Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [9]
"What's it doing in there?" whispered Ace. The Doctor felt her hand on his shoulder. He took and squeezed it fondly. "What can we do?" she said. "Smoke it out?"
"Sooner said than done. There's another problem I hadn't anticipated." He cynically raised his hat to one of the twitching curtains across the road and then resumed his gloomy reverie.
Ace wasn't so easily defeated. "Come on, Professor. At least let's get inside and find out what the damage is."
He looked at her for a moment and then dug into his waistcoat pocket. "You do it," he said and gave her the key.
She walked up to the TARDIS and studied the panelled walls with increasing puzzlement. After she had walked round the police box twice, she gave up and went back to the Doctor. "Professor," she said, "I can't find the door. It's disappeared."
"That's what I was afraid of. But I had to be sure it wasn't just me."
Ace helped him to his feet. He glanced up at the lurid sky, took a deep breath and advanced on the TARDIS. With a length of green garden string, he began hurriedly measuring off distances on the blue panels.
"It's started to stop being an illusion. And soon it won't be just us who are affected."
The gaps between the paving stones glimmered and began to widen.
A police car rounded the top of the avenue and bore down on them. From inside the TARDIS came the sound of more frenzied scrabbling. The Doctor clutched at the sides of his ship and moaned.
3: Bootstrapping
"We travel."
The rusty surface of Gallifrey, blotched with brown lakes and dust-grey clouds, spun beneath them and was eclipsed by darkness, devoured by the vortex void into which the Chronauts were hurled. This brief and unexpected mental image, so startling to the first-ever time travellers, still came as a shock to all those who followed on later missions. The total break from the world and reality to which they were native was like the severing of the umbilical cord that ties all that is born with existence.
They were alone in the dark with only each other's thoughts to cling to. For a moment, in a cluster of moments, surrounded by no moments at all, hope and time trickled away into nothing.
There was a click. The toy ounce-ape whirred into life, spinning and tumbling across the floor on its whirling arms.
The Chronauts heard the Pilot's giggle. "This way," he said aloud. "Soon be there."
"One minute since immersion."
The spheric pool, hovering above the Time Scaphe's heart, shimmered up an image of the astral vortex outside the ship. Cascades of rainbow light streamed from a far point forming a tunnel along which the Scaphe passed.
The Chronauts reclined on couches that lay like spokes around the wheel of the chamber. Their heads that drove the ship rested against the wheel hub in whose hollowed centre sat the Pilot, playing with his toys. Only occasionally, the child tapped his fingers on a hovering grid of coloured light that guided the Scaphe through time's convoluted vectors.
The crew watched the streaming light play in the pool above their heads as they travelled up-time or down-time. It was an illusion. No one alive had seen or could imagine the vortex real. It was an unproven dimension which existed only in theory — and so they were travellers within its boundaries, bootstrapping their way across its coursing tumult, bringing now to the future or the past, in concert with laws more akin to the superstitions of the suet workers in the city. Complexities in the Scaphe's sustainers created the illusion of flight as a courtesy for the crew.
The synthetic air in the chamber was already sluggish and warm. It was no different to a hundred simulations they had been through, but if they returned home from the flight, they would be pioneers. If they did not, they were martyrs.
Captain Pekkary had no need to watch his companions. The fusion of their minds as a crew told him everything. The Scaphe's course had been chosen and preset. Ninety minutes immersion in vortex, to emerge into real time ninety days after departure.
Pekkary closed his eyes