Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [3]
"So that's the dream!" Vael yelled aloud.
From light aeons past came the angry roar of the pitiless Sphinx. Vael cried out in fear at a bent figure, cowled in darkness, that reached out a skeletal hand to him for help. The hood of shadow slid back to reveal the wizened face. An old man imploring the brash youth he had once been to think again and change the ordained future. In the dream half-light, Vael knew himself.
Through the dark iridescence of the cosmos came the distant flicker of a star. As it approached, Vael saw that its light had a regular pulse. It crowned a hard oblong that tumbled towards him out of the maelstrom. The shape's blue-panelled surfaces snatched at the primal glare of starlight as they spun. Vael willed it to stop, but there was no escape. How could he control his dreaming? How did he know that the unreadable runes on its sides read "Police Public Call Box"? It tumbled nearer. It would crush him.
"This one's on me," said Ace across the café table.
The Doctor smiled gratefully at his young companion and stopped fishing through his moneyless pockets. He sat back and contemplated the dog-eared menu. "Baked Alaska," he said.
"Yeah." She draped her battered black jacket with all the badges on the back on the chair.
The Doctor was intrigued. "Frozen in the middle, but hot on the outside?"
"Ice cream and hot meringue."
"Fascinating. I've never been to Alaska. All right, I'll have one."
"As long as you eat it as well as analyse it!"
He wasn't sure about that, but agreed to keep Ace happy. "And a glass of water too, please," he added and sat back contented.
Ace wished he would take his hat off. He seemed to have been wearing the same jacket and paisley scarf for at least the past month relative time, but they never looked any worse for wear.
The traffic on Ealing Broadway was busy for Sunday — if it was still Sunday. Ace couldn't remember a night in between that could have led to Monday. The amount of planet-hopping that she and the Doctor had clocked up lately should have made jet lag feel like a mild headache. It didn't, because, she suspected, the TARDIS somehow compensated. She reckoned the Doctor's time machine had idiosyncrasies like that. Even moods, like its owner.
But she and the Doctor needed a decent meal, not a foil-wrapped jumble of flavoured nutrient bars dished out from the TARDIS lunch machine. Ace had instinctively renamed the ship's food dispenser in revenge for the Doctor's persistent use of pseudo-jargon and alien folklore, stuff she had to pretend to understand. The trouble was he was usually serious about it, and it was difficult to sneer at something improbably called the "Hand of Omega", when the next minute it was coming after you for its lunch.
Lunch. Where she had started.
Since Perivale was dead as a dodo, or a didus ineptus as the Doctor called it, they had checked that the TARDIS was still parked on the corner of a leafy housing estate and caught the bus to Ealing.
It was only three years since she had left, yet some familiar shops on the Broadway had already been replaced by newer, blander commodity outlets. The Doctor eyed the window displays of manikins in the department stores with a mixture of curiosity and what looked like suspicion.
"Never be certain of what you think you see," he muttered. He was in one of his quiet moods, the quiet before another storm of activity, so Ace steered him into the first café they came to while she still had the chance.
She recognized the bored waitress who eventually sidled over as a girl from a year below her at school. Debbie Whatever her name was didn't recognize Ace at all. She wrote down the order for one moussaka and chips, one baked Alaska, one glass of water and one glass of milk as if she was on automatic pilot. You'd