Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [56]
Mysterious third parties just happen to pass by, inadvertently saving the caillou from its fate. Even when they are put in a place of confinement, doors which are thought to be secure are found to have been left unlocked, and competent guards look the other way at precisely the wrong moment.’
Professor Hulot would insist that these things weren’t accidents at all; the caillou’s invisible influence was at work in
‘meta-space’, he’d claim, pushing people and objects into convenient places, though its three-dimensional form might seem to be ‘sitting on its backside doing nothing at all’.
The Professor would point to one well-documented case, of a caillou who visited Paris in 1791. The creature had appeared as a grey-haired old man, but at least three witnesses had seen him arrive in a miraculous metal box which had later transmogrified itself into a wooden barricade, as if to avoid detection. The old man had taken a great interest in the Revolution, and several of Robespierre’s agents – posing as common citizens, naturellement – had spoken with him.
Transcripts of the interviews had fallen into the hands of the Directory, who had examined the man’s speech, finding it packed with pointless witticisms and atrocious English puns.
‘Something to draw me out of my shell, hmmm?’ he’d said at one point, when offered an egg sandwich.
But though seemingly childish, the Professor claimed that these puns were in fact parts of complex equations that related to events beyond human perception. In the Professor’s terms, by making ‘verbal connections’ between events, the caillou was ‘completing circuits in meta-space’. ‘They seem uncommonly lucky, but that luck is merely a manifestation of their great and unearthly experience,’ Hulot wrote. ‘The older they get, the more extreme the coincidences that surround them become.’
It is perhaps hardly surprising that the Professor was considered to be something of an eccentric by his peers. It is surely significant, however, that mere hours after the joke about the egg sandwich had been made, the old man and his young travelling companion escaped from a Parisian military post using explosives from an artillery shell (the Professor always stressed the word shell) that had ‘accidentally’ been left in some dark corner of the building...
The agent called Raphael had never particularly cared for Professor Hulot, but then neither had his other teachers. This is why Raphael had become a chirurgeon instead of a field agent, why he’d been given the sharpest scalpel the Directory had to offer, and why he was now sweeping into the town of Woodwicke like an elemental force with the killing lessons foremost in his head.
‘Reason,’ demanded Matheson Catcher.
The Doctor sighed theatrically. Thirty-four-and-a-half minutes tied to a chair, and the interrogation was still getting him nowhere. He decided to try a different approach.
‘Very well. Let’s talk about reason. Sorry, Reason.’
Somehow, the capital letter seemed to change the entire tone of the sentence. ‘Would you like to hear a story?’
‘A story?’ The Doctor could have sworn he heard whirring, clanking sounds from inside the man’s head.
‘Once upon a time...’ the Doctor began.
‘A story?’ repeated Catcher. Obviously, something had got stuck inside that clockwork brain of his. I must have wound him up, the Doctor thought. ‘Fairy-tales. Not rational. No basis in scientific theory.’
‘That’s a pity. I was going to tell you about the Glass Eaters of the Anterides. The people who reasoned themselves to death. They moved in tighter and tighter circles of logic until they finally disappeared up their own Socratic methodologies.
Perhaps you’d prefer a story with killer robots in it.’ Again, the whirring in Catcher’s head. No, thought the Doctor, I’m imagining it. It’s easy to imagine things like that around this man. ‘I want to know what you call rational, Mr Catcher. Why do you do what you do? What’s the reason behind your Reason?’
‘The will of the Watchmakers. There