Doctor Who_ Human Nature Part 21

'It would be Rocastle all over to see it there and appropriate it,' Joan added.

'And, being over a library, it is, as I said, about books!' Something inside Hutchinson snapped. He pulled back the bolt on his rifle and swung it to cover Smith. 'Take us back to our post, you're guilty of mutiny.'

Smith took a step forward, so that the muzzle of the rifle was pressed up against his chest. He held up a hand to stop Benny from making any sudden move on Hutchinson.

The other boys stared at the two of them.

'If you don't return to your post, then I'll be forced -'

'Forced?' Smith's tone was quite mild. 'To do what?'

'To...' Hutchinson looked desperately around the other boys, looking for any sign of support. But all he saw were tired, frightened, sometimes tear-stained faces.

Even Merryweather was slowly shaking his head, as if advising Hutchinson that this was a bad move. 'To report you to the Head!'

'Really? Oh.' Smith turned away from the gun and started examining the inscription again. 'Off you go, then.'

Hutchinson looked round his cla.s.smates. 'Well, which of you lads are coming with me?' There was a general turning away. Not one of the boys responded to Hutchinson's eager stare. 'Come on! There's adventure happening! A sc.r.a.p! What sort of boys are you?'

'Living ones,' Anand told him.

'All right!' Hutchinson snarled. 'If you prefer cowardice over honour!' And he ran off.

'Isn't it odd,' opined Alexander, 'how close masculinity is to melodrama?'

'Only in an Irish dictionary,' said Joan.

'Why an Irish one?' asked Benny.

Joan stared at her. 'Why - it's a joke...'

'Is it?'

'Stop, stop, I need you both to think!' Smith put a hand atop each woman's head and turned them to face the inscription, flas.h.i.+ng Alexander a mixture of grin and shrug. 'I think that's that's a joke. An architectural one. Let's go inside and see if it's true.' a joke. An architectural one. Let's go inside and see if it's true.'

He shooed the boys into the library. 'The walls are marble, too. Very hard. Very st.u.r.dy.'

'Doctor,' Benny began.

Smith glanced at the look on Joan's face. 'Call me John. You know, I think that being covered in all that blood did something strange to me. I saw a dead cat. Is that normal?'

'You had a cat. Chick. It died in a very bad way.'

'Chick...' Smith whispered. 'The name means something... something far away.

And Gallifrey, you've mentioned that twice to me. I used it in one of my stories. I thought I'd made it up until I remembered - '

'John,' Joan touched his face with her hand, and wiped another tiny patch of blood away, 'you're frightening me. Are you in shock?'

'I'm not sure. It's working though. Don't worry. I love you.' The last of the boys had been ushered into the library, missing his whisper by a second. Now he shouted to them, 'I want everybody to start combing the walls. Call if you see anything unusual.'

Joan was smiling at him. 'I love you, also.'

Benny took Alexander by the tie and dragged him away, her fists clenched. 'That woman!'

'I think it's wonderful, loved one. Just because you and I have both lost our sweethearts, don't let's get bitter, eh?'

'I am not bitter.' They began to search the bookshelves. 'It's just so obviously going to end in tears. When the Doctor regains his senses, is he going to be pleased to find that he's going out with a wrinkly racist? I think not. Hey, wait a minute, did you say that you'd lost your sweetheart?'

Alexander froze. 'Oh, that was a long time ago...'

The library had an ornate plaster ceiling, which Smith stared up at, pointing his umbrella upwards and extending it at intervals in various directions, as if calculating. The only windows were a series of high panels to let in light. As she calmed down, Benny realized that she did, indeed, feel safer here. A number of small explosions were being heard at intervals throughout the school, hard to discern from the thunder outside. The boys were starting to look very stressed indeed, their little faces pinched up and their shoulders hunched. No wonder they hadn't gone with Hutchinson. Rocastle had hugely overestimated their interest in warfare. They desperately wanted to be rescued.

Despite some bad life decisions he might have made, she felt a surge of pride as she looked at the little man in the middle of the room. He was going to do that. He was going to save the day, again.

Then she caught sight of the look on Joan's face. She was also staring at Smith, unaware that she was being watched, and, caught unawares like that, she was terribly afraid.

Perhaps sometimes you couldn't save everybody.

Serif was walking through the corner of the building, using a molecular redistributor to melt away the brickwork in front of him. From the other sides of the school came the noise of the others using their heavy weapons.

The corner masonry dissolved, and Serif walked into a kitchen area, through the remains of what had once been a stove, kicking aside the melting metal doors. Any staff had long since departed. This would make a good place to begin the search.

Greeneye and Hoff were exchanging fire with a group of boys with rifles on a balcony outside Rocastle's quarters, ducking in and out of a row of ornamental topiary.

'Fun, isn't it?' Greeneye grinned.

'If you like that sort of thing.' Hoff clicked a b.u.t.ton on his cuff. 'I'm getting tired of it, though.'

He stepped out in the full view of the boys, and staggered back as a salvo of bullets bounced off the forcefield he'd erected in front of his chest. 'Good shot!' he called.

'My turn!'

He aimed his gun vaguely in the direction of the balcony and squeezed the trigger.

A heavy sh.e.l.l spiralled out of the weapon and landed in the centre of the kneeling boys. Some of them stood up in alarm.

The sh.e.l.l exploded and the balcony tumbled from the front of the building, a fiery ma.s.s of screaming, charring bodies. It landed with a crash, leaving a gaping hole in the masonry above it.

'Now,' Hoff turned to Greeneye as the latter emerged from cover, 'that's my idea of fun.'

Anand was tapping along a section of wall in the library. He was worried about his friend. Tim had been missing ever since he'd been summoned to the Head's office.

In all this trouble, he hadn't been able to ask about him.

While he was thinking, his hand encountered a soft spot on the spine of a book. It was one of a whole panel of fake spines, a Victorian decorative device long-beloved of captains who would tell their bugs to go and fetch a particular non-existent t.i.tle. The spine in question was that of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the soft spot was circular, and halfway up the binding. Anand pressed it. and the soft spot was circular, and halfway up the binding. Anand pressed it.

Something made a clunk and then a grind, and the whole panel of books swung open.

The boys cheered and the adults ran over to peer down a flight of dank little stone steps. 'Open sesame,' said Anand.

Serif shot three boys who ran across the end of the corridor he was stalking down, and turned the corner a moment later.

He was in the central hallway where the bursar's office met the foot of the great stairways.

A group of boys looked up from the sandbags they had piled against the great doors, which were secured with heavy bolts. They turned, swinging round their rifles awkwardly.

Serif mowed them all down in a blaze of silent blue light. He broke step only to swing the bodies and the bags away from the doors, which he unbolted and swung open.

'Come on,' he called to August and Aphasia. 'I'm sure I haven't killed the right boy yet.'

Smith's party were running down a narrow brick-lined pa.s.sageway. Smith himself hung back for a moment, noting that Captain Merryweather was always glancing behind him, biting his lip in panic, and tripping over his feet.

Smith drew level with him. 'What's wrong?'

'They'll come after us. They've got all those guns. They'll kill us.'

'But we're cleverer than they are.'

'That doesn't matter. That never matters. It's who's got the most guns that matters!'

'Trust me,' Smith murmured. 'I won't let you come to any harm. I promise.'

Merryweather looked up at him uncertainly. 'Can you promise that?'

'Of course. You boys may know me as mild-mannered John Smith, history teacher, but secretly I'm the Doctor, universal righter of wrongs and protector of cats.'

'Are you?'

'So I'm told.' Smith smiled at Bernice as she hung back from the gentle jog to join him. 'How are you?'

'I'm fine, I was wondering about you. You've changed your mind.'

'So you say.'

'No, I mean that you've started to act like yourself again.'

'I just got fed up. This is all play-acting. I'm terrified. And mad. Like I'm too mixed up to care who I am. Who is this Doctor, then?'

'A man from another planet who travels through time and s.p.a.ce having adventures.

He has two hearts.'

'I only have one.'

'That's because of the Pod. When we find it, you put it back to your forehead and you become you again. You grow your other heart back. Or so I a.s.sume.'

'So why do the villains want it?'

'They want to be like you.'

'Let me ask you a question. Merryweather, cover your ears, I'm in love with one of your teachers.'

Merryweather blinked and did so. 'That's all right, sir, so am I.'

'Ah, wait, before you ask me the question, look at this.' Benny pulled the list of Things Not To Let Me Do from her jacket and showed it to Smith. At the bottom of the list, she'd added, in hastily scrawled biro, 'Don't let me fall in love.'

'Interesting. My handwriting changes. Ah well, too late on that last point. The question is if in my original state I've got two hearts and two brains - '

'Just hearts.'

'Well, if I'm so odd that I've got lots of everything, could I still love somebody?'

Benny grimaced. 'I've, erm, never known the Doctor to have any concern for the trouser department. He sometimes gets his snaps out and goes all moody, but I suspect that's more a sort of paternal bit. In short, no, I don't think he normally does that kind of thing.'

'I see, two hearts but no love. Well, that makes our plan easier. One, we get everybody to safety, and that includes going back for the other boys. Two, we find the boy who's got this Pod. And three - '

'You put it to your forehead, become the Doctor again and kick some alien bottom?' Bernice asked hopefully.

'Ah, no. We give it to them and they go away.'

Benny stared at him. 'I think it's becoming one of those days.'

Rocastle stood in the middle of the canteen, his pistol out and ready. The boys of 5B were cl.u.s.tered around him in a nest of sandbags. The explosions that they'd heard earlier seemed to have stopped, as had, worryingly, the Vickers gunfire.

Quite a few of the boys who'd been sent out as scouts hadn't returned. Probably run away and hid; there was no indication that the defences had been breached. On a real battlefield, they'd have had the luxury of maps and hills to view it from, but here things would just have to be worked out as they happened.

The only OTC unit to have had actual combat experience. d.a.m.n it. The doors at the end of the canteen burst open. Several of the boys snapped up into firing postures, but Rocastle cut the air with his hands. 'Wait!'

It was Hutchinson, running wildly, his clothes and half his face blackened. 'It's Smith, sir! He's deserted his post! He's taken Farrar down to the library to hide!'

'Get into cover,' Rocastle told him. 'Brave lad. Plucky of you to come here. We'll settle Smith's hash when this is all over. Did you get into a sc.r.a.pe on the way?'

'Yes, sir.' Hutchinson slumped behind the sandbags. 'They're inside the school. One of them pointed a sort of flamethrower at me and I caught the edge of it.'

'Well done, Captain. Did you see where the enemy were going?'

'They were heading for the gymnasium, sir.'

'I see.' Rocastle stood up. 'In that case, I do believe that an exploratory mission is in order. The gymnasium has only one exit, and the southern stairs lead down there.

We'll have height and they'll have nowhere to run. We may have a chance of settling the whole matter. Follow me.'

The boys did so, shouldering their arms nervously.

'I like being me,' Smith was insisting to Benny. 'Besides, I'm engaged to be married.'

'You're what!'