Doctor Who: Shada (16 page)

Clare Keightley waited for Chris in the physics lab. She waited so hard she fell asleep in a very uncomfortable plastic chair, her head resting on a pile of books about carbon dating, and dreamt about America and big decisions and Chris and the Doctor and the book, but mainly about Chris. He would have been surprised to see how very forthright he could be in Clare’s dreams.

David Taylor’s mum wondered where he’d got to. Wherever he’d gone, she hoped he was having some fun at last.

And the Doctor, Romana, K-9 and Chris Parsons waited in the TARDIS, which remained in the corner of Professor Chronotis’s silent study, which had not so long ago been filled with the sound of friendly conversation and rattling china and teaspoons.

*

The Doctor and Romana either didn’t want or didn’t need to sleep, Chris realised. After entering the TARDIS, the Doctor had activated the force field and collapsed into a large wicker chair, looking tired and portentously undisturbable. Romana plugged K-9 into a power point underneath the console, ‘to charge him up overnight’ as she put it. His eye-screen went blank, then the lowermost of its horizontal bars glowed into life with a beep, and the one above that began to flicker.

‘He was down to one bar, poor thing,’ said Romana.

Throughout, K-9’s radar dish ears revolved steadily, searching for the sphere.

‘He can only trace it when it’s active,’ Chris pointed out.

‘I know that,’ said Romana.

‘Which means when it’s attacking someone,’ said Chris. ‘Trying to kill someone, steal their mind.’

‘Yes,’ said Romana as patiently as she seemed able.

‘That’s a bit horrible, isn’t it?’ ventured Chris.

‘Nothing else we can do,’ said Romana. ‘We’re talking about a potential threat to the lives of everyone in the universe. We can only hope we’ll be there to stop it in time, like we saved the Doctor.’

Chris decided to risk another question. ‘So you and the Doctor, you’re sort of explorers?’

‘That’s the idea, though it never seems to work out that way.’ To Chris’s astonishment Romana smiled. ‘Why not try and get some rest? There’s a bathroom and a guest suite.’ She indicated the interior door and gave another set of detailed directions.

‘So you’ll call me when you need me?’ said Chris.

‘Whenever that may be, yes,’ said Romana, still smiling sweetly.

Chris hesitated at the door. There was no other furniture in the control room. ‘Er, shall I fetch you anything? Chair or stool or cushion or anything?’

‘No thanks,’ said Romana. ‘I can sleep standing up, if need be.’

‘Really?’ said Chris. Then he noted a slight smirk mixed in with her smile. ‘You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?’

‘Night night, Young Parsons,’ said Romana, turning her attention to the console.

Chris set off down the twisting white corridors of the TARDIS. This time there was less urgency to his mission and he took time to open a few of the doors that led off the corridors. Some of them gave on to other, seemingly identical stretches of twisty white, and he was very careful, as befitted the proud owner of the 7th Bristol Scout Pack award for Orienteering 1966, to close them firmly and ignore any temptation to stray from the path. As before, he could remember Romana’s instructions exactly.

Some of the other doors led to rooms. There was a cricket pavilion, which somehow actually smelt of new-mown grass and linseed oil. Another door led to a huge empty cinema in which was playing a black-and-white Lone Ranger film. Chris flinched as he bumped into a large-bosomed usherette. He apologised, only to realise the figure was a cracked dummy wound around, for some reason, with dead Christmas tree lights, with a cabbage for its head, a stuffed parrot on its shoulder and a cleaning lady’s bucket, filled with popcorn, slung over one arm.

He peeked through yet another door to find an enormous room filled with shelves packed with balls of multicoloured wool, a huge plastic pick-and-mix dispenser with jelly babies in every tray, and piles of entangled yo-yos.

Finally, Chris made his way to the particular door to which Romana had directed him. So this was the guest suite. He gripped the handle and pushed, ready for anything.

Somewhat disappointingly the guest suite looked, at first sight, like nothing more or less than a fairly average hotel room, apart from the ever-present circular design of the walls. Flowery carpet, a dresser, a mirror, a trouser press. Then Chris noticed two peculiarities. The bed was a single four-poster, with ornately carved wooden posts, but when he drew back the curtains he found a bunk bed, with a rickety wooden ladder attached.

The second peculiarity was the minibar, if that was actually what it was. It was gleaming white and came to about chest-height, and it certainly looked like some kind of drink dispenser or chocolate machine, with a tray for delivery of the food or drink selected but with no slot for money – only two large dials with selector needles. There were numbers on the first dial, letters on the second. In the mood for experimentation, Chris set the dials to K12 and pressed a button in the middle. There was a rumble from inside, a kind of thunk, three loud beeps, a whirr, and then an object something like a white-coloured Mars bar shot out into the tray.

Chris picked it up and took a tentative munch. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, he realised. Chocolate would do very nicely. He took a bite. His mouth filled not with the sweetness of chocolate but the hot juicy taste of prime rib, medium rare. Chris grinned – space food, this was more like it! Greedily, he took another bite. The juicy steak was replaced by the tacky oversweetness of candy floss. The tastes blended in a very unpleasant way. He pulled out his hanky and spat the contents of his mouth out into it. There was obviously some clever space-thing you had to know before you got the hang of the minibar. He looked around for instructions but there were none.

There was one interior door, presumably leading to the
en suite
. Chris took a deep breath and pushed in.

This was perhaps even more disappointing. It looked exactly like a hotel bathroom, with a lavatory, mirror, towels and toiletries. Another door said BATH.

Chris pushed it open and gasped. Beyond the door was an enormous – at least Olympic-sized – swimming pool, slopping about in a huge white enamelled container. Chris looked closely at the base of the container and saw, to his astonishment, two tiny little brass feet supporting it at this end. Presumably at the other end, eighty feet away, there were another two. On the perimeter of the bath or pool, on the left at what would normally be the shallow end, he could just glimpse two ordinary-sized taps and a rubber duck.

Chris stripped off, climbed a metal ladder and dived in. It was the warmest, most soothing water he had ever known. There was a rush of spray and a bar of soap zoomed over the water towards him.

After his bath – he hadn’t dared take the plug out – Chris climbed back into the bedroom and shrugged into a big white towelling bathrobe that had been thoughtfully placed on the back of the bathroom door.

But how was he going to sleep, with all that was going on?

He sat on the end of the lower bunk of the bed and suddenly felt unaccountably tired, despite the incredible excitements and strangenesses of the day.

He gave the bed a bounce and lay back, overwhelmed with a tiredness. The bed was incredibly soft and inviting, starched sheets and plumped pillows enfolding him. Even the lighting in the room seemed to dim as his head sank into the softness.

His last thought of the day was of Clare. He really, really should have phoned her, but she’d somehow got lost under everything else. No doubt she’d given up on him and gone home to pack her few final things.

She was out of his league anyway, thought Chris. All the stuff that had happened today – Time Lords, robot dogs, impossible police boxes with Olympic-sized baths in them – seemed far more likely than her ever settling for him.

At least she was safe, and well out of it. Whatever it was.

Chris Parsons slept.

Chapter 29

THE DAWN’S EARLY light shone through the blinds of the physics lab, where Clare Keightley still sat slumped on the uncomfortable plastic chair. The magpie pecked on the window, probably coincidentally. Clare slept on.

Finally, Clare woke up. It took her a moment to emerge from the latest stage of her dream, in which she had been loading her packed boxes into the hands of the Doctor, who was smiling encouragingly. But where was Chris? Why wasn’t he there with her, starting off on this amazing journey? ‘Aha!’ the Doctor was saying, but she didn’t want his ‘Aha!’ – she wanted Chris’s ‘Aha!’ And where was Chris?

Now, as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes, the question remained. Where was Chris?

She got up, stretched, then automatically checked her watch – it was, incredibly, half past seven. The events of the previous day, strange as they had been at the time, had been stripped of their mystique by the cold sunlight.

She shook her head. Hold on. A bloke had told her to stay put – in fact, two blokes had told her to stay put, and she had meekly obeyed. When had she become the female lab assistant in a Fifties sci-fi B-movie, staying behind while the men went off to do mysterious and dangerous things that she was just there to react to? She wasn’t going to make tea and ask the obvious questions for anybody.

She devised a new plan – she would find Chris, shout at him, demand to know everything she’d missed, then storm home and pack her boxes and set off for her new life.

She grabbed the lab’s phone and dialled the number of Chris’s flat. She gave it a good twenty rings. He wasn’t going to have a lie-in today.

But there was no answer.

So she’d have to check with this Professor Chronotis. She got down a directory and flipped through until she found him – P-14, St Cedd’s. There was, very irritatingly, no phone number.

She’d just have to storm over there and demand answers. However, in the sobering morning light of reasonableness, bursting in to the study of an old don that she had never met before at eight on a Sunday morning shouting, ‘Where’s that bloke I’m not interested in and don’t care about, and what was all that guff about that book anyway and who was that Doctor guy with the scarf?’ seemed an arbitrary and slightly emotional thing to do.

So she scooped up the other books Chris had borrowed from Chronotis, the return of which would give her the perfect cover. She was a busy person, a level-headed, sensible academic, just returning some books, that was all.

She didn’t want to admit to herself that she was terribly worried about Chris and terribly worried about the book.

Chris needed looking after, he was an idiot.

She put her coat on and set off for St Cedd’s.

Chapter 30

BERNARD STRONG SETTLED himself down on his fold-out stool, adjusted his hat, settled the bait box by his feet, raised his rod and cast off.

He’d turned up early and got one of the best spots on this stretch of the Cam, along the water meadows a couple of miles outside the city. He had no real intention of landing anything good, he just wanted to clear out of the house before the missus woke up and gave him what-for after his late homecoming the night before.

Suddenly he saw a grey metal sphere, about the size of a football, hovering in mid-air some distance away down the curve of the river. He watched in astonishment as it zoomed forward with short, aggressive spurts of energy. What the heck was that thing? Some remote-control gizmo, a computer thing? Or perhaps a satellite, another bit of Skylab? If so, it might be worth a bob or two. If nothing else it was casting a shadow and would scare the fish.

Without really thinking about the logic of what he was doing, Bernard stood up and drew back his line from the water. He waited until the metal football-thing was within his reach and jabbed the end of his fishing rod at it.

The rod slipped off the side of the ball with a metallic scrape. Then the ball stopped in mid-air and turned on its axis, as if somehow it was adjusting itself to look at Bernard.

It made a loud buzzing noise, like an angry wasp trapped in a biscuit tin, and zoomed forward. Bernard felt its cold metal surface touch his forehead –

Then there was a pain in the back of his head, sharp and searing – and then nothing.

The mindless body of Bernard Strong pitched forward into the River Cam.

The sphere zizzed angrily past him, heading out into the empty water meadows.

It had been silent in the TARDIS control room for so long that Romana jumped when K-9’s high-pitched voice suddenly rasped out, ‘Master! Mistress!’

The Doctor, who had said not one word after settling down in the chair the night before, woke with a start and leapt for the console.

‘Have you got something, K-9?’

‘Affirmative, Master,’ said K-9. ‘The sphere is active: 5.7 miles distant at bearing 4.378. Velocity 15.3—’

‘Good dog!’ said Romana.

The Doctor punched new coordinates into the navigation panel with incredible speed, his fingers a blur. ‘We might still be in time,’ he told Romana. ‘Get Parsons up here!’

Chris was jolted from sleep by the insistent
ring-ring
of an ordinary-sounding telephone.