Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [87]
The Doctor scooped a stone from the bank and tossed it lightly into the river. With a soft splash it vanished, leaving gently spreading concentric circles. ‘Oops. Fractured the water.’
‘Facile and specious,’ said Sabbath. ‘There is no correlation.’
The Doctor had sought out a few more smooth stones. Now, as they continued walking, he began to juggle them. ‘Your problem, Sabbath, is that you’re a reductionist. You’re so certain a timeline can be pinned down and defined just so. It’s a very eighteenth-century view of science, if you don’t mind my pointing that out, this idea that truth is something that can be proved rather than something that hasn’t yet been disproved. Is there some ideal timeline out there, some Platonic essence of form, that you’re trying to make time conform to?’
‘Dear me, Doctor, I can’t believe I’m hearing you argue for chaos.’
‘You think it’s either your kind of order or else it’s chaos.’ The Doctor started juggling so that he caught stones behind his back as well as in front of him. ‘What’s so difficult to understand about variations within a structure? What if the “real” timeline is like a musical score, with infinite ornamentations possible? There can’t be a perfectly correct performance of a score, because a score is a guide, not a definition. It opens possibilities rather than closing them off. Why shouldn’t time be like music?’
‘Very pretty. And what if you’re wrong, and every trip you so blithely take pulls out another thread in time’s warp?’
The Doctor caught his stones one after another, and tossed them all into the river. Their various concentric ripples smacked lightly together and dissipated.
‘And what if you’re wrong, and in paring down time’s possibilities you strangle reality?’
‘Doctor!’
They both turned. It was Fitz’s voice.
‘Down here!’ called the Doctor.
Fitz came jogging through the trees. ‘Telegram came.’
He handed it to the Doctor, who ripped it open. Fitz and Sabbath looked over his shoulders and they all three read that neither Mayview nor anyone else at the clinic knew of or could find records for any other residences Chiltern might have owned or rented.
‘That’s it,’ Sabbath said quietly. ‘We have exhausted all our leads. Unless the local police track him down, a contingency I consider remote, Dr Chiltern has eluded us.’ The Doctor said nothing, just stared at the telegram as if it might, if he looked long enough, turn out to contain a different message.
‘Maybe he won’t use the machine again,’ said Fitz without much conviction.
The Doctor shook his head. ‘If he didn’t intend to use it, why take it with him?’
‘Indeed,’ Sabbath agreed. ‘And it’s possible that if he even so much as tinkers with it...’
The Doctor crushed the telegram into a ball.
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
The Doctor and Sabbath sat up late that night. Fitz, who was the last of the others to remain downstairs, sat nursing a beer at the little bar and watching them across the room, their chairs drawn up to the stone fireplace, heads together, arguing, pondering, suggesting. He was struck by the disinterested concentration of their discussions, as if each had forgot who the other was and was focused solely on the problem. Periodically the Doctor would rise and pace restlessly, while Sabbath, with a deep sigh, leaned back in his chair and stared morosely at the flames. Then the Doctor would resume his seat and they’d confer some more. The Doctor had drawn dozens of the machine’s details and instructions on a pad, and they went over these again and again without, so far as Fitz could make out, arriving at any helpful conclusions. They were brooding separately when he finally went upstairs to bed.
‘Of course, if by any chance he uses the machine again without destroying the universe,’ Sabbath said drily, ‘he’ll show up on my instruments and we can quickly find him.’
‘Ah yes,’ said the Doctor in the same tone. ‘After all, he’s used it three times already and the universe is still here. We shall continue to trust to blind luck and it will see us through.