Doctor Who: Shada (4 page)

And now they were back on Earth again, taking part in what the Doctor had assured her was an idyllically bucolic and very relaxing activity. As usual, Romana had her doubts.

They’d arrived in the Professor’s rooms a couple of hours earlier, but found them empty. Romana was concerned his absence might have something to do with the urgent message he had sent them. But the Doctor seemed almost glad of the chance to rush off through the back of the college to the river’s edge, where he threw a handful of large-denomination notes at a surprised young student, threw off his hat, coat and scarf and virtually bundled Romana into a tiny, wobbly wooden boat.

She couldn’t see the point in this at all at first. There was a perfectly serviceable path right next to the river, which they could have walked along and enjoyed exactly the same view without the possibility of capsizing. But the Doctor had seemed so delighted, marvelling at the wooden pole before thrusting it into the dirty water and using the full heft of his tall powerful frame to push off down the river like it was the Amazon, that Romana decided literally to go with the flow.

Now she reclined in the punt, the Doctor’s ancient Baedeker guide in one hand, the other trailing over the edge through the clear water, enlivened by the sunshine and the pleasing architecture of the college buildings along the banks. Unlike the Academy on Gallifrey, this was a fresh, vibrant place of learning, the most ancient of the colleges a mere eight hundred years old.

The Doctor stood at the other end of the punt, punctuating each stroke of the pole with the name of one of the great Cambridge alumni.

‘Wordsworth! Rutherford! Christopher Smart! Andrew Marvell! Judge Jeffreys! Owen Chadwick!’

Romana frowned. That name hadn’t been on her tablet. ‘Who?’

‘Owen Chadwick!’ the Doctor repeated emphatically. ‘Some of the greatest thinkers in Earth’s history have laboured here.’ He went on. ‘Newton!’

Romana nodded. She knew Newton. ‘“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,”’ she quoted.

The Doctor gave the pole a particularly hard shove through a muddy patch and the punt shot forward, as if to illustrate the truth of those words.

‘So Newton invented punting?’ asked Romana.

‘Do you know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had?’ said the Doctor airily. ‘Like all great thinkers, he encapsulated the simplest things. There was no limit to old Isaac’s genius.’

Romana smiled as the little boat passed under a bridge, the shadows of the willows on the bank casting criss-crossed patterns on the stone. ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ she mused, ‘that something so primitive can be so…’ She searched for the right word.

‘Restful?’ the Doctor suggested, shoving down again and causing the punt to wobble alarmingly.

Romana found the word. ‘Simple. You just push in one direction and the boat moves in the other.’

They emerged from under the bridge and Romana gazed at another grand college building beyond the trees that lined the riverbank. ‘I love the spring,’ she said. ‘All the leaves, the colours…’

‘It’s October,’ said the Doctor, a little shamefaced.

Romana blinked in surprise. ‘I thought you said we’d be arriving in May Week?’

‘I did,’ said the Doctor. ‘May Week is in June.’

‘I’m confused,’ said Romana.

‘So was the TARDIS,’ admitted the Doctor.

Romana decided to make the best of it. ‘Oh, I do love the autumn,’ she said, trying not to sound too critical. ‘All the leaves, the colours…’

The Doctor harrumphed. ‘Yes. Well, at least with something as simple as a punt nothing can possibly go wrong. No coordinates. No relative dimensional stabilisers. Nothing!’ He lunged down yet again. ‘Just the water, the punt, a strong pair of hands and the pole!’

The words were barely out of his mouth when the pole jammed solidly into another muddy patch with a loud squelch. The Doctor tried manfully to retrieve it as the punt shot forward but was finally forced to abandon it or join it in the River Cam.

Romana looked sadly at the retreating pole as they sailed on.

The Doctor slumped down into the punt. ‘Er… I think it’s about time for us to go and see if the Professor is back in his rooms. Ask me how.’

‘How?’

‘For every reaction,’ said the Doctor with one of his sudden toothy grins, ‘there is an opposite – and equally difficult – action!’

He rattled in the bottom of the punt and snatched up a long-handled wooden paddle, deployed for just such an emergency, swung it into the water and started to paddle furiously towards the bank.

The punt passed under another bridge. Romana was glad there was only one paddle. She’d had quite enough paddling during their adventure on the third moon of Delta Magna, when—

Suddenly her thoughts were interrupted. This interruption was not just in the normal sense, of something distracting her. It felt as if something had literally barged into her mind and cut off her train of thought.

It was a thin, distorted babble of inhuman voices. Lost souls in torment, crying out in terror and confusion. The words were indistinguishable but the anguish was unmistakable, and tugged at her hearts.

The punt swept out from under the bridge. Romana blinked, and the voices were gone. It had all happened in a second.

The Doctor’s expression was similarly disturbed, and he had stopped mid-paddle, looking around in surprise. Romana caught at his arm. ‘Did you just hear voices?’

The Doctor nodded solemnly, just as the sun passed under a cloud, sending a chill autumn wind along the river. ‘Yes – a sort of thin, distorted babble of inhuman voices.’

‘Then what was it?’ asked Romana.

The Doctor shrugged. ‘Probably nothing,’ he said very unconvincingly.

‘Doctor, please, let’s go in,’ urged Romana.

The Doctor nodded and resumed paddling ferociously towards the shore.

If the Doctor or Romana had looked up rather than just around at this point, much of what follows may have turned out quite differently. But as it happened, they did not. And so they did not see the man on the bridge.

Skagra looked down, making his first detailed survey of this planet of primitives. He enjoyed looking down on people.

He still wore the functional white coveralls of the Think Tank, but had added a long, shining silver cape and a wide-brimmed shining silver hat, the better to go unnoticed and unremarked upon on this remote and uncivilised world. He had been pleased to see, on his journey on foot into this small conurbation known as Cambridge, that he had been correct in this decision. Several of the primitives had even shouted words of social greeting to him as he passed through the streets, using untranslatable colloquialisms such as ‘Oi, Disco Tex, where are the Sex-o-lettes?’ and ‘Get her!’ and ‘Hello, honky-tonk!’ Yes, he was obviously passing for a native amongst these cattle.

This planet really was almost distressingly backward. The few pathetic satellites winking in its orbit stood as a measure of that. Its people travelled in ground cars with exhaust pipes that belched smoke, or on laughably basic self-propelled contraptions consisting of two wheels and very little else. Skagra had passed a trading post that trumpeted low-resolution magnetic videotape recording equipment as the height of invention and sophistication, suggesting that the primitives would never have to miss
Coronation Street
, whatever that was, ever again. Their economy seemed to consist of shoving dirty pieces of paper with the head of a great matriarch printed crudely on one side at each other. The Matriarch wore a crown, suggesting a type-B monarchy, which was presumably something to do with this important street where coronations were so regularly performed.

There was also this strange, slow and wasteful mode of transport along the waterway in small wooden craft. He had just seen a primitive male make an incredible hash of this simple, if pointless, task.

All things considered, Skagra decided Earth rated as a 2 out of 10 planet, bad but not quite the worst he’d ever seen, and it gained half a point for its breathable atmosphere and another half a point for its tolerably close sun.

In fact it was the perfect place to hide away in, just as his target had done. Somewhere in this quadrant of the city, the so-called ‘university quarter’, was what he had come for. He was approaching it circumspectly, still not quite convinced that anybody could be so stupid as to possess what he desired, yet put up no security systems to protect either it, or himself.

The leather handles of a large carpet bag were clutched tightly in one of his hands. Inside the bag was the sphere, the babble of its voices undetectable by the non-telepathic primitives of this planet. The sphere buzzed and hummed angrily, rubbing against Skagra’s leg like a pet demanding to be fed.

‘Soon,’ he told it curtly. ‘Very soon.’

Chapter 4

CHRIS WAS VERY glad to be back in his lab. He threw his satchel down on a bench and just stood breathing calmly for a moment, reassured by his spectrograph, his carbon-dating machine, his X-ray machine, and even his Bunsen burner. He looked the longest at his neat, almost bare bookshelf. These were all things he could understand.

He looked out of the window into the little garden which the laboratories surrounded. The sunshine was fading now and it was starting to feel a lot more like October. A solitary magpie hopped about on the lawn. Chris gulped and then reminded himself that he was a rational, scientific person surrounded by rational scientific things.

Whenever he felt irrational and unscientific like this, Chris reminded himself of the pure, simple and almost inexpressible beauty of Euler’s Identity:
e
^iπ
+ 1 = 0
. You just couldn’t argue with Euler, however many mad professors and police boxes you’d bumped into.

He checked his watch. It was just after two, so Clare had probably had lunch and was back in her rooms. Operation Keightley, aka The Chris Parsons Project, could now swing into phase two.

He flipped open his satchel and took out the books. He was irritated to discover that among the relevant ones was that other one, the strange one, the one he’d picked off the wrong shelf, the one with the odd not-quite-Celtic scrolly symbol on the front. He was about to put it down when –

He was back at home again, the cricket and buzzing bees and mum’s voice coming from the kitchen –

Chris blinked – and put down the book. Odd.

He picked it up again –

He was back at home again, the cricket and buzzing bees and mum’s voice coming from the kitchen –

– and then he blinked, and was back in the lab. That had been very strange. This book seemed to have the irritating habit of making you imagine things very vividly, things that weren’t actually happening.

He shook himself. Of course it didn’t. Books didn’t do that sort of thing. Well they could, but not that vividly and you tended to have to be reading them. You didn’t expect to feel the terror of Jane Eyre locked in the red room just by touching the spine of the Penguin paperback.

No, it was quite ridiculous. Books sat on shelves and waited to be read, that was all they did, the same way that solitary magpies signified nothing but an almost total lack of magpies.

He looked down at the book again, and again he saw the rows and rows of arcane symbols scrawled across its pages. But this time there was something else, and that something else was the most ridiculous something of all.

He could swear that as he looked at the book, the book was somehow looking back at him.

Chapter 5

THE DOCTOR LED Romana through the gates and into the impressive forecourt of St Cedd’s College. He pointed his paddle demonstratively around the buildings.

‘Here we are! St Cedd’s College, Cambridge. Founded in the year something or other, by… someone someone someone in honour of… someone someone someone whose name escapes me completely.’

‘St Cedd?’ suggested Romana.

‘Do you know,’ said the Doctor, turning to look at her and apparently very impressed, ‘I think you’re very probably right. You should be a historian.’

Romana smiled. ‘I am a historian,’ she said proudly, keeping to herself the thought that really, considering her relationship with the Doctor, she sometimes wondered if she should be a nursemaid.

A short, bespectacled man in a bowler hat and an immaculate suit and tie was pinning a notice on one of the boards that stood outside a smaller building set just inside the main entrance. Romana supposed he was some kind of official, a gatekeeper perhaps.

To her surprise the Doctor bounded over to the little man and whispered loudly in his ear, ‘Good afternoon, Wilkin.’

‘Good afternoon, Doctor,’ said Wilkin casually, pressing the drawing pin firmly but neatly in its place, without turning around and without turning a hair.

Romana was pleased to see the Doctor slightly deflated by this smooth response. She loved it when he was out-eccentricked.

‘Wilkin!’ the Doctor gasped. ‘You remember me?’

Wilkin turned from the noticeboard, smiling imperturbably up at the Doctor. ‘Of course, sir. You took an honorary degree here in 1960.’