Doctor Who_ Return Of The Living Dad Part 17

'Everyone was infected,' said the Doctor. 'Everything was infected.' His pupils were so dilated, they looked like two dark holes in his face, holes into nothing. 'The virus chewed through the s.h.i.+ps the way it was designed to.'

'But why didn't you just come up with a cure or something?' Roze breathed. 'Why didn't you just go back in time and warn them?'

'It was too late,' said the Doctor. 'It had happened.'

'Two years from now?'

'That's the truth.'

Roze looked at Indigo, his glittering eyes filling up with tears. He felt himself stumbling away, finding the door handle. Behind him, Indigo was shouting something, but he didn't care.

Alekto

One picosecond from now You can't go through SOLID stuff. Where my fingers brush on the cinnamon bricks, they (the bricks) get older and younger, a few seconds, that's all. Maybe you could see my fingerprints in those sluggish atoms, if you looked close enough. But who's going to look?

So I have to go up, up, into the air, stepping on the spinning molecules. I can walk right around in a big SPIRRRRALLLLL, see? My arms move through the nothingness between the liquid dancing of the particles, lifted, drifting, faint peppermint.

The gla.s.s is a liquid too, you see? I can shoulder my way through that slow cascade. The pane is already a little thicker at the bottom. I push my face into the stuff, thrusting my fingers into the waterfall. There! There! My hand is right through. My hand is right through.

I look back as I wriggle and slide through the gla.s.s.

Where I've touched it, there are tiny smudges and sparkling colours inside the window. More of my fingerprints. But who's going to look?

There's a couple of aliens in the room. One up, one down, lying on the bed. What're they up to?

Piece of METAL, that heavy electron soup a sharp fleck in the empty air of the room. The one up has got a pocket knife. He's talking - he's the man in charge. I have to tune in to those waves in the gas to find out what's going on.

'I said you couldn't lie to me,' he says. 'You know what I want.'

He's sitting down next to the alien on the bed. He's got that blade right up to his eye eye! 'I'm waiting.'

'There are only the two of you, aren't there?' says the man on the bed. Oh, he's sparkling with time, he's been all through time, its fingerprints are all over him! He's the one I've been looking for! I have to talk to this guy! 'What on earth do you think you're going to do?'

'Like,' says knife-man, 'I'm really going to tell you.'

He's going to do it, he's really going to do it!

He's got one hand up in the air, his free hand. I close my own hands around it, pressing my palms to the organic envelope of living skin.

A few months from now he gets a ride back to Lalande.

It's only eight light years away, right? A pa.s.sing flying saucer.

The sharp tang of the strange ga.s.ses in the s.h.i.+p's air. The lurch in his belly as they touch down. Home.

And then he spends a couple of years trying to get back into the government. He eats some real real food and talks to some food and talks to some real real people. And then everybody dies. people. And then everybody dies.

He remembers that afternoon of complete panic, two years from now, him and the other civil servants trying to keep what has happened secret, but the corpses come stumbling out of the cordoned-off area in their hundreds of thousands, the gra.s.s disintegrating where they tread.

His own face peels off in chunks in a tiny government shuttle crammed so full that the living keep the dead standing up.

It hasn't happened yet. He drops the knife. He starts screaming and screaming. He runs out of the room.

The guy on the bed just lies there, sleepily turning his head to watch. His eyes are okay. 'Thanks,' he says softly.

Wow, this is the real thing. I peer into his face. Can he see me? How does he know I'm there? He reaches out to me, just a movement of the fingers of one hand. I curl my fingers around it.

We both get the shakes. It's like two radio stations jamming each other. Luckily he's tranked and I'm used to this stuff anyway. After a few seconds the waves of jittering fade away and we're in contact.

I see what I look like to him. Yeah, I've got a human face, human hands, but the rest of me is tracks and trails of time and molecules, spreading and spiralling back and out like feathers. I look like I have wings.

'You're beautiful,' he breathes. 'What's your name?'

I'm running my other hand over his hair and face, I can't help it. His timelines are all tangled up. He's like a book I want to read, before he can wake up and run away.

'It's been a long time since I had a name,' I tell him.

'What's your name?'

'I'm the Doctor,' he says.

Doctor! 'Can you make me well again?'

There's a machine next to him on the bed, along with some bits of junk. It sends spiralling lines out into time, and when they brush against me, the machine's lights flicker and it beeps and twitters. I press my hand against it, and it squawks and squeals and dies.

'What happened to you?' he asks.

I wish I could remember what happened to me.

'I found something... I'm not supposed to be like this! I found a thing that did this to me.'

'You're slightly out of phase,' he says. 'That's all it is. You must have been this way for a long time.' I nod. He sees a thousand faces nodding, smearing like a rainbow. 'Your temporal tangent is blurring all over the place. But all we have to do is put you in stasis for a few seconds, and re-anchor you.'

'You mean you could do it?' WOW! 'You could fix me?'

He frowns. 'I need to find my TARDIS first. The equipment I'll need is inside. My s.p.a.ce-time s.h.i.+p. She's gone...' He's blinking, trying to stay awake. 'Can you help me find her?'

'Yes,' I say. 'I know what to look for. Go to sleep.'

'No,' he says. Suddenly he makes a sound, a sort of moan, as my fingertips brush down over his left shoulder.

Ghost pain. I take my hand away.

'Was that the past or the future?' he asks, breathlessly.

'You should sleep off that drug,' I tell him. 'When you wake up, you'll be fine.'

'No,' he says. He can't keep his eyes open. 'I don't want any dreams, no dreams.'

So I run the fingernail of my ring finger over his forehead, and the blackness and the silence wrap him up. No dreams.

13 Abduction Greys

Chris and Tony had been sent to ask at the police stations around the place, looking for their slightly odd 'foreign' friend, who might have lost her way while camping.

After three different lots of mildly bored police, they stumped glumly back to the car. The disguised Tzun sat in the pa.s.senger seat, hands primly folded in his lap, letting Chris drive.

'It's weird,' said the Adjudicator, as he pulled out onto the road with much more than his usual caution. 'You're better at faking the twentieth century than I am.'

'I still find the police intimidating,' admitted Tony. 'A bit hard to hurdle.'

'I didn't know whether to threaten violence or offer a bribe.'

'Sometimes I think it would be more straightforward if I switched off the hologram.' Tony's voice changed into a ridiculous buzz. 'Bow before me, Earthling sc.u.m, or I'll eat your heads!'

Chris broke up laughing. 'Don't do that in front of Roz,'

he said. The Tzun made a m.u.f.fled noise like a phone ringing.

'Hey, how'd you do that?'

Tony took out his communicator. 'h.e.l.lo? Yes?'

The voice at the other end was so faint they could barely hear it. 'It's Joel. I think I have an emergency here.'

'Where are you?' said Tony, speaking softly. The answer was indistinct. Chris spun the wheel, pulling over. Cars flashed past them in the murky afternoon as they strained to hear.

'Woods near Greenham.' Joel was whispering. Tony was operating controls on the communicator to try to get a fix on him. 'Two soldiers. Helicopter. I'm hiding.'

'Stay there,' said Tony. 'We'll come and get you.'

'Should we get reinforcements?' said Chris.

Tony pulled the map out of the glovebox. 'He's right about here here. We have to beat them to him.'

'Right you are,' said Chris, turning the key. Gravel sprayed out from the tyres as they pulled back out onto the road. The Adjudicator floored it.

'Oh dear,' said Tony.

Roz sat on a folding stool, irked.

There were a number of irksome things in her immediate vicinity. She kept herself amused by listing them. Firstly, there was the miserable weather. Secondly, there was the appalling cheerfulness of the women who were trying to live in a bunch of tents in said weather. Thirdly, there was said women's gruesome dedication to peace, non-violence, colourful artwork, a better world, and smiling when they were up to their ankles in freezing mud.

This was the third camp they'd visited. A woman and her young daughter were making a banner. They laughed, splas.h.i.+ng paint over the long strip of cloth. Jacqui and Ms Randrianasolo were chatting with a couple of women. It was all women. Roz supposed there was a sort of strange balance there. Women outside the fence with the tents, men inside with the guns.

A car drove up to the camp. Two women emerged and sloshed through the mud to where Jacqui and Ms Randrianasolo were talking to the others. Roz hoped that in between the chitchat they remembered to ask about Ia Jareshth.

Plus ca change. She'd arrested protesters at Subport Eight who had sat down around polaric VTOL craft so they couldn't take off without killing the crowd. She'd held back crowds of Undercity rabble who'd been protesting the genetic damage they said was done by the city's gravity beams.

Shame she couldn't tell the cheerful women that ten centuries from now it'd still be the same, with the state doing whatever it liked and nearly everyone going along with it.

That ought to take the rosiness out of their cheeks.

'Hey, Roz,' said Ms Randrianasolo. 'You ought to hear this.'

Roz got up and walked carefully through the muddy gra.s.s. 'We just had a right scare,' said one of the newcomers, a little old lady with huge gla.s.ses, starting her anecdote over again. 'We were in the Cooked Goose, trying to get some service, when a couple of soldiers marched in and asked where the "troublemakers" were. We just about fainted. Anyway, it wasn't us they were after. It was a couple of punks who'd been running around yelling.'

'Punks,' said Roz.

'You should have seen one of them. He'd done something to his eyes. All sparkly they were, like red tinsel.'

Ms Randrianasolo gave Roz a meaningful look. 'Anyway, the soldiers took them away, but they gave them a terrible knocking around first. I've never seen people panic like that in my seventy-two years.'

'I think I might make a phone call,' said Roz.

'There's no phone box,' said the old woman. 'Unless you want to pop round and borrow the phone in the sentry box.'