Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [63]
‘Oh… let me see.’ The man raised his hand in front of his face, as if to count something off on his fingers. But his fingers wouldn’t stay still, so he let his arm drop again. ‘What’s the year? 1996. Starting from the 1970s, how does it go? Let’s see… Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Dering, Springsteen, Norris…’
He stopped.
‘No. That’s America. Wait. Heath, Thorpe, Williams, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Clarke… Major. Yes. Major.’ He ummed and ahhd to himself. ‘I think that’s it. I spent quite a lot of time in the 1990s. When I was back in my first body. Don’t talk about it much, of course. Not a… not a happy time.’
‘You should move through time. Destroy Major. Destroy the leader. Stop the corruption.’
‘Would it help?’ said the man. ‘Supposing I got rid of his whole cabinet. Supposing I could. Supposing I wanted to. What then? Another one would pop up in its place. A different party, the same order. Left or right. When you can move through time, you can see how little difference there is between the factions. Human politics. The same rules always apply.’
‘Then change the rules.’ Badar wanted to make the man see how urgent this was, how important to the structure of the TARDIS world, but he didn’t seem to be getting the point. ‘Change the order. Move through time. Change everything.’
‘No!’ The man was shouting now, the first time Badar had heard him do that. ‘The damage to the timeline… the ripples…’
‘You don’t care about the ripples!’ Badar protested. ‘If you cared, you wouldn’t interfere on the other worlds. You only care about being seen.’
‘There are things in the universe,’ the pale man snapped. ‘I told you. Terrible things. Waiting for opportunities. Waiting for their chance to return to this universe…’
He trailed off.
‘Rubbish,’ he concluded.
‘What?’ said Badar.
‘I’m talking rubbish. Old Time Lord legends. Cautionary tales.’ He flapped his arm around for a while longer, finally managing to pull himself up on to one elbow. ‘That’s what I told Sam, when she asked me. All the old stories. All the old excuses.’
‘But me? You’re not going to lie to me?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
The man stared right across the cell, trying to make eye contact with Badar. But his eyes looked blurry, like they weren’t focusing properly. ‘Because you’re here,’ the man explained. ‘Because they’ve hurt you. Tortured you. Because you’re going to die, if I can’t think of a way to get us out of this. I can’t make excuses. Not to your face.’
His voice sounded raw. As if everything, all the intonations and little white lies, had been stripped away from it. Badar nodded, and felt the throbbing in his neck again.
‘All the names,’ Badar said. ‘Thatcher. Major…’
‘Blair. Clarke. Yes.’
‘You should get rid of them. Move through time, and stop them. Get rid of the leaders. All the ones who sell weapons. All the ones who let us be tortured. Get rid of them all. Like you do on the other worlds.’
‘Perhaps I should,’ said the man. ‘But I can’t.’
* * *
Dusk
As the sun went down outside the window, the guards came back into the cell, and told Badar that he’d be going out into the courtyard tomorrow.
* * *
Midnight
Badar slept. He’d expected to stay awake, to spend the last hours of the day trying to finish the TARDIS world before the sun came back. But he slept, much as ever, drifting in and out of the cell, watching the dark things come and go across the walls.
At one point, there was a scratching sound. Not the scratching of the dark things’ fingers, but a much softer kind of noise, from somewhere on the other side of the cell. When Badar turned his head, he saw the outline of the other prisoner, hunched over the handle of the door.
The man kept scratching away at it, tapping at the lock, twisting the handle. Badar realised he was using both hands. How he could do that kind of thing with a broken arm, Badar wasn’t sure.
Eventually, the man stopped. Badar got the feeling he knew he was being watched.
‘I can’t do it,’ he said.
Badar grunted. ‘You said. Yesterday. No escape.’
‘But I know why I can’t do it.’
The man moved