Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [7]
`The tendency of a body to remain at rest or moving with constant velocity is called "the inertia of the body". This is related to the mass, which is the total amount of substance,'
Ian told the class. The thick and tangible smell of chalk dust, books, damp uniforms and of school dinners wafting through the corridors was almost enough to make him believe that he had travelled in time.
An outrageous concept.
NEWTON KNEW HIS ONIONS, had been scrawled in a child's handwriting on the blackboard behind Ian. He looked at the motto, shook his head, took the duster and removed the final word, replacing it with APPLES. 'Much better,' he noted.
`Therefore, the resultant force exerted on any given body (in this case, a Time and Space craft disguised as a 1952
London police telephone box by means of a science wholly beyond any explanation that I can give you) is directly proportional to the acceleration produced by the force. In this case, gravity. Kenneth Fazakerley, are you eating in class?'
The reply wasn't at all what he expected.
Ìan. Are you all right?'
First Barbara Wright's voice and then her face sliced into his hallucination. That wasn't especially unpleasant either.
Just like that first time they had met, their eyes drawn to each other across a crowded room in that quaint little tea shop on Tottenham Court Road.
'Sir Isaac Newton told us why an apple falls down from the sky,' Ian mumbled and tried to stand, with the aid of Barbara.
But he only succeeded in bruising his knees on the console room floor. 'Why didn't he just leave gravity alone? We were doing quite nicely before he came along...'
Barbara towered over him, elongated. Bent out of shape by gravity's pull and seemingly at an angle of 60 degrees.
Don't get me started on Pythagoras, Ian thought angrily.
Another right silly-sausage with his hypotenuse and his theorem. Barbara's hands rested on her hips and she had a concerned look on her face, of the sort that she normally reserved for tending to a second-former with a grazed knee in the playground. 'Have you hit your head?' she asked, maternally. Ian just smiled, stupidly, and tried to get back to for every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.
Somewhere nearby Vicki was still sobbing. 'Look to the girl, Miss Wright,' Ian murmured and then slumped into unconsciousness to dream, happily, of sitting in a tree and throwing apples at that clever-dick Newton's head.
`Good gracious, child, stop that snivelling. It's only a flesh wound.'
Ian had always found that particular phrase a little ludicrous. A flesh wound means, surely, that one's own flesh has been wounded? Which is, let's be fair, pretty painful.
Therefore, he saw no reason to quantify this as somehow less dramatic than any other type of non-flesh wound.
Considerably more than some, in fact. He opened his eyes and saw the Doctor and Barbara struggling to apply a cotton bandage to Vicki who had, seemingly, cut her arm on the rim of the console. Feeling dizzy and sluggish, Ian closed his eyes again and swam happily back to his warm and cosy dreamworld until a sharp poking in his ribs brought him out again.
`...And as for you, Chesterton,' the Doctor said, prodding Ian with his stick, 'they would call this malingering in the army.'
A scowling face and a shock of white hair greeted Ian as he reopened his eyes.
Ì did two years' national service in the RAF, Doctor,' Ian replied, pushing the walking stick away. 'You know that.
Honourably discharged. I can still remember my rank and serial number if you want?'
The Doctor seemed to spend an age considering this before he chuckled and patted Ian on the back. 'You'll live, my boy,' he noted and returned his attention to the still-complaining Vicki. Òh, do stop making such a fuss...’
Barbara joined Ian and knelt beside the wicker chair in which he was resting. 'How do you feel?' she asked.
`How do I look?'
`Like you've just gone fifteen rounds with Henry Cooper,'
she replied, truthfully, and held up a mirror to Ian. One side of his face was swollen and an ugly purple bruise was