Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [122]
‘Deactivation code?’ The eye looked alarmed as the roundel sealed up over it, and the mouth quivered as it shrank.
‘I wasn’t aware that you could do tha–’
And then the Doctor was alone in the room. There was a pause, during which an entire galaxy-spanning civilization rose and fell within the universe-in-a-bottle that sat in the corner.
Then he looked up, towards the ceiling, as if some kind of god were watching him from up above. The anger drained gut of his features. A smile began to blossom in its place.
‘Everybody was so busy arguing about the Watchmakers, they forgot to ask the opinion of the Watch,’ he mused.
He reached out, felt the warmth of the nearest wall, patted it affectionately. Any personality the TARDIS might have developed...
The smile burst into full bloom. ‘I saved the day again,’ he said. ‘Or at least, part of me did.’ And with that, he turned around and walked back towards the console room.
A few minutes later, the TARDIS began wheezing with its usual rhythm, coughing its way back into ordinary space and time. The gynoids watched for a while, waiting for the ghostly after-image of the police box to disappear, then sulked off into the desert.
Idly, the Carnival Queen let her attention wander out into the land of clockwork, and watched the people of Woodwicke as they woke up and realized that it hadn’t all been a terrible dream. History breathed out, the world kept turning, and 25
December proceeded according to the usual schedule.
The Carnival Queen sighed.
-– And a merry Christmas to all of you at home, she said.
An Epilogue:
One Way or Another, the World Will Be
Saved
The men looked grumpy. Distinctly grumpy. Though the militia were duty-bound to be ready for action at all times, none of them had been expecting to work on Christmas morning, and Jake McCrimmon was waiting to see which of them would be the first to complain, or to question an order, or
– worst of all – to start singing The Bonnie Way Back, the way soldiers always did when they wanted to give up and go home.
God’s truth, if it had been like this in the old days – when McCrimmon had stood against the Sassenach hordes at Dolman Hill, or even when he’d watched his elder clansmen fight the seige of Quebec – then the world would have been in the grip of anarchy by now. Back then, any man who griped or grumbled or answered back or even looked like he wasn’t pleased to be serving his country would have been tied to a big tree and thrashed senseless. A command from a superior had been like an order from On High, in those days, like an edict from the Pope himself.
McCrimmon led his poxy band through the riot-worn streets of Woodwicke, finally bringing them to a halt on the corner of a place called Burr Street. Anarchy had been loosed upon the town, right enough. The place stank of liquor, the road littered with the remains of shattered beer-barrels. A few of the townsfolk wandered to and fro across the street, dazed and lost expressions on their faces. A man was curled up in the ashes of a bonfire, a scrap of sackcloth clenched in his hands, a bloody makeshift bandage wrapped around his head. The man was weeping, and McCrimmon guessed he’d been weeping for hours.
Then there were the buildings. The buildings, which looked like they’d started melting in the rain. Even the soldiers stopped their mutinous murmurings when they saw that.
Where the walls had folded in on themselves, McCrimmon saw ungodly patterns in the bricks and the timbers, like leering, half-formed faces. Dozens of families had left this God-forsaken town in the early hours, according to the authorities in Dill Village. Mass hysteria, some had said. But hysteria couldn’t turn walls into jelly, could it?
McCrimmon ordered his men – the literate ones, anyway –
to note down everything they saw. His chiefs would want to know all the grim little details, surely. Information was like gold dust to the Special Congress, and McCrimmon had a sworn duty to report incidents like this one to them.
‘Anomalies’, the chiefs