Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [125]
It was dark – the walls were solid metal.
There was forty metres to walk – forty paces, about twenty seconds.
There was blue light at the other end, harsh, like neon.
And about halfway along Miranda realised that if Ferran was at the other end, and saw them coming, all he would have to do would be to close the door again and there would be nothing they could do to stop themselves being crushed.
She quickened her pace, forcing her father to do the same, and they stepped out into the engine room.
The chamber was smaller and less cluttered than Miranda had expected, but it defied logic.
It was the inside surface of a sphere, but there was no up or down: the whole surface was the floor. She could tell, because it was littered with skeletons and patches of faded uniform. It was disorientating, against all mammal logic. What sort of people could feel at home here?
In the centre of the room was a large sphere, lit from within, the source of the harsh blue light. The sphere was translucent, and full of mechanisms like snapping jaws. As they gnashed together, it reminded Miranda of a tank full of piranhas.
The room was thick with time, filled with it, as it might have been full of poison gas or seawater. There was a sense of movement, like a hurricane, but it wasn’t around them, not in space at any rate.
Ferran was about a hundred yards away, wearing a protective suit, the sort of thing they wore in nuclear power stations. He was kneeling down, and it looked like he was at a control console or similar piece of apparatus.
She looked over to her father.
‘You stop Ferran, I’ll save the Earth,’ he suggested, matter-of‐factly.
Miranda nodded, and started to stride towards Ferran.
* * *
The Doctor hurried over to the huge central sphere.
His mind kept whispering words at him, but they weren’t quite audible. The words were the names of the components of the time engine, and explanations of how they worked. He tried to concentrate on them, but he couldn’t hear.
He knew what to do.
The sphere was about twenty metres in diameter, and threw out blue light, waves of time and a great surging, grinding noise. But there wasn’t any heat.
He reached out to place his palm on the surface of the sphere, and – just as he knew it would, he realised – the surface parted, forming an oblong hole just large enough to walk into without ducking his head.
The Doctor stepped inside.
* * *
‘Ferran!’
He looked up, startled by her presence.
‘How can you survive in here?’ he asked, through a clear visor so thick it refracted his face.
‘I’m above all that,’ Miranda told him. ‘Look at my clothes, though.’
Her clothes were fading and fraying. Nothing too serious yet, but clothes that had been new on yesterday now looked as if they’d been worn and washed dozens of times. She could feel her hairgrip corroding away in her hair.
She wondered what her lifespan was, and when she would start to feel different. So far, there was nothing, no changes at all.
‘Stay back!’ Ferran shouted. He had to shout to make himself heard.
‘I can’t let you destroy us,’ she told him gently.
* * *
The Doctor reached into one of the energy streams.
It talked to him, responded. A machine this sophisticated had to be on the verge of intelligence, he realised with a start. And, as Turing had always said, a computer as intelligent as a man was instantly more intelligent, as it would have a better memory, more efficient control over its own thoughts.
It wasn’t alive, not quite: it needed guidance, it needed coaxing.
By him.
Time travel, literally in his hands.
It had been one of his and Debbie’s perennial conversations: if they had a time machine, where would they go in it? Debbie always chose the past: the court of Queen Elizabeth, Roman Britain, even the streets of Victorian London, The Doctor had walked those streets, but he had never spoiled Debbie’s romantic notions with his memories of them. The Doctor would pick the future, every time. The past fascinated him: he loved to study history, to imagine himself talking to historical figures. But how