Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [103]
It was an odd departure. Padil speechless and looking stricken.
Carnell insisting that in return for his confidences the Doctor could at least let him see the inside of the TARDIS. The technologists, Ging and Tel, hanging around the bay trying to pretend they were on their way to the subterranean robotics lab rather than waiting to see how the mysterious box opened.
There was a brief moment of distraction as Uvanov and his entourage entered the bays and the Doctor and Leela slipped into the TARDIS and were gone.
Leela checked the edge of her knife. The security man she had recovered it from had been playing childish throwing games with it when she had caught up with him. ‘That was unkind,’ she said.
The Doctor was busy with the control console. ‘What was?’
‘Padil wanted some last Words of Capel.’
‘I think she probably has enough already for a slim volume,’
the Doctor said. ‘It’s interesting. The whole question of holy books and their uses.’
Leela could feel one of the Doctor’s lectures coming on. She took the sharpening stone from her travelling pouch and started working on the knife.
‘The trouble with holy books,’ the Doctor went on, ‘is that what are taken to be prescriptions are frequently descriptions. They don’t talk about what must be, they talk about what is. If you take a description of what is happening to be a prescription of what you must do, you are turning what was intended to be an aid to understanding into the opposite - a force for ignorance.’
‘Padil was her fighting name. She told me her real name just before we left.’
‘I mean, take what happened back there on Kaldor,’ the Doctor was saying. ‘Padil will embellish the details - give it a few hundred years and no one will be allowed to question it and she will be a supernatural figure herself. Saint Padil of the Pits.’
‘Her real name is Sel Pitter,’ Leela said. ‘Her father was the headman.’
The Doctor looked up. ‘Diss Pitter’s daughter?’ He smiled broadly. ‘So that was Carnell’s ace in the hole.’
‘Ace in the hole?’
‘It’s a gambling term,’ the Doctor said. ‘Poker.’
Leela saw the opportunity to head off the rest of the Doctor’s meditation on holy texts. ‘What is poker?’ she asked innocently.
Document Outline
Front cover
Rear cover
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Briefing
Marker
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Debriefing
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen