Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [30]
Ah, but he was a Time Lord, wasn’t he? Used to dealing with alien environments. Put in an environment he couldn’t quite cope with – like this one, for example – any Time Lord was well within his rights to lose his mind. It was a question of cultural pride.
‘I’ve been in trouble before,’ he told the ceiling. ‘But the right kind of trouble.’
* * *
The new improved TARDIS corridors turned out to be almost exactly the right width for the Mini Metro. Sarah wondered if that was why the Doctor had renovated the ship, so he could go for a drive without all the fuss of having to go outside. But then, that didn’t make a lot of sense, did it? Why settle for the gloomy old TARDIS when you had the finest open roads in all of space and time to choose from?
That was the thing about being able to go anywhere in the universe. It made most hobbies seem so pointless. Once, in the days when she’d been one of the Doctor’s roll-on roll-off companions, Sarah had stumbled across the TARDIS library: a nigh-endless corridor stacked with books, computer records and odd triangular things that went ‘poink’ when you touched them. It had seemed perfectly logical at the time for the Doctor to have such a big collection. It was only afterwards that Sarah had started to question the sense of it.
Why keep a library of your own, when you could visit any other library anywhere in history at the flick of a switch? However many books the Doctor owned, he couldn’t possibly have all the great works that had ever been published in his catalogue. The library was pointless. Totally pointless.
In the end, she’d come up with three possible explanations. One: the Doctor kept a library just for the sake of it, for the sheer love of collecting things, the same impulse that made fans of science-fiction TV shows buy the videos even though they’d taped exactly the same programmes off the television. Two: the Doctor enjoyed filing things, simple as that. Three: the TARDIS had built up the library itself, just to keep itself occupied.
Sarah was reminded of the library now, as she pottered through the corridors with the two out-of‐it soldiers in the back of the car. She hummed to herself as she drove, an extract from her great unfinished opus, Concerto for People Running Up and Down Corridors. The passage ahead of her was full of magazines, whole stacks of publications that didn’t seem to have anywhere better to go. After a while, navigating the stacks became too much like hard work to be fun, so Sarah stopped the car, popped the keys into her pocket (cheeky, really, as she’d found them in the ignition), and got out.
There were several doors leading off the corridor, although Sarah couldn’t immediately see anywhere suitable to dump the soldiers. She stopped as she passed one of the magazine stacks, and flicked through some of the Doctor’s old back issues, none of which seemed to have been printed on Earth. One particularly thick publication bore the title House and TARDIS, and, even though Sarah was pretty sure the ship was translating it into English for her benefit, she didn’t understand any of the other words on the cover. Several small pieces of card fell out when she opened it, inserted ads for products that probably weren’t very useful even if you were a Time Lord. Sarah tutted, and shook the magazine, more of the ads falling to the floor with every flutter.
It was starting to feel wrong, being back here on board the TARDIS. When she’d (inadvertently) walked out on him, her life had begun to normalise, to smooth itself out at the edges. K9 had upset the balance a little when he’d turned up, but soon he’d become just another part of domestic life, like any other PC. Even those little ‘incidents’ in ’83 and ’95 hadn’t ruffled her, much. And the fact that her memories of the Doctor were starting to blur at the edges? The fact that she couldn’t even remember his regeneration properly any more? The fact that she kept thinking about what had happened