Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [99]
‘Nineteen sixty-four,’ the Doctor said, and he was practically spitting in the poor man’s face by now. ‘You said you were on Earth in 1964. The show was a junkyard.’
‘Well, that’s true –’
‘Then the junkyard would have been unoccupied,’ the Doctor went on, getting the words out faster than his tongue seemed to want to move. ‘While it was still half finished. It would have been empty for most of 1963. Waiting for you to arrive.’
‘Is that a problem?’ said I.M. Foreman.
The Doctor let go of the man. Suddenly he was standing by the door again, with his back turned to the rest of the room, slowly scratching the back of his neck.
‘The show attracts things,’ Sarah heard him mutter. ‘Jehoshaphat. I should have realised. And I thought I was the one who’d made the decision.’
Slowly, he turned back to face the blind man. Suddenly he was the Doctor she knew again, although there was a kind of energy in his body she didn’t recognise. A kind of… anger?
‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘You’re one of my ancestors.’
‘Um…’ Sarah began.
‘Um…’ added I.M. Foreman.
‘Not literally,’ the Doctor went on. ‘Not by blood. But you were the first. You, and some of the others from the order. You were the first ones who took your beliefs to the outside universe. The first true renegades. You introduced that idea to the culture of Gallifrey, and it never went away. Every Time Lord who ever borrowed a TARDIS from the Academy was following the patterns you laid down. Don’t you see, man? You’re a first-generation renegade. We were following in your footsteps all the time, without even realising it. All of us. My granddaughter even named herself after you. Not that she ever knew the truth. To her, you were just a name on a sign.’
‘Honoured,’ said I.M. Foreman.
The Doctor was angry, Sarah realised. Because he wasn’t the pioneer he’d thought he was. Because he’d travelled from one side of creation to the other, and found someone else already waiting for him at the end of the journey. Because I.M. Foreman had interfered with his whole life, just like he’d interfered with the lives of all his human companions.
‘Doctor –’ she began, although she had no idea what she ought to say to him. Luckily, he hadn’t finished talking yet.
‘None of this matters now,’ he announced. ‘The important thing is, thanks to you this town’s being attacked by the Remote. That’s the first thing we’ve got to think about. How we’re going to save the people whose lives you’ve endangered.’
I.M. Foreman just shrugged. ‘It’s not generally the way we do things,’ he said. ‘Direct action.’
‘It’s the way I do things,’ snapped the Doctor. Before anyone could say another word, he turned to the door, grabbed the handle, and shoved it open.
There was the smell of dust and gunpowder. All of a sudden, the outside world was flooding back into the room.
* * *
7
Face-Off
(in which the villain tears off his mask, to reveal the features of…)
The Remote ship was hovering with its belly directly above the travelling show, so the front end of the vehicle/settlement was just poking over the edge of the town wall. The ship had reached out with half a dozen of its boarding tubes, six pipelines of black plastic membrane that had sprouted from the vessel’s bulk and planted themselves in the dust, one in the centre of the show, one outside the town gate, and the rest inside the walls of the town proper. The Remote troops were already taking control of the streets, battered plastic firearms at the ready, threatening anybody who got in their way. Not that many of the locals were bothering to get in their way, obviously.
So when the oldest