Heart of Tardis Read online

  Jamie returned her unspoken, raised-eyebrow query with a shrug. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘He’s off again.’

  The Doctor’s head rose, grinning and unkempt, from behind the console. The grin made Victoria’s heart sink. An otherworldly genius the Doctor might be, but it was the genius and otherworldliness, on occasion, of an idiot savant or a child. A fumbling, if fundamentally good-intentioned intelligence, with no real conception of the consequences of its actions. Victoria could quite imagine - should the circumstances ever arise - the Doctor going up to the Lord God Almighty and pulling on His beard, just to see whether or not it came off.

  ‘I think I have it,’ the little man proclaimed triumphantly. ‘I think I do. At last, I really think I do.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Victoria regarded him levelly ‘And what, precisely, do you really think you have?’

  The Doctor rolled down his sleeves and plucked his coat from where it hung on a nearby hat stand that Victoria had failed to notice before, her mind being occupied with other things. He shrugged himself into the coat and became, for some short while, diverted into fussing over the slight fray on its cuffs -

  then, with a start, seemed to remember where he was and turned with a flick of his pudding-bowl-cut hair to regard Victoria again. Not for the first time, she found herself wondering just how much the mischievous little twinkle in his eyes was innate, and how much was consciously contrived for show.

  ‘As I might have told you,’ the Doctor said, ‘at some point or other, I came to acquire the TARDIS under rather unfortunate circumstances. What with one thing and another, to avoid beating unnecessarily around the bush and, indeed, to cut a long story short, I ended up having to appropriate it by unconventional means...’

  ‘Stole it, you mean,’ said Jamie around the last half of his sandwich. ‘You mean you stole it.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the Doctor with a little moue of pique, ‘if you really want to put things in the worst possible light. In any case, my, ah, people have certain procedures in place for when such a thing should happen. If a TARDIS is, as you say, Jamie, stolen, then self-proliferating, command-level polyviral automemes are activated on an accretional and exponential time-delay basis, which...’

  The Doctor looked around at the blank looks he was receiving from both Jamie and Victoria.

  ‘It’s like chaining a penny farthing to a lamppost.’ he said,

  ‘or hobbling a horse. The difference being that my people are a bit more advanced and do things a bit more subtly. Instead of rendering the TARDIS immobile, they simply made it almost impossible for any thief to take it where he wants it to go. Set the controls for the late Byzantine era on Earth and you’ll up in the Cool Cheese Millennium on Jupiter; head for the year 3000 and you end up last Thursday afternoon... that’s why, I think, the old girl has become so intransigent as of late. It’s not a question of me not knowing the first thing about piloting her at all.’

  Now the Doctor gestured grandly, taking in the entire mass of tangled rubber tubing that adorned the room. ‘I have now managed to bypass those processes; work around them with a number of quite brilliantly unorthodox and ingenious connections, even if I say so myself. Of course, that means the loss of a certain number of fail-safes, but with a complete regaining of control that’s neither here nor there...’

  ‘Fail-safes?’ said Victoria uneasily. ‘What exactly do you mean by fail-safes?’

  ‘Oh, you know the sort of thing,’ The Doctor waved an airy hand. ‘Protocols that prevent us from materialising around some solid object, or in the heart of a sun, or in some universe other than our own. Not to worry though...’ He rubbed his hands together in a brisk and workmanlike fashion. ‘Such things are unimportant if one knows precisely where or when one is going. Allow me to demonstrate.’

  And with that, before either Jamie or Victoria could even so much as draw breath to protest, he reached for the console and pulled a lever.

  * * *

  ‘Now I think,’ said the Doctor, a number of hectic seconds later, ‘I know what it was I did wrong...’

  Chapter Two

  A Meander Through the Relics

  Species and their cultures evolve - but then, so does everything else. In biological terms, all evolution means is that a child looks different from its parents. Or applicable progenitory organisms. In general terms, evolution means that everything changes over time, even if only to collapse under entropy, to have bits drop off until it dies. The important factor in the process is that of selection. A change in basic nature happens over such immense periods, involves such extraordinary circumstances to bring it about, that in the terms of a generally humanoid life span any changes exist purely on the level of minor variations on a theme.

  ‘Is here we come to big-nasty war on monkey-hominid planet called Dirt,’ said the attendant, trundling through the chamber on the organically force-evolved rollers it used instead of legs. A complex limb sprouted from its grey, obloidular body and fashioned its appendages complexly so that they formed the outline of what could have been a graphically-designed arrow, pointing at one of the massive display cases to its left.

  ‘Is phase one of big hitting everybody people with stuff type-thing that last almost all of monkey-hominidly local century, what is number of fingers aboriginal monkey-hominids have times number of toes, what come to eighty-eight proper years.’

  The display case was crammed with artefacts, some of them genuine, some alien attempts at reproduction. They had been arranged in an illustrative tableau - again, by alien hands, with alien sensibilities.

  ‘Is you see Tommies and the Fritzes all sitting in trenches,’ the attendant continued informatively, ‘with the clangy pinball machines and mustard gas masks, what are made from finest yummy yellow mustard and is made into nasty horrible devil faces, and is blowing poison gas to protect them from their enemy, the boorish Hun, what is riding towards them on big spiky-armoured pecky-battle Istereich! Is above them flying bloody Red Baron in evil dirigible sausage-ship, and is very big impressive dogfight - with real pretend-move living dogs grown from Collection protoplasmic gene-banks all same!’ Romana looked up at the terrified and yapping chihuahuas as they struggled in the straps securing them to the conveyances that hung on wires inside the case. ‘That strikes me as being unnecessarily cruel,’ she said. ‘And not entirely accurate in the historical sense.’ She turned to her companion. ‘Is it? Even remotely like it was, I mean. You’re the one with the first-hand experience in these matters.’

  ‘Well, these things get lost and found and misinterpreted over the millennia,’ said the Doctor, smiling up at the scene. He seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘You have to give them full marks for effort, if nothing else.’

  ‘Even so...’ Romana said dubiously. ‘You’d think they’d notice little things like the fact of it being physically impossible for something like that to fly. What are the things the dogs are strapped into actually supposed to be?’

  ‘I think,’ said the Doctor, ‘they’re the Collectors’ idea of Sopwith Camels. It’s quite a feat of bioengineering, I suppose, that they managed to get the cockpits and flight controls between the humps.’

  The attendant, meanwhile, had led his motley collection of sightseeing alien charges to another case. The Doctor and Romana hurried to catch up.

  ‘Is here phase two of Big Dirt War. In happy Englandish springtime scene we see Good King Hitler on the beach and is playing with his ball, tossing it to Mother Brown and old Uncle Joe and rumpy-jiggy girlfriend Nancy Mitford. But is soon to come big and horrible tragedy! Is evil Eisenstein here on beach, too, with atomic Nazi doodlebugs! Is see how they burrow through the sand making big swirly marks (is from which they get their name) and is heading for Good King Hitler to crawl up bipedal-hominid leg and blow brains out of head! Soon whole planet Dirt is plunged into big hitting people with stuff-type thing again, and evil Eisenstein goes hoppedy-skip back to submersible nuclear battleship, what is called Bismarck...’

  Th
e race of creatures that had eventually become known as the Collectors had once been rather better known as a hideous galactic scourge. While they hadn’t turned suns into supernovae, obliterated entire worlds with planet-crackers or killed populations on the level of genocide, as opposed to decimation, they had proved unstoppable in their own particular way. Their invention of the hyperwobble-drive and their use of psychonomic shielding on their swarms of ships meant that, while any planetary defence system might see them coming, the incalculably erratic progress of the ships themselves would prove too much for organic and artificial minds alike. Said planetary defences would suffer the large-scale equivalent of a nervous breakdown, allowing the planet to be completely overrun.

  The only known defence from the creatures who would become known as the Collectors was, quite simply, to get the hell out of the way. Even the Daleks themselves had once, on hearing rumours of a band of Collectors in the vicinity, gone through extremely tortuous subterfuges to mask their entire home planet, pretend that it had been destroyed, and only bring it out from cover when the creatures who would become known as the Collectors had gone.

  The creatures who would become known as the Collectors were not evil as such, but they were rabidly acquisitive. They had an insatiable desire for things, which they plundered from the planets that they overran, with absolutely no eye or other applicable optical receptor for the items’ proper context or worth. The distinctions between precious gems or copralithic lumps of compacted silt, or finely crafted burial masks, or dead animals, or paving slabs, or slaves, or mangles, or jelly moulds...

  All the values that other sentient beings placed upon the objects around them escaped the creatures who would become known as the Collectors completely. They were simply things and the creatures who would become known as the Collectors wanted them. And they acquired them in such numbers that mere words like millions and billions lose their very meaning.

  Over their millennia of plunder, however, the creatures who would become known as the Collectors changed. One cannot come into contact with thousands upon thousands of other cultures - even via a process of violent mass theft - without certain attributes impacting and rubbing off.

  Over thousands of years, the drive for pure acquisition waned; comparisons and contrasts formed despite themselves. The nature of the creatures who would be known as the Collectors evolved, by increments, until at a certain point they found themselves in a position similar to a gang of pirates looking at their booty, running their eyes over the haul of gold and jewels and suchlike treasures and wondering: what the hell are we going to do with it all now?

  The upshot was, some tens of thousands of years beyond what in human terms would be called the twentieth century, if you wanted to find something your best bet was to go and look around the Big Huge and Educational Collection of Old Galactic Stuff.

  The TARDIS had materialised in the hall of Big Pretend-Move Animals But Don’t ‘Cos They’re Dead And Have Sand Stuck Up Them. The Doctor and Romana had wandered through the tangled taxidermic bestiary, past hairy mammoth-voles and hipogiraffes and behemoths and bandersnatches, until they had come to one of the transport tubes that wound and proliferated through the entire Big Huge and Educational Collection. The Collection was sorted and arranged by the kind of minds that would have been hard-pressed even to comprehend such a human term as ‘random’. One could travel through it for weeks, for years - for centuries - and never find the same place twice, let alone what one might be trying to locate.

  Fortunately, the Doctor had remembered to take along a reasonably sophisticated tracking device, its cannibalised twenty-second century bubble-circuitry packed inside the case of a hollowed out Pifco transistor radio. He and Romana had shot through the tubes on blasts of slightly noxious compressed air, occasionally shouting simple directions like ‘Up!’,

  ‘Right!’ and ‘Down again!’ until with some degree of overshooting and backtracking they had reached the near vicinity of their final goal.

  Now, as they tagged along behind the sightseers being led through the hall of What Human-Type Monkey Hominids Got Up To On Planet Dirt, the tracking device began to bleep to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday to You’ via a cheap little sound-circuit that had been recycled from a musical greetings card. ‘I think we’ve found him,’ said the Doctor with delight. It was probably the first and only time in the history of the universe that anyone had been delighted by the sound of a musical greetings card.

  ‘...is while Johnny Welfare plays folk rock on a stolen guitar,’ the alien attendant was saying, ‘his girlfriend is getting high on boogie tea and has fixed herself a California sandwich...’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Romana peered into the display case, which was showing a tableau from what had apparently been the Summer of Great Big Rumpy-Pumpy Love. ‘I can’t see him.’

  ‘You’re looking in the wrong direction,’ said the Doctor. ‘By the lava lamp and under the I’m Backing Britain poster.

  They’ve covered him with a throw-rug and sat a gonk on top of him, but I’d recognise him anywhere.’

  Romana looked closer and, indeed, saw the familiar shape under the horrid orange and purple covering. ‘Do you think he’s intact, after all these centuries? Do you think we can get him to work?’

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ said the Doctor cheerfully, rubbing his hands together at the prospect of some serious tinkering. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, we can simply extrapolate such memory algorithms as remain and transplant them into a new chassis. I’d been meaning to upgrade the little fellow for a while now, anyway.’

  ‘Hmph.’ Romana rapped the display case thoughtfully. She had been expecting glass, but the sound told her it had been fabricated from some extruded form of monatomic carbon and was diamond-hard. Any thoughts on the matter of how we’re going to get him out?’

  ‘I have formulated,’ said the Doctor, his eyes sidling from the display case to the attendant and its charges as they moved on to another scene, ‘a marvellously subtle and complex plan of action as we speak.’

  Chapter Three

  The Return of the Final Revenge of the Creature Part Two

  The spaceship powered through the inky depths of outer space in a surprisingly stylish manner that was in fact a direct lift from an episode of Buck Rogers and the Mole Men starring Buster Crabbe.

  In the control cabin, entered by way of a basic soundtrack-popping splice, Professor Saunders pulled a lever to activate a rather diminutive Van de Graaff generator the immediate function of which was not readily apparent.

  The Proximan Death Barrier was destroyed with the implosion of the planet,’ he said, in his suave received-pronunciational tones, idly fending off the advances of a smitten pair of female guards, who were trying to stroke his brow.

  ‘We’ll have no problem getting back to Earth. Indeed, with the modifications I’ve made to our atomic space-jets, I believe we can make it in half the time.’

  ‘Imagine that!’ exclaimed Scooter from where he was being partially smothered by the six-foot tall and strapping Commandant, who had previously presided over the horrors of the Slave Podiums. ‘A trip of thousands and thousands of miles in a single week! You’re a genius, Prof.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Professor. ‘I rather have to admit that I am.

  Just a little to the left, if you’d be so kind, my dear.’

  Captain Crator looked up from where he was studying something that flashed its lights and went ping.? ‘I suppose I’d better check on our royal guest.’

  The High Queen had, in some unexplained manner been able to lay her hands on a fetching new samite gown, and a variety of soft furnishings which were variously hung and strewn around the formerly bare and spartan steel-plate-and-rivet-walled cabin. She now reclined upon a rather markedly luxurious couch, toying with the slightly insubstantial-looking chains that secured her to the wall.

  ‘Ah, me,’ she said despondently, looking up at Captain Crator as he came into the cabin. ‘I see now how my intolerance
and dictatorial ways have led my planet to its doom.’

  Crator’s face shifted expressions furiously as it attempted to convey how he was deciding to conceal the fact that it had been Professor Saunders, sitting on a lever who had inadvertently set the Proximan bomb-rockets to explode in their own silos. He sat down himself down on the couch and took her hand. ‘You’ll have to stand trial on Earth for your crimes,’ he said, with a lunatic disregard for any kind of comparative legality whatsoever ‘but, with the loss of your planet, I think they’ll decide that you’ve suffered enough.’ He became expansive, and not a little gesticulatory. A new life on Earth awaits you, High Queen - and one to put even the glittery minarets and weevil-swamps of Proxima XIV to shame!’

  ‘One can but hope,’ said the Queen, coolly, but you could tell that she was warming to the dashing Captain even as she spoke. The good Professor Saunders has been advising me as to how I might fit in there better.’ She smiled at him through lowered eyelids. ‘So tell me, Captain Crator what is this thing you Earth men call “an expeditious bit of the how’s-your-father”?’

  The road back into Lychburg wound through a series of wooded hills, branching several times, and in the night it was easy to get lost. Norman swore under his breath and glanced between the two unmarked roads available at the junction. If her traffic had been around, he could have just gone with the general flow, but due to some freak of timing there was no other vehicle in sight. Norman was sufficiently adolescent to place a premium on looking cool in front of his girl - or at least not looking the precise opposite - and to wander aimlessly through the back roads for an hour would look, he thought, uncool in the extreme.

  ‘I think we should go left,’ Myra said. It wasn’t so much what she said as the way she said it, but he felt an almost physical paroxysm of relief. It was as if she had read his mind, and seen his secret dread of girl-contempt, and had made damn sure that what she said contained not a single trace of it. Mr Hecht had talked in his class about teenage hormones, Norman recalled, how they made you sorta crazy and confused, how I hey made you blow the tiniest of things out of all proportion -