Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [64]
‘I’ve been in prisons before,’ the man said. ‘I told you that, didn’t I? Plenty of prisons. I escaped from most of them. Bargained my way out of the rest.’ He let his snapped arm flop on to the floor by his side. ‘Did I tell you about the Daleks?’
‘No,’ said Badar.
‘Machine‐monsters,’ the man explained. ‘Very important to that mythology of ours.’
‘Dark things?’
‘None darker. I’ve been kept in prisons by them, more than once. They use torture, too. But they’re much more precise. Methodical. They have exact formulae for calculating when prisoners should be hurt. And for working out the optimum times for interrogation. In Dalek prisons, you settle into a kind of routine.’ Badar saw the pale man’s fingers tapping against the floor. ‘In fact, most prisons I’ve been in have been like that. Regulated. They do everything they can to destroy your self‐will, but they do it by numbers. They use mind probes. Neural implants. Hallucinogenic drugs, sometimes. Everything done by the book.’
‘No book,’ said Badar. ‘Not here.’
‘I know,’ the man said. ‘That’s the point. I escape so often I never stop to think about the way I do it. But I’ll tell you the secret if you like. The way you escape is by slipping through the cracks in the routine. You work out how your captors operate, and you fill up all the holes in their schedules. You’ve got to turn yourself into a kind of skeleton key. Find the gaps in their system. Get into the workings of the lock. Turn the tumblers from the inside.’
The man sighed then. The sigh was long, forced and theatrical.
‘But there’s no logic,’ he went on. ‘No system. Not here. They didn’t have any real excuse for locking you up. Your arrest was very nearly random. They don’t even have any reason to torture us: they just do it when they feel like it. There’s no routine, no order. Nothing you can adapt to. That’s why I can’t escape from this cell. I can’t concentrate properly, because there isn’t anything to concentrate on. There’s just brutality. Pointless brutality. You see? This isn’t like Ha’olam. There’s no implant, there’s no alien super intelligence stopping me from getting out. It’s not an experiment. It’s not part of some masterplan or other. It’s real.’
‘Move through time,’ said Badar. ‘Stop everything.’
‘I can’t. Even if I had the TARDIS, I can’t turn back time. It’s all in the equations. It’s a bit like Schrödinger’s Cat. I can’t erase this part of history, not now we’ve seen what’s in the box. Maybe if we were in the middle of a timing malfunction, or… No. It doesn’t matter. It can’t be done. Not even by me.’
Badar wasn’t sure what any of that meant, but he wasn’t going to let it stop him. ‘But if you escaped you could walk through time. Stop the future. Bring down the governments. Get rid of the Majors. The Blairs. The Clarkes.’
‘Yes,’ said the man, and he said it as if it were a confession. ‘Yes, I could. I could rewrite the whole of British history from this point onward. And world history. And galactic history.’
‘You could stop the British? Stop my people? Stop the torturing?’
‘I could. But I wouldn’t.’
‘You stop it on other worlds –’
‘I know,’ the man cut in. ‘We’ve already been through this. The answer to your question is, I don’t know. I don’t know why Earth should be different. I don’t know why I don’t sort out the troubles in Ireland. I don’t know why I don’t disarm Iraq. I don’t know why I don’t stop the genocide in Malaysia. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I’ve become so attached to Earth, I’m scared to interfere too much. And yes, I know there’s no difference between what happens on Earth and what happens on Terra Alpha, or Varos, or Proxima Two. But I can’t change things. I’ve made a decision. I’ve drawn a line in the sand. And if I cross that line I’ll end up just like the Master. Meddling for my own purposes.’
‘You do that anyway,’ Badar pointed