Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [87]
She regretted some of her experiences and experiments now (and maybe ought to regret a few more of them) but all the time her frame of reference had been expanding.
Moving to England as soon as she could, relishing the idea that every face she saw would be unfamiliar and that everything from car registration plates to the banknotes would all look different. With her new job, the world was her oyster.
But after only a few days travelling with the Doctor, Tegan had begun to question her wanderlust. It was like some crazy package tour. Four days, and as many alien worlds: the cool warmth of the TARDIS interior; the mud huts and pure mathematics of Logopolis; the recursive labyrinths of Castrovalva; and now this arctic colony. The day before yesterday Tegan had been witness to the dawn of creation itself. The cosmos was larger than she would ever be able to comprehend, and full of monsters and death. Everything out there wanted to kill her or destroy the universe. Tegan just wanted to go home and lock the door.
‘Can you prescribe anything?’ she asked wearily.
The Doctor’s eyes were screwed shut as he tried to think of a solution. He had been staring death in the face, beating impossible odds, saving planets for centuries. How did he stay so cheerful?
Finally the Doctor clicked his fingers and looked her square in the eye. ‘Temporal Fusion,’ he said. We can send the TARDIS back along its original flightpath, undoing everything. You might say that the original flight is a stitch in time – well, we’ll unstitch it!’
Another analogy.
‘How’s it done?’ Adam asked. He was pretending to take it all in his stride, but Tegan could see he was as lost as she was. He was just some small-time crook, after all.
‘Two Time Lords acting in concert would be able to navigate the Vortex. There have to be two – the mental strain would be too much for just one of us.’
‘So we have to get you and Patience back to her TARDIS?’ Adam asked. They had reached the top of some wooden steps. Quint climbed down them, Tegan followed him, trying to listen to the Doctor.
‘Yes. We use the Time Control Unit. The telepathic interface ought to be undamaged, but even if it has been then I can rig something up from material from the TARDIS’s central cortex.’
Quint helped Tegan down. ‘So where is this TARDIS?’
Adam asked the Doctor, who had reached the top of the steps.
‘Well, that’s just it, I’m not sure.’ The Doctor stood up and straightened his frock coat.
Adam had been the last one to come down, now he was moving to a gleaming control panel.
Tegan looked around the room. The wood panelling had been replaced with chrome and white plastic, When she had been on holiday in Hong Kong two years before, Tegan had been invited to a party onboard a luxury yacht.
That’s what this reminded her of. A couple of people dressed in the same buccaneer style as Adam manned control panels, looking a few centuries out of place. All around were radar screens and instruments. The pilot obviously did everything by pressing buttons. They’d not been far off fly-by-wire in Tegan’s time, but it was good to know that it had been perfected. Looking closer, Tegan saw patches of rust, and that some of the facings had been chipped. The ship was well-maintained, but it was old.
‘Patience might be able to locate it, but, well... she’s unconscious and, I can’t risk another telepathic conference.
If I still had my time sensor...’
‘Doctor, the conseque–’
‘I am well aware of the consequences, Tegan,’ the Doctor snapped. He returned to his musings. ‘Now, I can’t initiate temporal fusion by myself, so we need Patience conscious and relatively strong. So, I think we should keep heading for the Nightingale Facility.’
Adam nodded his assent. ‘We cannot travel much further by ship: we’ll be too big a target. We’ll have to trek the last ten miles by foot. We’ll be underground for most of the time.’
The Doctor looked around the room, taking in his surroundings for