Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [0]
The Hour of the Geek
Lawrence Miles
They call it the Dead Frontier. It’s as far from home as the human race ever went, the planet where mankind dumped the waste of its thousand year empire and left its culture out in the sun to rot.
But while one Doctor faces both his past and his future on the Frontier, another finds himself on Earth in 1996, where the seeds of the empire are only just being sown. The past is meeting the present, cause is meeting effect, and the TARDIS crew is about to be caught in the crossfire.
The Third Doctor. The Eighth Doctor. Sam. Fitz. Sarah Jane Smith. Soon, one of them will be dead; one of them will belong to the enemy; and one of them will be something less than human…
Featuring the Third and Eighth Doctors, INTERFERENCE is the first ever full‐length two‐part Doctor Who novel.
* * *
FOREMAN’S WORLD:
MORNING ON THE SECOND DAY
WHAT HAPPENED ON EARTH
(PART TWO)
14: The Darker Side of Enlightenment
(Sam learns about the birds, the bees and the remembrance tanks)
Travels with Fitz (VII)
15: Realpolitik
(from London to the TARDIS)
16: Sacrifices, Episode One
(what the aliens learned from Sam)
Travels with Fitz (VIII)
17: Rewired
(it’s bigger on the inside. Aren’t we all?)
18: Sacrifices, Episode Two
(could you then kill that child? Well, yes, actually.)
Travels with Fitz (IX)
19: The Nature of the Beast
(Mr Llewis gets down to business)
20: Multiple Homecoming
(six more short trips)
Travels with Fitz (X)
21: Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation
(Sam finally gets a sense of perspective)
22: Voodoo Economics
(the final edit)
Travels with Fitz (XI)
23: Indestructible, Ms Jones? You Don’t Know the Meaning of the Word
(finally, the Cold)
24: Cool
(eleven characters, eleven loose ends)
Travels with Fitz (XII)
Coda 1:
Coming Down to Earth
FOREMAN’S WORLD:
AFTERNOON ON THE SECOND DAY
WHAT HAPPENED ON DUST
(PART TWO)
6: How I Was Made
(prototypes and consequences)
7: Face-Off
(in which the villain tears off his mask, to reveal the features of…)
8: Army of Me
(the Magnificent Thirteen, or the Dirty Baker’s Dozen)
9: Building the Perfect Monster
(one of those solutions that may well be worse than the problem)
10: Control
(everything falls into place, more or less)
Coda 2:
Interference Patterns
FOREMAN’S WORLD:
EVENING ON THE SECOND DAY
* * *
‘We leave you now with the images of the day…’
– Standard sign-off line from ITN Evening News, as of March 1999
* * *
FOREMAN’S WORLD:
MORNING ON THE SECOND DAY
There was an old riddle about a goose and a bottle. At least, that was what the riddle was about on Earth; the same idea had somehow ended up on any number of worlds across Mutters’ Spiral, from Gallifrey to the rim, and it often involved much more exotic things than geese and much stranger things than bottles. But it was the image of the goose that came to I.M. Foreman while she slept. Perhaps it was the human DNA in her that did it, or perhaps she had bottles on her mind, seeing that she was sleeping on the grass just a few feet away from the most valuable object in the galaxy (possibly).
The riddle went something like this. You take an infant goose, just hatched from its egg, and slip it through the neck of a bottle. The goose grows inside the glass, until it’s too big to slip back out again. The question is, how do you free the goose without breaking the bottle?
* * *
I.M. Foreman woke up early, long before the Doctor did. She spent an hour or so sitting on the hillside next to him, watching him sleep while the sun crept up over the valley. More than once, she had to bite her lip to stop herself giggling. Once he switched his face off, and let the muscles around his mouth relax instead of giving the world the full benefit of his gurning, he looked more like a proper person than a complex space-time event. You could see the wrinkles in his skin, and the way the flesh had settled on his bones. You could see all the details that made him human, or whatever he called himself instead of human. I.M.