Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [61]
‘I’d love to,’ Bob confirmed. ‘Er... so, do you want to go to Dinah’s party with me?’
Miranda looked very determined. ‘Yes.’
Bob grinned, unable to believe his luck. On the one hand Miranda had just asked him out. On the other hand... boiling coffee.
He let Miranda disappear before he squealed with pain.
* * *
Miranda got off the bus, smiling to herself.
She hadn’t expected Bob to turn her down, but she was relieved that the process had been completed smoothly. It was something of a relief that she would be going to the party with someone. She’d reached the age when everyone seemed to be paired off when they went out, and she ended up in a corner, cogitating about the anthropology of the situation.
The sun was shining, too. Spring was under way, the trees beginning to bud.
The iron gates swung open automatically at her presence. Actually, the presence of a gizmo she had on her keyring, but the effect was the same.
Dad was home – the Trabant sat incongruously on the gravel drive.
She let herself in and called out that she was back.
There was no answer, so she made a couple of mugs of coffee and took them through to the lab.
Her father was there, in his shirtsleeves, rifling through a pile of handwritten notes. She glanced at them.
‘Five-dimensional vectors,’ she said. Looking over at the blackboard, she saw a string of equations. She crossed over, tried to work her way through them. ‘This is a bit beyond O-level maths,’ she said.
‘So are you,’ the Doctor reminded her. She knew what he was really telling her: you can work it out for yourself.
She had another look.
‘Co-ordinates,’ she said. ‘It’s the description of the path of an object. But it’s travelling in five dimensions. Then... this bit is... That’s notation I’m not sure about.
‘Ordnance Survey grid references,’ the Doctor said, without looking up.
He’d taken the road atlas out of the Trabant. It was sitting on the workbench by the jar he kept her milk teeth in. Miranda thumbed through it.
‘Oh, I see. Northern England.’
The Doctor looked up. ‘What do you mean Northern England? Great Britain, yes, well done, but it’s impossible to pinpoint it closer than about a thousand kilometres.’
‘You’ve made a mistake,’ she told him, tapping the blackboard. ‘You’ve missed out...’
He was already alongside her. ‘Of course, of course.’ He crossed out the offending symbols and replaced them with the right ones. ‘And the implication is that the exact co-ordinates can be narrowed further. Down to –’
‘To within a metre and a second,’ Miranda guessed.
‘Perhaps not that far.’
Miranda smiled. She found it funny that the Doctor could get so worked up about a theoretical problem.
The phone in the hall started ringing.
‘Could you get that?’ he asked. ‘It’s probably for you.’
Miranda scowled. She thought she’d proved beyond all statistical doubt, and despite her dad’s insistence, that when the phone rang, it was almost always for him.
She trudged out into the hall, leaving him to his scribblings.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ she told the phone.
She picked up the handset.
‘Hello?’
A terse man on the other end asked if she had a pen. She had. He asked her to write down an address, then told her to take it to the Doctor and tell him that was where he would find Debbie Castle. Then he hung up.
Miranda was annoyed with the rude behaviour. So annoyed, that she was halfway back to the lab before she remembered who Debbie Castle was.
She handed her dad the address.
He was almost out of the room, grabbing his coat from the hook on the door.
‘I’ve got to go somewhere,’ he said. ‘You look after yourself.’
Miranda was surprised, to say the least. ‘Where are you going?’
‘North.’ He smiled.
* * *
Chapter Thirteen
The Black Tower
Night was falling as the Doctor drove into the city.
The motorway came in over the hills, and he saw the city laid out before him, a murky orange starscape that stretched to the horizon in three directions. It was a magnificent sight, like a living organism with the lights of the cars as corpuscles on the arterial roads.