Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [98]
I.M. Foreman cocked his head to one side. Sarah got the feeling he was playing innocent. ‘Is there?’
‘This show of yours. It attracts things, did you know that?’
The blind man shrugged. ‘Frankly, I don’t care who I’ve got for an audience. Natives or aliens.’
‘Attracts things?’ Sarah queried.
‘It makes dents in the space-time continuum wherever it goes,’ the Doctor told her. He said the words in a hurry, so he could carry on his conversation with the showman without losing his drift. ‘Anyone with any sort of time-sensitivity can find themselves being drawn to it. Like the TARDIS was. Or like these Remote people, for example.’
‘Everything comes to Dust,’ Sarah heard I.M. Foreman murmur. ‘Tell us something we don’t know.’
The Doctor fixed his eyes on the man, doing his best to look accusing. ‘How does this show get from planet to planet?’ he asked.
‘Oh, it’s not hard. We just use the techniques to tell it where we want to go next. And the show goes there.’ I.M. Foreman made a ‘whoosh’ noise with the spare air in his cheeks, although Sarah found it hard to believe things were quite that simple. She wondered what these ‘techniques’ might be, exactly. The way I.M. Foreman talked about them, you’d think the show ran on raw prayer. She imagined I.M. Foreman and his friends sitting in a circle and chanting, programming the travelling show with their hymns, just like the Doctor programmed the TARDIS with his magic mathematics.
‘The show builds itself a new patch of space-time on the target planet,’ the showman went on. ‘The new patch pushes the fabric of the world to one side, and squeezes itself into the gap. It tries to disguise itself, usually. Like that travel capsule of yours does. By the way, did you know it’s broken? There aren’t any police boxes on Dust.’
‘I had noticed,’ said the Doctor, grimly.
Sarah cleared her throat, to remind them both that she was still there. ‘You mean the show doesn’t really look like a bunch of caravans?’
‘Only on Dust. Wherever the show goes, it finds a new shape for itself. It always leaves the old shape behind when it leaves, though. Like a snake shedding its skin, I suppose. Mind you, the show picks the furnishings itself. The decor around here gets a bit erratic sometimes. You’d be amazed at some of the shapes it’s had over the years. A wagon train. A derailed steam engine. An urban junkyard. An extra floor on a twenty-third‐century space station.’
He probably listed some more examples after that, but Sarah didn’t hear him. Halfway through the sentence, she’d felt – actually felt – the temperature in the room drop by several degrees. When she looked at the Doctor again, his face had turned the colour of fresh linen. His eyes were wide open, staring in horror, and disbelief, and shock, and a million other things. He looked, in every possible respect, like a man who’d finally worked out what was going on in the universe.
‘A junkyard?’ he said.
I.M. Foreman just nodded. Had he really not noticed the change in the Doctor, or was this part of his act? ‘That was on Earth. London, 1964, I think. Same kind of period as that police box you… oww.’
The Doctor had moved too quickly for Sarah to follow. One moment he was near the door, the next he was standing right in front of the pseudo-priest. Grabbing the man by his waistcoat, quite possibly just to stop himself toppling over.
‘Your “techniques”,’ the Doctor said. His face was pressed right up against I.M. Foreman’s now, and there was a desperation in his voice that Sarah hadn’t heard there before. This planet really was getting to him, wasn’t it? ‘Good grief, man. How long? How long does it take the show to finish building itself a new site?’
I.M. Foreman seemed quite calm. He looked puzzled, rather than worried. ‘Months. Maybe years. Depends how the show feels.’
‘Years?’
‘We haven’t got the same modelling technology as your TARDIS, remember. Look, I’ll explain. When the show locks on to a new planet, it starts building retroactively, so most of the work’s done before the time zone we’re aiming for.’ I.M. Foreman