Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [16]
But today was a good day for high strangeness, even by the Doctor’s standards. Since she’d woken up, Sam had been mystified by a grand total of five different things.
Strange thing number one: the Doctor’s departure. Sam had wandered into the grand dome of the TARDIS console room to find him preparing to leave the ship. The doors had been open, and he’d been standing at the threshold, straightening his jacket as if readying himself for an important boardroom meeting. He would have looked pretty smart, if it hadn’t been for the grappling hook slung over his shoulder.
Strange thing number two: the Doctor’s explanation. He’d looked almost embarrassed when he’d seen Sam, and had accelerated his rate of jacket-straightening accordingly. ‘Going for a quick game of chess,’ he’d said. As he’d walked out of the TARDIS, he’d warned her not to follow him under any circumstances. Sam had obeyed his instructions, for once. Just to prove she could, really.
Strange thing number three: the computer simulation. After the Doctor had left, Sam had sniffed around the console room for a bit, for the simple reason that she didn’t often get the chance to fondle the controls without having the backs of her hands slapped. She’d found a computer monitor screen set into one of the panels, a screen she’d never noticed before, so either it was a new addition to the layout or it had only recently been unearthed from beneath the bits of hardware and empty yoghurt pots that kept cluttering up the console. Like everything else on the TARDIS, the computer had looked positively anachronistic. The graphics had been bright and blocky, the kind you used to get on those crap old microcomputers they had in schools back in the ’80s.
On the display, there’d been a crude representation of an office block, a grey slab covered in big square windows. Stuck to the side of the building, tilted at ninety degrees so its base was attached to the outside wall, there’d been a rectangular blue blob. The TARDIS, Sam had guessed.
As she’d watched, an animated graphic had popped out of the building. A little pink man, tumbling from a top-floor window. The man-graphic had fallen in an arc, dropping past the TARDIS and vanishing off the bottom of the screen, while at the top of the display the computer had reeled off a series of complex equations to do with the figure’s descent velocity. After a while, another man had fallen out of the window, at a different angle, but he’d also missed the TARDIS.
The little men had kept coming, until, finally, one had hit the tiny TARDIS. Immediately, the man had vanished, and the TARDIS graphic had flashed victoriously. Then the whole sequence had begun again, starting with the first, doomed, pink leaper.
Strange thing number four: the Doctor’s re-entry. While Sam had been trying to figure out the point of the computer simulation, there’d been a thumping sound from somewhere behind her. She’d turned, to see the Doctor lying on his back near the TARDIS doors. He’d been sprawled at a peculiar angle, arms outstretched, as if he’d just fallen out of the sky. He hadn’t been carrying his grappling hook.
Sam had folded her arms, which was what she usually did when she wanted an explanation. The Doctor had lain there a while, not moving, a huge grin plastered across his chops. Finally, he’d sat up, flicking a rogue wisp of hair out of his face.
‘Internal gravity compensators,’ he’d beamed. ‘Do you know, I had no idea whether that would work?’
And finally, strange thing number five: the Doctor’s sudden determination to be somewhere else. As soon as he’d picked himself up off the floor, he’d darted across to the console and had started hammering new algorithms into the systems, eventually punching (yes, actually punching) the dematerialisation switch. Even now, he was busy darting around the controls, fingering this, wobbling that. Sam hadn’t unfolded her arms yet.
‘Good game?’ she asked, more than a little tersely.
The Doctor answered with a wave of his hand. ‘He cheats,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he cheats. He moves pieces around between regenerations.