Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [31]
But being here, in the bowels of the TARDIS, trying to get in touch with the Doctor again… that changed things. You could never get him out of your life, Sarah reminded herself. For some reason, she found herself thinking about mathematics, about equations and subequations.
Two months ago, she’d started getting pains in her stomach. There’d been peculiar dreams – more peculiar than usual, anyway – and a sticky, uncomfortable feeling when she’d woken up in the mornings. As if her hormones had been shifting, very, very slightly, doing things to her body her brain didn’t want to know about. It had been during one of those periods when she’d been seeing a lot of Paul. An awful lot of Paul.
And the pregnancy test had come up positive. She didn’t remember how she’d felt about that. She seemed to recall walking around in a kind of trance, sleepwalking her way through things until she’d finally managed to get to the GP. The GP had run tests, and told her that she definitely wasn’t pregnant, whatever the Boots test said. Sarah didn’t remember how she’d felt about that, either. She’d gone for a second opinion, then a third, then a fourth. All the doctors concurred. She was clear. But there was something wrong with the make-up of her hormones, something in her chemistry that was confusing the basic urine test. Clouding the waters, pardon the expression.
When she’d started travelling with the Doctor, he’d insisted on giving her an injection. A universal vaccine, he’d said. Sarah hadn’t spent a day sick since, apart from the time the Cybermen had pumped that venom into her system, and a couple of cases of food poisoning in the mid-1980s. The Doctor had assured her the shot was safe, that there were no known side effects.
No known side effects. But the Doctor wouldn’t have looked too closely into the workings of the human reproductive cycle, would he? It wasn’t his style. Besides, she’d heard him say there weren’t any children on Gallifrey, not real ones, so she doubted that the notion of making babies had even crossed his mind when he’d vaccinated her.
Something wrong with her hormones, the doctors had said. Nothing dangerous. But they couldn’t say what the effects would be on any children she might want to have.
No way of telling that to Paul.
Of course, the dreams had got worse after that, even though the sickness had gone away. The imagery had come straight out of The Fly. She’d imagined herself giving birth to horrible mutant things. Blobs of living matter that couldn’t survive on their own, that had to be wrapped up in metal shells just to live through childhood. Her offspring, the next generation of humanity. For all Sarah knew, the Doctor had been lying, and the injection was the Time Lord method of reproduction. A way of planting their DNA in the bodies of their human victims. Like old B-movie monsters, wanting Earth for the women there.
Yuk. Yuk yuk yuk.
Sarah looked down. She’d been a million miles away, and in her absence a great pile of advertisements had built up around her feet, all of them inserts from House and TARDIS. The ads were up to her knees by now, and they were still slipping out from between the pages. She stopped shaking the magazine.
‘Bigger on the inside,’ she muttered. Then she put the publication back down on its stack, and headed for the next doorway along the passage, still searching for somewhere to put her prisoners.
* * *
After a while – one of those seemingly endless whiles that didn’t seem to be connected to any known system of temporal measurement – the guards came back. This time, they were all carrying shock batons. The Doctor didn’t struggle as they dragged him into the middle of the room. How often had he saved this planet? How many times over did these men owe him their lives? The lives of their families, the lives of their descendants? And how many