Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [0]
Keith Topping
First published in England in 2003 by
Telos Publishing Ltd
61 Elgar Avenue, Tolworth, Surrey KT5 9JP, England
www.telos.co.uk
ISBN: 1-903889-32-4 (paperback)
Ghost Ship © 2002 Keith Topping
Skull motif © 2002 Dariusz Jasiczak
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
'DOCTOR WHO' word mark, device mark and logo are trade marks of the British
Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence from BBC Worldwide Limited.
Doctor Who logo © BBC 1996. Certain character names and characters within this book
appeared in the BBC television series 'DOCTOR WHO'. Licensed by BBC Worldwide
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Contents
Prologue 7 Chapter One 11 Chapter Two 19 Chapter Three 28 Chapter Four 34 Chapter Five 39 Chapter Six 47 Chapter Seven 52 Chapter Eight 58 Epilogue 63
Ghost Ship is dedicated to the very lovely Robert Franks, David Howe, John Molyneux, Jason Tucker and Michelle Wolf.
And all of the other lost souls on the good Queen Mary. Past, present and future.
The time is out of joint. O, cursed spite,
that ever I was born to set it right!
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET
PROLOGUE
THE VOID
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass
stains the white radiance of eternity.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, ADONAIS
THE VOID IS VAST.
An eternal and impenetrable, endless, unbroken rolling blanket of nothing.
No light in the darkness.
No form, no substance, no colours, no meaning.
The Void had become my home. In the philosophical sense, as well as the literal.
And what a spectacular realm it seemed to this weary and jaundiced traveller. There were times when it seemed lamenting and mournful, yet it possessed the curious otherworldly wonder of immaculate symmetry. Like a fossil, it could not age or wither or die. It simply existed, for all infinity, in the now. Here was a place where time and space and relativity had no substance beyond the limits of a fertile imagination. A de facto conceit that they shared with all those other useless elephantine scientific concepts that tiny minds, chained by the bondage of polite convention, cannot possibly dream of comprehending. In the literal sense, as well as the philosophical.
The bewildering beauty of complete insignificance.
Here is a small trick to get you thinking on a whole new level. Imagine yourself at the centre of an enormous crowd, of one million people. Then imagine that you are, all of you, trapped within a single grain of sand. One of millions upon millions of grains lying on a single beach in which every grain contains a million souls. Now multiply that beach by every other beach on the planet Earth and the figure that will emerge when all your calculating is done may be somewhere close to the total number of inhabited planets that exist in the universe.
Sometimes mathematics can be quite heart-stopping.
Try it. It will, I guarantee, make you feel very small and vulnerable as you lie in your bed in the early hours of the morning, in the darkness just before the coming dawn, thinking about whether size is really that important.
For out there, in the vast unchanging eternity, the great unknown, there are signs and wonders