Heart of Tardis Read online

  ‘Time’s wasting,’ the Doctor said as they left the cabin to meet him. They didn’t need to waste time dressing because Victoria, for one, would not have removed a single item of clothing in their present surroundings for all the coffee in Aribaca. ‘And it doesn’t do to waste time.’

  Jamie was examining the automobile with the guarded enthusiasm common to men the universe over when confronted by a big, good-looking machine that they know they should be regarding as functionally useless. ‘Where did you get this, Doctor? Last night you said we’d used up the last of our money.’

  ‘Well, I was out for my morning stroll,’ said the Doctor, ‘and I happened across this place that was buying blood. I can’t imagine what they want to use it for. I thought I’d better stop selling it when I had enough to rent a car, though. They seemed to be getting a little bit nervous when they realised my body wasn’t going to run out of the stuff.’

  ‘What do we need an automobile for?’ asked Victoria. The acquiring of such an expensive possession, even on a rental basis, did not bode well for the Doctor’s hopes of their leaving any time soon.

  The Doctor beamed. ‘Only bums walk around these parts, apparently. Which puzzles me a bit because I thought that people usually used their legs. On the other hand, I rarely get a chance to drive in this life. Hop in. I want to show you something interesting.’

  They drove through streets packed with people who were dressed in a variety of outlandish styles and going about business the nature of which could sometimes only be guessed. On street corners, ratty-looking youths in leather jackets leant on lampposts and toyed with switchblade knives, wolf whistling at spandex-clad girls as they swept by on rollerblades. Newspaper boys in cloth caps declaimed the wares on their wire-frame stands. Men with sharp suits and ponytails held urgent conversations with their mobile telephonic devices. A policeman idly twirled his night stick. An ice-truck driver wandered from a Kwik-Shop convenience store towards his horse-drawn conveyance, munching on a microwaved breakfast burrito.

  At length they drew into the car park of the imposing steel-and-glass edifice of the Mercy Hill General Hospital. The hospital had a sign outside it reading: ASK ABOUT OUR

  GENEROUS MALPRACTICE SETTLEMENTS!!

  ‘This isn’t it,’ said the Doctor. ‘This isn’t what I wanted to show you, but it’s on the way.’

  They walked through corridors and wards lined with beds.

  Many of the patients were in full body casts, engendering some doubt as to whether anyone was actually alive inside them.

  Orderlies and nurses shuttled about tending to the patients generally but never quite, if you looked at them and paid attention, doing anything specific. The Doctor led Victoria and Jamie through the maze of corridors, occasionally sniffing the air in a refined sort of way, occasionally cocking his head as if to listen to something no one else could hear.

  Eventually they came to a small private room, in which lay the girl they had encountered out in the woodlands. Her head had been bandaged. An intravenous drip had been plugged into her arm and monitoring machines flashed and bleeped. A jolly-looking medical doctor was tending to her, chuckling to himself in a way that suggested that chuckling was his natural state.

  ‘Is the young lady allowed visitors?’ the Doctor asked, making to tip his hat and then looking disappointedly at his fingers when they failed to find one.

  ‘Are you immediate family?’ the jolly doctor asked them.

  ‘I think we’re more like friends,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Well...’ The doctor sucked his teeth consideringly.

  ‘Ordinarily, I’d say that only immediate family were allowed, but what the hell. He he he...’

  ‘And what’s your diagnosis, doctor?’ the Doctor asked, peering at the unconscious girl as she rested peacefully.

  ‘My diagnosis,’ said the jolly doctor, ‘is a nasty bump on the noggin, causing temporary unconsciousness and amnesia: Jamie and Victoria looked at each other. They had become quite accustomed by now to the way in which the Doctor had the knack of getting what he wanted from people - not so much through some mesmeric influence but by somehow managing to do and say precisely the right thing. This was slightly different.

  The jolly doctor just seemed to be mad, hopefully in a harmless sense, doing and saying things that had no connection with what people did and said in real life.

  ‘That doesn’t sound very medically specific,’ said the Doctor dubiously. ‘If it’s all the same to you, I’d appreciate a second opinion.’

  Another doctor stuck his head through the door. ‘Hello, everybody.’

  ‘Hello, Dr Rick,’ said the jolly doctor.

  ‘I’d like to hear a second opinion on this patient,’ said the Doctor. It was as if, thought Victoria, he was playing along with some common script.

  ‘A second opinion?’ Dr Rick scuttled into the room, rubbing his hands and exuding greasy untrustworthiness from every pore. He glanced at the unconscious girl. ‘Hmm. Massive trauma, severe angioplepsy, diploid prolapsation and a suspected hairline fracture of the skull. It’ll take months of intensive and expensive treatment to cure her, or my name’s not Dr Rick.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said the Doctor. ‘Doesn’t bother us, since we are not the people who will pay the bills.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dr Rick. ‘In that case, it’s a bump on the head causing temporary unconsciousness and amnesia. She should be coming out of it, right about now.’

  As if on cue, the girl stirred. She opened her eyes and groaned. ‘What happened to me?’ she murmured, running a frail hand across her brow. ‘Where am I... ?’

  ‘You’re quite safe. Don’t worry,’ said the Doctor soothingly.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  ‘I...’ The girl looked around, startled. ‘I can’t remember anything at all! I can’t remember who I am. I can’t even remember my own name...’

  ‘Now just what,’ said the Doctor, back in the automobile and driving it with an inept recklessness that nonetheless seemed to have them avoiding certain disaster time and time again, ‘did we learn from all that?’

  ‘They were lying.’ Jamie said from the back seat, shortly, his direct nature angered by those who resorted to subterfuge.

  ‘They were putting on an act.’

  ‘I’m, not sure if that was entirely the case,’ said Victoria, thoughtfully.

  ‘Oh yes?’ said the Doctor. ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘Well...’ Victoria groped for the words to define some rather abstract concepts. ‘If it were an act, I didn’t form the impression that they were aware of it. It’s something like the way that actors become the character they play, but more extreme than that. It looked wrong to us, but to them it was natural and real...’

  ‘Well done, Victoria,’ said the Doctor happily, turning the car sharply so that it narrowly missed an unexpected and frantically clanging trolley bus. ‘The lies, I think, are being told by someone or something else.’

  He took one hand from the steering wheel and gestured grandly to take in the world in general, the streets and buildings and people. ‘Is there anything about this that strikes you as strange?’

  ‘If you’re asking me,’ said Jamie, who had first met the Doctor in the battle of Culloden, and whose basic idea of a glittering metropolis was a lowland market settlement, It just looks strange, like all the other strange places you’ve taken me.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you don’t have too much basis for direct comparison,’ the Doctor allowed. ‘But take it from me, there are things happening here that simply aren’t right.

  Everywhere we look, we see things that shouldn’t be coexisting. Ice-trucks and mobile phones and trolley buses. Do you see all those automobiles parked outside that shopping mall, for example? The cars are from the fifties and sixties, the mall itself is classic nineteen-nineties... it’s as though someone’s just dropped all these things here, thinking they’re what make up a town, without any regard to their proper context in t
ime.’

  ‘You said these things would happen if we were on Earth,’

  Victoria said thoughtfully. ‘Do you mean we’re not on the Earth?’

  The Doctor frowned. ‘I suppose we could be but, well... it’s a bit difficult to explain. I think I’d be happier showing rather than telling.’

  The Doctor’s driving might have been erratic, but it covered the ground with efficiency, as well as with things spilled by other drivers as they swerved to avoid him.

  Soon they were out past the city limits, with nothing to see but scrubby woodland and the occasional gas station.

  Victoria couldn’t be sure, but she thought they were driving in the opposite direction from which they had first entered Lychburg, squashed up in the back of a police patrol car the previous night.

  That meant they were travelling ever further from the TARDIS which, currently inaccessible or not, served as an odd kind of home base in this strange and futuristic world. It wasn’t that this was particularly worrying, but her awareness of it settled in her mind like an itch she might at some point decide to scratch.

  After a while, at the point where both Victoria and Jamie were assuming that the plan was to drive on into some other town than Lychburg, the Doctor said, ‘We’re getting close now, I think.’

  A track led off from the road to what appeared to be, through the occasional bit of obscuring vegetation, a big open space in which was a huge, flat structure like a giant-sized magic lantern screen. A sign on a scaffold arch that had been erected where the track led into the space read DRIVE-0-RAMA, and on a hoarding to one side were the words:

  ‘Showing Tonite: It Came from the Hell Planet Beyond Time!’

  ‘Is that it?’ Jamie said from the back of the car. ‘Is that what we’ve come all this way to see?’

  ‘In a sense, Jamie,’ said the Doctor, driving the car straight past the Drive-o-Rama. ‘Now, if you’d both like to hold on tight to something... I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen next...’

  Absolutely nothing happened next, save that the car sped on along the road. The Doctor seemed a little disappointed.

  ‘I was sure we’d have felt some effect at least,’ he said, crestfallen. ‘By my reckoning we should all have exploded, or turned ourselves inside out, or something of that nature and... ah, well, never mind, here we are again.’

  Without changing their direction of travel, they were coming back up the track leading off into the Drive-o-Rama.

  Everything was precisely as they had seen it so recently, save that they were approaching the space from the opposite direction and the track led off the other way

  ‘It’s like the TARDIS.’ said Victoria, worriedly, as she realised what had happened. ‘Only it’s happening...’ She tried and failed to come up with something not quite as nonsensical as:

  ‘outside in, rather than inside out.’

  The Doctor nodded. It seems our travel plans are thwarted in every... well, in every direction we turn. We’re trapped here, I think, like insects in a killing bottle.’

  Chapter Twelve

  An Assemblage of Small Mementoes

  ‘Well of course I’m Dr Smith,’ the new arrival exclaimed indignantly from his cell. ‘Who else would I be?’ through the spyhole. Delbane saw him rummage around in his coat pockets, then stop when he realised that one of the Special Branch guards in the cell with him was on the point of doing something rash with his weapon.

  ‘I was merely trying to lay my hand on my affidavits,’ he said hastily, holding his hands where the guard could plainly see them. ‘I was even going to offer round the jelly babies, or toffee creams, or possibly a pickled egg, but now I rather think I won’t.’ He sat down on the bunk, which gave a dejected creak of old springs.

  The Special Branch guards remained impassive, as they had since the man had been brought here to the UNIT glasshouse, which was inordinately large and extensive, contained cells that could be pressurised and gave off more of the general impression of being some high-technological containment facility rather than anything else.

  It wasn’t the job of the guards to talk or think, it was their job to keep the prisoner secure and, should it come to it, shoot him without a qualm. As a result, with the cell door unlocked

  - the new arrival ostensibly being held merely until his identity was confirmed - the situation was more dangerous than if he had been locked up for committing a crime.

  ‘And I completely fail to see,’ he said to Delbane, as she walked through the door, ‘what the point is of segregating me from my companion.’ He seemed entirely unsurprised to see her, and it was as though he were simply picking up some previously interrupted conversation. ‘We arrived together, if you remember, so don’t you think we’d have done all our nefarious plotting and collusion beforehand?’

  Delbane ignored the question as one of the guards went out and brought her an incredibly uncomfortable canvas and tubular steel chair. The way this man had arrived, in addition to all the other strangeness she had so recently experienced, had left her feeling a little unbalanced inside.

  She wondered if she was entirely in her right mind.

  She decided to stick to simple, solid procedure:

  ‘You claim to be Dr John Smith,’ she said. ‘How can you prove that?’ She waggled a file at him meaningfully. ‘There are no verified photographs of you anywhere on record. Not one. How do we know you’re who you say you are?’

  The man shrugged. ‘I’m afraid I don’t photograph very well.

  Sometimes they come out and it’s like looking at a completely different man. I suppose I could point at a mirror and go “that’s me”, but that’s an incredibly tedious old joke, and I think we’ve had quite enough of them for a while.’

  He beamed suddenly, with the air of someone holding the other person in a conversation up to complete and utter ridicule. ‘I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you have one of my old UNIT friends vouch for me? Or more than one? Or every single one of them? That should go some way to convincing you on the law of averages if nothing else.’

  ‘That’s already in hand,’ said Delbane. ‘There are other matters to clear up first. For one thing, how did you manage to break in without people seeing you?’

  ‘I haven’t broken anything,’ said the putative Smith. ‘I have a perfect right to be here, and I defy you to prove I’ve broken anything at all, at least in that sense.’

  ‘Our man Slater,’ said Delbane,’ is swearing that you appeared out of thin air, right before his eyes. Or rather, that thing you came out of did. That’s clearly impossible...’ She quashed the thought that Slater, whom you couldn’t honestly think of as a recruit from the brightest and the best, was not the ideal person to bear witness to an impossibility.

  She decided to just cut to the chase: ‘...so just what the hell is happening here? What are you playing at?’

  ‘Slater?’ said the possible Smith. ‘Was he the chap who looked like he was having a small but rather neatly formed nervous breakdown?’ He snorted. ‘Things must have gone downhill if people are put out just by things appearing out of thin air. Happened all the time in my day. If that day still, in fact, existed.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ said Delbane.

  ‘Dr Smith’ ignored her question. ‘It just so happens,’ he said,

  ‘that I am something of an amateur illusionist, with a small sideline in conjury, sleight of hand and prestidigitation. You people happened to come upon me just as I and my lovely young assistant were practising our magic cabinet trick for the UNIT Christmas Ball.’

  ‘Christmas Ball?’ Delbane looked at him. ‘It’s the middle of July.’

  ‘I did say I was something of an amateur illusionist.’ said Dr Smith blandly. ‘I sometimes need a lot of practice to get it right.’

  There was a knock on the cell door and another Special Branch man came in with a familiar figure in tow. It was Benton. He looked haggard and slightly dazed, but at least 300

  per cent better
than when Delbane had last seen him. She found she was glad about that, strangely enough, and wondered what would happen to him and others like him if Crowley’s plans for the administrative annexing of UNIT came to fruition. Would he, and they, be kept on in some toothless, showcase capacity or would they simply be heaved out?

  ‘Corporal Benton!’ Dr John Smith bounded from the bunk in galvanised delight, heedless of the threat of what now amounted to three armed Special Branch men. ‘Or is it Sergeant now?’

  ‘It’s sergeant, Doc.’

  Benton, though more restrained, seemed as delighted to see Smith as the other was to see him. It was like watching years fall away from the man.

  ‘That’s nice to know,’ said Smith. ‘Sometimes you can only tell what time it is by the internal references.’

  ‘I was worried you might have... uh... changed so much I wouldn’t even recognise you.’ said Benton.

  ‘No chance of that. Not for a while, anyway.’

  Benton’s face now seemed to collapse in on itself slightly, in the manner of a man reduced to tears but fundamentally unable to cry. ‘You have to help,’ he blurted out. ‘The Brigadier’s been taken and these people...’ He looked around at the Special Branch men and Delbane with conflicting emotions, the conflict being which degree and sort of dislike would gain the upper hand. ‘Well, look at them. These people...’

  ‘Never fear, Sergeant Benton,’ said Doctor John Smith blithely. ‘We’ll put things right. All will be well, and well, and all manner of things shall be well, as I remember remarking to Francis Bacon one night as, for reasons of his own, he was trying to stuff snow up a chicken...’

  He turned to beam happily at Delbane. ‘I think you’ll agree this clears up almost any question that I’m not precisely who I say I am - and, if you’ll recall that dossier of yours, that means I have quite a bit of seniority around here.’