Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [71]
‘The younger-looking one,’ he answered.
‘And that’s why he thinks I regenerated: Adric here saw me regenerate, only a couple of days ago in his timeline, but centuries ago in mine.’ The Doctor smiled, satisfied that he had explained the situation sufficiently clearly.
‘So there are two of you on this planet, at this time?’
Adric asked.
‘Yes,’ the Doctor admitted. ‘I’ve crossed my own timestream. Oops.’ He didn’t seem unduly concerned.
‘It’s a temporal paradox, then?’
‘Well, at the very least it’s a pair of Docs,’ the Doctor chortled at his own joke. Adric and Roz glanced at each other.
‘Don’t the Time Lords have a law against this sort of thing?’ Forrester asked.
‘Oh yes, but laws like that are there to be broken. Don’t scowl, Roz. There are all sorts of loopholes. I’m not meant to meet myself, but I haven’t, have I? Not yet. Anyway, these things happen. It’s no worse than having a boy from another universe or an Adjudicator from nearly four hundred years in the future wandering around. Now we know there’s been a mix-up, your Doctor can return to the TARDIS and pop off somewhere else. Is he still trying to get Tegan back to Heathrow?’
Adric nodded.
‘Well, just find him and say that the situation here is all under control and he’s not to worry about it.’
‘The situation s under control, is it?’ Forrester asked.
‘Just about.’ The Doctor’s grave expression discouraged Adric from pursuing the matter.
‘So you know what that thing out there is?’
The Doctor bounded up onto the chair and peered out of the skylight. ‘Good, it’s here. Thought so.’ He jumped down again, his face set in an expression of determination.
‘Why should my Doctor leave?’ Adric asked. ‘He was here first.’
The Doctor and Forrester hadn’t heard, or were pretending nor to.
‘Do you know what it is, then?’ she was asking.
‘We have to get down there,’ the Doctor said evasively.
‘The door’s locked,’ Adric told him. ‘We’ll need the sonic screwdriver.’
‘Oh no we won’t.’ He moved over to the keypad and tapped one of the controls. The door slid open. The Doctor looked back over his shoulder, grinning. ‘When in doubt, always press the big green button.’
‘Camera Twelve: Booking Office. Look at her. She’s not concealing any weaponry, that’s for sure.’
Adjudicator Haigh twisted one of the dials on his console and the bare back of the young woman lurched toward him. Adjudicator Lewis returned to study the same image on his own monitor. The girl in question wore a full-length dress in green silk. It was low-cut at the back, any lower and she would be facing an indecency charge.
On a planet with an Arctic climate there weren’t too many dresses like that, even in the buildings with climate control. She was petite with a finishing-school walk.
‘She looks good from the back,’ Haigh confirmed. ‘But that’s no guide. Some of the ugliest women I know look good from the back. Remember that gorgeous blonde who turned out to be a Maalri? Lovely bum, but the face of a warthog.’ Lewis wondered, not for the first time, how his colleague had passed the rigorous psychological profiling at the Academy. He also worried briefly about neglecting their duties – they were meant to be on the lookout for terrorists and illegal aliens – but then he remembered the banks of computers behind him that were covertly sweeping the entire complex for guns and bombs. If any Adamists made it into the terminal, then Haigh and Lewis would the last to find out – the computers informed Security Command before getting around to them.
Looking out for pretty girls was one of the more entertaining ways of passing the time while nanoprocessors did your job for you. Besides, there hadn’t been any Adamist attacks here for over a year.
The girl turned around, and smiled at something. The dress wasn’t as low-cut at the front, not quite, but it shimmered around her as she moved.
‘OK, I admit it, she’s beautiful,’ Haigh said.
‘She’s very young.’
‘Nothing wrong with that. I like the virginal type.’