Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [10]
The only way she could picture it was as a police box flying through space, like a rocket, but the image seemed faintly ridiculous.
Tegan wasn’t the Astronomer Royal, but she watched the telly: space probes from Earth were beginning to explore the solar system. The new space shuttle could orbit the Earth in ninety minute, that was ten times faster than Concorde. But it would take the space shuttle hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to reach the nearest star.
According to Einstein, the fastest that anything could travel was the speed of light: 186 000 miles a second Her year twelve science teacher had said that the speed of light was a constant that underpinned the way the universe worked. If the shuttle could fly that fast, it would be able to whiz around the Earth nine times a second, which seemed plenty fast enough for Tegan. But it would take a spaceship travelling at the speed of light four years to reach the nearest solar system. The TARDIS travelled to other galaxies even other universes, in a matter of moments. The Doctor had mentioned once that his ship had a ‘lightspeed overdrive’, and with just those two words he had casually invalidated the whole of human physics.
‘You can’t fly it, you know. It was the Master who guided the ship to Castrovalva.’
‘I’m perfectly well aware of that,’ Tegan replied curtly.
‘From what I’ve seen of Earth in your time, I doubt you even begin to understand how the ship works.’ What infuriated her most of all was that Adric wasn’t trying to be cruel, he thought he was making a reasonable point. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor by the hatstand, scratching equations into a notebook with a stubby pencil
‘And you do, I suppose?’
Adric looked up from his notepad for the first time.
‘Gallifreyan technology is very advanced, but if you understand block transfer computation and realize that TARDISes have an infinite amount of mass and energy at their disposal, the maths involved is surprisingly straightforward.’
Tegan bristled, determined to say something perceptive.
‘The TARDIS isn’t infinite any more, we jettisoned a quarter of it.’
Adric just chuckled.
Before Tegan could reply, the Doctor and Nyssa bustled into the console room.
‘Good, good. You’ve not touched anything.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’ When the Doctor said it, the remark was almost comforting.
‘What the hell happened?’ Tegan demanded to know.
‘Are we still heading for Heathrow?’
‘To answer your questions in order: I don’t know and I don’t know.’ The Doctor dashed around the console, glancing at settings, flicking levers. ‘But at, least now we’ve stopped. That’s odd: a syonic pulse.’ He cancelled the readout with the flick of a switch,
Adric had shuffled to his feet and reached the console.
‘So where are we?’
The Doctor’s eyes flashed. ‘See for yourself.’
He twisted a control, and the scanner shutter slid open.
Together they watched an alien world as it rolled beneath them. Tegan gazed at its image on the scanner. The TARDIS imaging system gave a very good impression of scale. This near, they could only see a section of the planet.
It was a brilliant soap-powder white. Meteorites tumbled into the gravity well, incandescing as they hit the atmosphere. Aurorae danced in the ionosphere. Below, grey clouds drifted by, looking as if they had been daubed onto the atmosphere with a thick brush. She watched awestruck as a hurricane swept across a wide plain. Despite these isolated examples of violence, the overall impression was serenity, timelessness.
‘That isn’t Heathrow,’ Tegan noted. No one listened to her. The planet was beautiful, it was a sight that no other Earth person had ever seen before, nor would they in Tegan’s lifetime. But it wasn’t home.
Information was pouring across one of the readouts on the console. Nyssa began to examine it. The Doctor joined her.
‘Why don’t you read out