Doctor Who_ Logopolis Part 6

They were moving towards the door when the Doctor paused to look around him. 'You know, Monitor, there's something rather familiar about this room. But none of this was here last time I came.'

'Your extensive travels put us stay-at-homes to shame, Doctor. Doubtless on one of your trips to the planet Earth you have visited the Pharos Project.'

The Doctor snapped his fingers. 'Of course, the Pharos Project!' Then he realised he was no wiser, and had to ask 'What about the Pharos Project?'

'And what is a Pharos, anyway?' Adric interjected.

The Doctor was strong on Ancient Greek and replied before the Monitor had a chance to speak. 'Means a lighthouse. It's the name of a famous Earth project designed to transmit messages to remote planets.'

'I understand they're trying to get intelligent life to respond,' the Monitor added.

The Doctor smiled. 'But the life is too intelligent to do that before it knows what the Earth people are up to!' He was looking round the room again, and suddenly turned to the Monitor. 'Of course! This is almost identical to the Pharos computer room . . .'

'I always thought you underestimated our Logopolitan skills,' said the Monitor with some pride. 'It's a perfect logical copy.'

'Block transfer computation!' exclaimed Adric, not wanting to be left out of the conversation.

'That . . . and a little more,' the Monitor agreed. 'You see, structure is the essence of matter.'

'And the essence of structure is mathematics!' Adric added excitedly. He had grasped the point, and was keen to let everybody know it. By mathematically modelling the Pharos Project in sufficient detail and supplying the necessary raw energy, the Logopolitans had been able to re-create whole sections of the Earth structure on their own planet.

On the steps down to the street the Doctor said, 'In that case, Monitor, you must be able to model any s.p.a.ce/time event in the universe.'

'Yes, true,' replied the Monitor modestly. 'But for the moment let's content ourselves with solving your little problem, Doctor.'

No wonder they think so little of travelling, the Doctor mused to himself. On their journey back to the TARDIS the party gathered another following of flowing-robed Logopolitans.

The Doctor drew the Monitor out of earshot of Tegan and Adric and said in a low voice 'I wonder if I can ask you a very special favour, Monitor?'

'My dear Doctor . . . of course.'

'I need this repair rather urgently,' said the Doctor, choosing his words carefully, 'because what lies ahead for me is . . . not for them. I'll have to leave them here, Adric and the girl. Would they be too much of a burden?'

'I'm sure we can make them comfortable, Doctor.' The Monitor was puzzled, but it would have been a breach of etiquette to press questions.

They had arrived at the TARDIS a little ahead of the others. The Doctor turned to his old acquaintance. 'I'll be back when I can. Which, to be frank with you, Monitor, will be soon - or not at all.'

The Doctor's handshake was firm. He lowered his voice and added, 'I hate farewells. I hope you won't mind a small deception to keep this simple.'

The Monitor understood immediately. 'You don't want them in the TARDIS with you?'

Tegan and Adric caught up with them at this point, in time to hear the Doctor say, as if in reply to a remark of the Monitor's, 'Dangerous, eh? How dangerous?'

The Monitor took his cue. 'Well . . . there's a chance the computation may produce . . .

an instability.'

The Doctor seemed to take a moment to ponder the question. Then he turned to Adric and Tegan. 'An elementary eggs and basket situation, wouldn't you say? Not to put all of the one in the other.'

Adric tried to protest, but the Doctor persuaded him that even though there might be only one chance in seven hundred million of the process going wrong it was still silly to jeopardise more lives than necessary. Tegan saw the sense of that. Then, with the tiniest wink to the Monitor the Doctor disappeared through the blue double doors.

Adric wouldn't let the matter rest. He turned to the Monitor. 'Then the Doctor is in danger? He said he was expecting danger - great danger, he said.'

The Monitor smiled at Adric's agitation. 'A simple precaution. There is very little that can go wrong.' But seeing the alarm still on the boy's face he felt compelled to add: 'In fact, I must confess, nothing at all . . . I'm afraid I misled the Doctor in order to have the pleasure of your company while he engages on this mundane task. Now, perhaps you'd like to see more of Logopolis . . .'

'No offence to you personally, but I'd prefer to see a lot less of it.' The Monitor's high diplomacy calmed Tegan, but it didn't stop her speaking her mind. 'Can you give me some idea how long we're going to be delayed here. I do have a job to do.'

Adric apologised to the Monitor for his brash companion. 'I'm sorry. She's upset . . .'

'Too right I'm upset,' Tegan declared. 'Wouldn't you be?' But if she was honest with herself she had to admit it was kind of exciting too. At the interview for the job they had asked her what her hobbies were, and she'd said 'Flying and travelling'. If that committee of stiff-necked personnel officers could only see her now!

'That's very odd,' said Adric. 'It looks like . . . Nyssa!' He was peering past Tegan at some distant point behind her. She turned to see a small female figure standing on the skyline, right on the edge of the plateau. She seemed to have appeared from nowhere.

The girl began walking towards the group round the TARDIS. And then she waved.

Adric's mouth opened in astonishment. 'It is Nyssa!'

The figure was running now. 'It's the girl who helped us on Traken,' Adric had time to explain, before Nyssa's arms were wrapped round him in an embarra.s.sing hug of greeting.

Tegan shook Nyssa's hand. 'Hi, I'm Tegan. Did they hijack you too?'

The brown curls bounced around her pale young face as Nyssa shook her head. 'A friend of the Doctor's brought me. He's here somewhere.'

They looked around, but there was n.o.body but themselves and the Logopolitans.

'A friend of the Doctor's?' asked Adric. 'Are you sure?'

Nyssa's serious round eyes echoed surprise that he should doubt her word. 'Of course.

Is the Doctor here?'

Adric pointed to the TARDIS, and Tegan added, 'He's trying out some kind of new trim for the machine. Have you seen inside that thing? It's the most amazing . . .'

Tegan broke off abruptly, struck by something about the appearance of the TARDIS.

During the arrival of Nyssa the Monitor had drawn closer to it, some doubt creasing his normally smooth features. Tegan looked at the time machine, unable to define what it was that was so evidently wrong. But turning to Adric and Nyssa she realised that they saw it too.

The colour was too bright! And as they watched, it quickly became brighter, until it was fluorescing violently.

At first Adric wasn't convinced it was a fault. 'It's the chameleon circuit. The Doctor's reprogramming it...,' he explained to Nyssa. But they could all see the look of alarm on the face of the Monitor and his fel ow Logopolitans. Adric rushed to the Monitor's side.

'What's the matter?'

'A transfer instability. It may be only momentary.'

The Monitor seemed to be right. The fluorescence was visibly dying down. Instinctively, Adric, Nyssa and Tegan pressed forward, but the Monitor gestured to them to stay back.

'Something is wrong!' Adric cried.

At first it seemed like a trick of the light, some reaction of the eyes to the fluorescing.

But as they watched it became clear without any doubt. The TARDIS was smaller!

Tegan turned to the Monitor. 'You'd better do something,' she snapped.

The Logopolitan shook his head in dull amazement. 'I don't understand . . . I don't understand . . .'

'Look!' Nyssa exclaimed, although all eyes were already on the TARDIS. 'It's still shrinking!'

Alarm was spreading among the gathering of Logopolitans, who were drawing back from the sight. The TARDIS was now no taller than a man's height, and still diminished slowly as they watched.

Adric grabbed the Monitor's arm. 'But the Doctor's in there!' he shouted. At a distance from the horrified crowd, elevated by the height of the smooth fold of rock on which he stood, the translucent watching figure remained immobile, waiting his time. And he knew that time was coming. But not yet - not quite yet.

7.

The Doctor's young friends pressed in around the Monitor, and Tegan's voice was louder than the others. 'It's your numbers doing this. You must be able to do something to put it right.'

'Quick! Please, we must get him out of this!' Adric demanded, tugging at the Monitor's sleeve.

A greyness glazed over the fine features of the Logopolitan. 'This is unheard of . . . A fault in the computations?' He pushed his fingers, some ornamented with simple rings, through the neat silver curls of his hair. Then the moment of hesitation was over. In a voice crisp with authority he spoke to the distressed crowd around him. 'Collect the visitor's machine. The honour of Logopolis is at stake.'

And Adric thought he heard him add under his breath, 'And more than our honour . . .

much, much more.'

The TARDIS was now no bigger than a large cabin trunk, and even a child of ten would have had to stoop to get in through the miniature door. It was still fluorescing intermittently, but its surface didn't seem to be hot to the touch when the Logopolitans hoisted gently it into a horizontal position.

Nyssa had run forward to supervise the lifting of the TARDIS. Now as the procession swept towards the city she fell into step beside the Monitor.

'What are you going to do with the Doctor?'

The Logopolitan Leader turned his head towards her gravely. 'Our best. That is all we can do.'

And they hurried on to the Central Register through the winding maze of Logopolis, not knowing if the Doctor, inside that shrunken and still shrinking toy, was alive or dead.

The Doctor himself was little wiser. He had been only part of the way through the tedious business of reading the figures off the data block and keying them at the console when the room began to fill with an insidious buzzing sound, like an infuriated mosquito caught in a jam jar.

It was then that the distortions started. He first noticed a curious truncation of the time column, as if he were looking down on it from the perspective of the ceiling. His own hands, working at the keyboard, suddenly seemed a long way off. The buzzing grew, until he wasn't sure whether his head was in the room or the room was in his head. As he folded to his knees the floor rose smoothly to meet him halfway, like a well filling with dark oil.

An idea came swimming towards him through the thick buzzing blackness: dematerialise. Whatever was causing the spatial anomaly might be local. There was a chance of escape, if only...

The console was a giant mushroom that towered miles above him. He tried to struggle to his feet against some huge pressure. But he fought it, and eventually in agonising slow motion his knees straightened, and he found himself thin and tall, stretched like an over-tightened violin string between ceiling and floor.

His hand, almost an independent creature at the end of his long arm, managed to pull the dematerialisation lever. The buzzing continued to grow. He tried to conjure power from the auxiliary b.u.t.tons arrayed around the lever, but still nothing worked - only the viewer screen, which was now filled with a jolting picture of rose-coloured rock perforated by shadows that the Doctor's brain only dimly registered as a hugely magnified image of a Logopolitan street.

And still the buzzing grew louder and higher in pitch until his whole body vibrated to it.

And then, as if the violin string had snapped, the Doctor staggered and col apsed to the floor.

The procession of dark-robed figures hurried on with the tiny TARDIS. Logopolitan courtesy, and a real concern, made each one anxious to accompany the Doctor to the Central Register, so on this occasion the streets behind them were left rimmed with empty cells. There was, however, one cell on the route that was not empty.

From behind a yellowing, fluted column set just inside one of the dwelling places a face appeared, dark and spikily bearded. The thin lips parted, uttering a chuckle dry as the dust that was still settling in the train of the receding procession.

'At last, Doctor!' smiled the Master. 'At last I've cut you down to size.'

The Doctor knew nothing of the proximity of his oldest and deadliest enemy, indeed at that moment he knew little of anything. The TARDIS viewer offered a juddering succession of clues: a sea of serious faces, pink stone walls, flashes of bright sky. The image of a large building, approached by a flight of steps, lurched across the screen.

And then a carved stone staircase, followed by the sharp white light, streaming from the interior of a lofty room, where the jolting giant images finally came to rest. Gargantuan in proportion, the face of Adric loomed in, filling the viewer screen. Behind him the ballooning features of Tegan and Nyssa signalled the vast scale of their concern.

The Doctor saw none of this. His crumpled figure lay at the foot of the screen, inert beneath the weight of that unstoppable buzzing.

By the time they had reached the Central Register the TARDIS had been small enough for two Logopolitans to carry. They set it upright and now stood back, waiting for new orders from the Monitor.

Adric, Tegan and Nyssa knelt around it. The fluorescing had died down, and in every respect the TARDIS looked entirely ordinary - except that there was now no room for anything larger than a new-born kitten through that doll's-house door.

'Hold on, Doctor. The Monitor is going to help us.'

But there was no point in Nyssa calling, Adric pointed out. The Doctor might be able to see his surroundings on the TARDIS screen, but due to a long-standing fault it couldn't carry sound.

Adric straightened up and looked around him. He felt so powerless in this alien room with its high white walls and rectangular racks of equipment whose purpose he could only guess at. He remembered what the Monitor had said: it was a logical copy of the Pharos Project. Why had they made the copy of a computer instal ation when Logopolitan computations ran without computers?

The Monitor was stationed in front of the long grey console. That part of the installation must be Logopolitan in origin, thought Adric, the hub from which 'the Numbers'

emanated, and to which the computations returned. Just as he had done before, the Monitor was leaning forward, intoning into the black aperture that Adric had first mistaken for a screen.

'Etra secque secque eram nol. Etra secque kayrie gorrock gorrock kayrie zel. Kayrie nerus nerus kayrie zel . . .'

The sound was hypnotic. And then Adric almost jumped out of his skin as a sharp grating noise split the air close behind him. One component of the Earth technology had sprung to life, a flat cream-coloured box, the front panel of which now glowed with light.

Adric deduced from the paper covered with figures that emerged from the top that it was a sort of primitive printing mechanism.

The Monitor was beside him now, reaching to tear off the print-out. 'It's somewhere in the dimensioning routine,' their host p.r.o.nounced, scanning the paper. 'We can trace it, if there's time.

'Perhaps I can help?' Adric suggested. He explained about the Alzarian Badge for Mathematical Excellence - not boastfully, but just so that the Monitor would understand he wasn't dealing with an ordinary boy who would only get in the way.

The Logopolitan Leader explained that the printer was producing a machine-code dump of the routine that had caused the trouble. 'Can you read Earth numbering?' he asked.

He tore off the print-out and handed it to Adric, who studied it for a moment.

'Yes,' the boy said. 'The Doctor taught me.

'It's a copy of an Earth machine, so I'm afraid we have to make do with their clumsy symbols.'