stavros.
‘Chef, yes. Excuse me, chef. I was just wondering. Why are you so dedicated to evil? I mean, why not give good a go? Couldn’t your Garleks be just as effective as forces for good?’
‘Good—is just another word for bland,’ said Stavros, dismissively. ‘You wanna boil all the bitterness out of my Garleks, do you? Nah. Now, enough chatting, innit. Time to turn you all into half-clove monstrosities, destroy your free will, fit you with cyborg exoskeletons and turn you loose upon the world filled with hate and the desire to destroy. Innit.’
‘Or else?’ asked the Dr.
‘What you mean, or else? Or else I’ll get my Garlek there to blast you with its death-gas of concentrated garlic-essence and no mistake. You die nasty that way, I assure you, innit.’ He gestured towards the Garlek with his cigarette. ‘You better do as I say,’ he concluded.
The Dr glanced at the Garlek once again. ‘Hold on a second,’ he said.
He walked briskly up the death-cyborg. ‘No, Doctor,’ I cried out. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Don’t fret Prosy,’ he declared.
‘But Doctor! It’ll destroy you!’
But heedless of my warning the Dr was reaching out with his right hand to grasp the death-gun stalk of the Garlek. I couldn’t watch: I closed my eyes.
I heard a single click.
I opened my eyes again just in time to see the Dr disappear into the Garlek. He had - somehow - pulled open the front of the casing of the device, and was now stepping literally inside it. He vanished.
‘Hey!’ Stavros was shouting. ‘Hey! What’s a-going on!’ He was jabbing at his control panel with a leathery hand, trying to get the Garlek to respond. But nothing was happening.
Almost at once the Dr appeared again, stepping briskly out of the Garlek casing. In his hand was a pen-sized silver stalk: a Moronic Screwdriver.
‘Your soldiers shot my last one of these to pieces,’ he was saying. ‘But luckily I always keep a spare in the drawer in there.’
‘That’s—that’s—the TARDY?’ Linn gasped.
‘Of course. Don’t you remember - Stavros here ordered his men to bring it down to the lab? He was going to experiment upon it.’
‘But it was in the shape of a giant horn.’
‘Well, it was. But up in the bunker, there, Stavvy issued an order turning over all army and police duties to his Garleks. We all heard him. And since he’s dictator his words have the force of law. The metamorphosing software inside the TARDY responded by changing its outward appearance to conform with the new policing regime. I wasn’t sure at first, but the more I looked the more convinced I became that this wasn’t a real Garlek at all. My own ship! Ha! You weren’t expecting that, were you, Stavros?’
It was evident that Stavros was infuriated. ‘Tzatziki!’ he swore. ‘Spanakopita! I’ll get you for this, Doctor, innit!’
‘We’ll see about that,’ said the Dr, aiming the Moronic Screwdriver at the head of the evil dictator. ‘A few minutes of this and he’ll be too moronic to do anything evil at all. He’ll be too busy working out how much drool to dribble to be concerned with grandiose plans for taking over the galaxy.’
‘Why not just kill me?’ Stavros demanded.
‘Nonsense,’ said the Dr. ‘I don’t kill people. That’s not my style.’
‘And yet you would put an end to the whole race of the Garleks,’ said Stavros. ‘Is that not murder?’
‘Don’t quibble ethics with me,’ said the Dr, aiming the Moronic Screwdriver at the dictator’s nutbrown forehead. ‘No ethiquibbling from you, thank you very much.’
‘My body is already ruined,’ cried Stavros, flapping a leathery hand over his control panel. ‘If you destroy my mind it will be tantamount to killing me! You might as well go the whole ho
g!’
‘When I think of all the evil you have performed in your time . . .’ said the Dr.
‘Doctor,’ said Linn, with a tone of unease in her voice.
‘ . . .and all the evil you are planning to perform . . .’
‘Doctor, stop a mo,’ Linn said.
I, too, could sense that something was wrong.
‘Don’t interrupt me, Linn,’ said the Dr. ‘I’m just getting to the bit where I harangue him for his evil.’
‘Something’s wrong, Doctor,’ said Linn, looking around.
‘She’s right. Something’s not right,’ I agreed. ‘I mean. She’s not wrong, something’s wrong. Here. What I’m trying to say, by way of agreeing with Linn, is that she is right to suggest that something is wrong.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Stavros seems to have lost his Greek accent,’ I observed.
‘Has he?’
I felt an unpleasant tingling in my solar plexus, the sort you get when you have the sense that something very bad is about to happen. The thing was I recognised that voice - the new voice that Stavros appeared to be using.
‘Accent schmaccent,’ said Stavros, with a distinctly home counties twang. ‘I could never remember my Greek accents anyway.’
‘Hang on a second,’ said the Dr. ‘Your voice has changed. Why are you talking like that?’
‘I shall talk as I please. Indeed,’ Stavros added, leaning back in his motorised chair, ‘I shall talk like what I please.’
Linn, standing beside me, sucked in a deep breath.
‘Deliberate grammatical solecism, eh?’ said the Dr. ‘You don’t scare me with your heavy-handed mangling of the proper rules of communication.’
‘Don’t I?’
‘Quick, Doctor,’ said Linn, grabbing his coat. ‘Let’s make a run for it. Into the TARDY! Let’s get away whilst we still can.’
‘I’ve got to put an end to the beginning of the Garleks first,’ said the Dr, looking confusedly about him. ‘Let me just—’
He pressed his thumb against the on-switch of the Moronic Screwdriver. A beam of concentrated moronification shot out. The molecules of air between the Dr and Stavros became too moronic to continue their Brownian motion and started to freeze out as crystals of ice.
‘Too late for that, Doctor, I’m afraid,’ declared Stavros. ‘Your screwdriver won’t avail you.’
There was a loud cracking noise, like a large plank of wood being snapped in half. The Moronic Screwdriver flew from the Dr’s hands.
‘This is not the end of the Garleks,’ declared Stavros. ‘It is not the beginning of the end of the Garleks. It is not even the end of the beginning of the Garleks. It is, however, the end of you Doctor—’
‘What?’ asked the Dr, slightly non-specifically, considering the circumstances. ‘Who . . . do what? What?’
Stavros seemed to freeze. There was an atmosphere of indelible menace in the air. Which, of course, is where you’d expect to find atmosphere.
For a moment we all held our breaths.
‘He’s gone quiet,’ the Dr observed, cautiously. ‘And motionless.’
‘Didn’t it strike you as odd that he didn’t immediately call for Garlek guards to come defend him?’ Linn said, urgently. ‘He could have done that with a single finger on his control panel. And yet he did not. I’ll tell you what I think: he’s not what he seems . . .’
‘This is rather peculiar,’ agreed the Dr. ‘Extremely. Odd, very.’
And just as he said that, things got a whole lot odder.
Yes. I know that the comma is out of place in that last sentence.
Allow me to explain.
Chapter Eleven
‘MEET ME— ET!
A crack appeared in the frontal carapace of Stavros’s chair. It opened just a hemi-demi-inch, and ran all the way up the front of Stavros’s body. Light spilled from the crevice. And then it widened, and two halves swung apart from one another on some unobvious hinge.
‘What is going,’ started the Dr, and put his mouth into a circle to conclude his sentence on? when he was interrupted with a loud bang! A metallic stair unfolded from inside Stavros’s torso and clanged onto the ground.
‘It’s a TARDY!’ I exclaimed.
‘You don’t say,’ said Linn, with, I feel, uncalled-for sarcasm. ‘Did you just figure that out?’
‘Oh don’t be like that,’ I said. ‘I’m a simple Prose Taylor from Earth. I’m not a fancy Time Gentleman apprentice, like . . .’
‘Shh,’ said the Dr. ‘Somebody’s coming out.’
There was the sound of footsteps coming down what appeared to be an immense stretch of staircase. They came closer and closer, clattering of boots on metal steps. The approach took a whole minute; two. Finally, with a little sigh as of exhaustion, a small green figure stepped briskly down to the last few steps and stood on the ground before us all. He, she or it was no more than a metre high. It (let’s say) had the face of a rapturous tortoise; but was dressed in a pale green onepiece of faintly military appearance and was wearing big clumpy boots on its small stumpy legs, giving its lower regions a pronounced stumpyclumpy appearance.
‘Hiya,’ it said. Its voice was squeaky, like a squeegee being wiped across a clean window, or a creaky door being opened slowly. Or like Richard Leaky, whom (if you’ve ever heard him you’ll know) was possessed of a high pitched voice.
‘And who in the name of J Jurms and his Po,’ asked the Dr, ‘are you?’
‘I’m the ET.’ The creature standing before us did a little bow. With a fluid motion its small arm flipped to its side and came back up again holding a boomerang-shaped weapon.
The Dr blanched. Blancmanged. Blancversed. I mean he went white. In the face. And maybe elsewhere about his body too. But I could only see his face.
‘That’s,’ he said, pointing. ‘That’s—a—’
‘It’s no blinking Moronic Screwdriver,’ said the newcomer, happily.
‘It’s a TGV!’
‘So it is.’
‘But those weapons are outlawed by the convention of linearity!’
‘They are outlawed,’ agreed the ET. ‘Despised and condemned by all civilised people in the Galaxy. And why? Because they are deadly to Time Gentlemen! The only weapon that bypasses your infuriating ability to re-un-degenerate yourselves at the moment of death!’
‘Would you please explain what’s going on,’ said the Dr, gathering himself and trying for dignity.
‘It’s perfectly simple,’ said the ET. ‘I am your nemesis. Your arch enemy.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said the Dr. ‘My arch enemy is called the Master.’
‘Tall feller?’ said the ET. ‘Little triangular-shaped beard? Booming voice? That was me.’
‘You?’
‘Well, it was my TARDY. You don’t need to look so surprised. If your TARDY can take the shape of a Garlek, why mightn’t mine take the shape of a tall bearded man with a booming voice?’
‘But if you own a TARDY that must mean,’ said Linn, ‘that you’re a . . . Time Gentleman?’
‘Naturally,’ said the ET. ‘I’m on my seventieth re-un-degeneration. I seem to have been getting smaller with each of them in turn, actually, for the last dozen or so. Smaller and greener.’ He shrugged. ‘But what can you do!’
‘Seventy?’ objected Linn. ‘Impossible! Time Gentlemen only re-un-degenerate thirteen times!’
‘Usually that is true,’ said the ET. ‘But I found a way to bypass that little difficulty. It’s a long story, and one I’m not inclined to go into right now. I haven’t got time anyway. I’m most dreadfully sorry, my dear Doctor, but I’m going to have to kill you.’
‘I beg your pardon . . .’ said the Dr. ‘Did you say kill me?’
‘That’s about the long and short of it.’
‘But why?’
‘You’re surprised?’ said the ET, perhaps disingenuously. ‘And yet you were readying yourself to moronify poor old Stavros - when you thought it really wa
s Stavros. I might ask the same thing there. Why?’
‘To prevent a worse evil,’ said the Dr. ‘Incidentally, where is Stavros? The real Stavros?’
‘Somewhere hereabouts,’ said the ET, gesturing with his weapon vaguely. ‘I don’t know. All I know is that my TARDY is set to “most evil person on planet” mode.’
‘You were about to explain,’ said Linn, ‘why you feel obliged to murder the Doctor here?’
‘To prevent a worse evil,’ said the ET, suavely. ‘What other justification for murder carries any weight? It’s Linn, isn’t it?’
‘You know me?’
‘Of course I do! You’re training to become a Time Lady, I believe. And you,’ turning to me, ‘must be Prose? The assistant?’
I gulped by way of answer.
‘Ms Trout,’ said the ET. ‘How would you feel if you were to learn that the whole rationale of the Time Gentlemen - everything they stand for - is profoundly wrong? That tidying up the time lines will lead inevitably to the end of the universe?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said at once. ‘That’s entirely backwards. Without the Time Gentlemen patrolling the timeways, anarchy would ensue. Chaos! That would lead to the end of the universe—’
‘I’m afraid it’s so,’ said the ET, gaily. ‘I must murder the Doctor to save the universe.’
‘You’re a liar!’ I exclaimed. Perhaps unwisely.
‘Do you say so, Prose Tailor?’ he said, smiling wide enough to display a line of top teeth like the perforated edge of a stamp. ‘But I’m not the one with lying and betrayal on my conscience.’
‘Oh,’ I said, as everything fell into place. ‘You tricked me! You wheedled the information out of me - that the Doctor would be sent here, to the time just before the Garleks were sent out into the cosmos; and you arranged to be here to meet him! You got here first and lay in ambush for him, disguised as Stavros!’
‘Something like that,’ said the ET, airily. ‘But I’ve an important question for you, young Prose. Do you know how the cosmos used to be?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘What you need to understand about the Time Gentlemen, ’ said the little green figure, fluently, ‘is that their notion of temporary neatness, of the grammar of time - involves a linear mindset. They are comfortable with Monday being followed by Tuesday being followed by Wednesday. They are not comfortable with Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday all happening at once.’
