Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [108]
‘Yeah, but you’re not. Are you exercising incredible self-control, or are you really not worried?’
The Doctor moved his shoulders in something that wasn’t quite a shrug. ‘We’re doing everything we can.’
This didn’t really answer Fitz’s question, but he let it pass.
‘The only danger,’ said Anji, ‘is if this third Chiltern has another place to go. And that doesn’t seem likely.’
‘No it doesn’t,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘He was a prisoner in the house on Dartmoor, which rather diminished his opportunities for finding hideaways.’
‘You never saw him there, did you?’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘It was dark. You’ve seen as much of him as I have.’
‘He looked like...’ Fitz thought back on his brief shocked glimpse of the horseman in the glare of the Jonah’s lights, ‘I don’t know what...’ he finished weakly.
‘What happened to him?’ said Anji. ‘What went wrong?’
The Doctor looked out the window at the night rushing past. ‘I don’t know.’
* * *
Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor went straight to the computer screen attached to the sensors and began fiddling with different settings, calling up readings and printing out graphs, none of which appeared to satisfy him. Fitz watched him, slightly tranced from tiredness but, after his nap on the train, wide awake. After muttering that she was not, not, going to be asleep when the universe ended, Anji had more or less passed out on the sitting-room settee. The Doctor, in contrast, seemed keyed up, almost in a hurry.
‘Fitz –’ he said, pausing for a screen to come up, then stopped. He punched a few buttons. ‘Last night –’ he began again.
‘It’s all right.’
‘I wasn’t –’
‘Forget it,’ Fitz said. ‘You were right to get rid of me. If I’d known what you were planning I’d have killed you.’
The Doctor smiled. ‘I had to go there,’ he said, still apologetic.
‘I know. Bloody shame if it was a wasted trip.’
The Doctor shut his eyes briefly. ‘Yes.’
Put my foot in it there, Fitz winced. What could that journey possibly, even impossibly, have been like? And to take it again after that first, involuntary, hideous one – he thought of the Doctor in the white bed in the Liverpool hospital, screaming when he had no breath to scream with.
‘So,’ he said quickly, ‘what are you going to do if you get a signal on that?’
‘Contact Sabbath immediately.’
‘How? By pager?’
‘An equivalent.’ The Doctor laid something that did indeed look very like a pager beside the keyboard. ‘He’ll do the same when Chiltern shows up there.’
‘And we’ll charge over?’
‘He may be able to handle it himself.’ The Doctor narrowed his eyes at the screen, then sat back. ‘All right.’
‘What?’
‘I may have managed to make the sensors work on a fine enough level to detect the machine when it’s off, just from traces of its activity. May have. The trade-off is that I’ve had to narrow the sweep area geographically to about forty square miles. I’m beginning in Devon and moving up through Wales, going from west to east.’
‘How long will that take?’
‘Three or four hours. Now,’ the Doctor stood up, ‘I want you to sit here and watch the screen and if you see anything, press this button on the, erm, pager.’
‘What if I fall asleep?’ said Fitz, nervous at the responsibility.
‘Why would you? You look bright-eyed and alert to me. And I’ll turn on the coffee machine as I leave.’
‘Go where?’
‘After that mirror.’
* * *
Chapter Twenty-five
In the night, the Crystal Palace seemed constructed not of glass but of shadow and reflection. Not fully illuminated but lit at intervals by electric bulbs, it was from the outside a mass of soft darkness with glints of hard yellow light in its depths. As the Doctor moved swiftly along beside the building, the interior shadows wavered and moved with his passage, and the light came and went as if from behind wind-stirred leaves.
Over the river, the public clocks of London began to sound, not quite in order, so that there came an overlapping echo of bass and tenor and dull iron notes, shifting in shape and pitch as they fell across the water. one-two‐three/ONE-tw‐/two-THREE‐one/three-one