Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [45]
In one direction, a millwheel without a mill was clunking round on the stream. It appeared to have no support for its central axle, unless its cogs were linked with the cogs in its mirror image on the near-perfect surface.
There was no sign of people anywhere. And no sign of vegetation on the grey plain either.
Grey buildings rose beyond the stream. A real dog's breakfast of architecture, an eccentric jumble that vied to scrape the sky and out-Babel the Tower of Babel. But the perspective was wrong. The buildings leaned at a drunken angle, more tipsy the further they went.
The Doctor squinted at them, trying to understand why he felt cramped in the middle of a wide open space.
The grey dominated everything, as if a lid had been left off and all the colour had evaporated up into the tiny sky. Even monochrome television — black and white was a misnomer —had more shades of grey.
On this side of the stream, there were more buildings stretching as far as he could see, and a small humanoid boy who stared at him from a few feet away.
"Hello," said the Doctor by habit. "I'm the Doctor and this is . . ." he faltered. ". . . My broken bicycle."
The boy's ginger hair was tangled, but the colour was all the more startling against the monotonous grey of the environment. He wore a pair of general-purpose overalls, silvered like some sort of spacesuit. But there was no insignia for the Doctor to recognize.
The boy just stood and stared.
The Doctor had always found children very agreeable people. Their uncomplicated nature was refreshing and often disarming. They seemed to find a natural affinity with him and he with them. And in one way this was curious, since most Time Lords would find children, if they ever accidentally met any, to be unnatural and uncomfortable creatures. Children were small and moved about a lot. There was a distinct lack of children at home, small ones at any rate, but there was also a deep-seated and very dark race memory. Of all Gallifrey's curses, that was the greatest and cruellest.
The Doctor felt awkward. He had no pockets to slap. He rummaged in his saddle bag and produced a small blue ball with golden eyes printed over it. "If you stand there much longer you'll take root," he said and held out the ball.
The boy shifted his feet and peered at the soles of his boots. Then he looked at the Doctor as if to say, "You're silly."
The Doctor tossed the ball gently and it rolled to the boy's feet. He picked it up and studied it.
"Keep it," said the Doctor and sat down in the dusty ditch. It was an unashamed calculation, designed to show that he was not a threat. The boy came closer.
"Do you live here?" the Doctor asked.
The boy fingered the ball, studying the patterns with his hard blue eyes. But he said nothing.
The Doctor looked up and smiled. "What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?"
Whether in fright or plain antagonism, the boy turned and ran. A man's voice yelled from somewhere.
"No, don't go," called the Doctor. He struggled to pull the bicycle from the ditch, but it jammed on a rocky ledge. The jolt snared his fingers in the brake handle and he dropped the bike, shaking his hand in agony.
The boy was well away by now, a flash of red gold in the gloom, running towards the cover of the buildings. The Doctor looked the other way and saw a line of figures growing out of a nearby ridge.
Five adults, dressed in the same silvered suits and apparently attached to the rock at the knee. One of them, a young male, stood on his own. The other two men were dwarfed by the two tall women with whom they stood, hands linked. They watched him impassively and so he waved his hat and called out a greeting.
At first they made no move, which seemed to