Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [96]
Another panel came away in his hands.
‘Careful,’ Chris warned. If he shorted out anything important, they’d be dead. The Doctor didn’t hesitate, and began poking around at the wiring.
‘Fly!’ he ordered. ‘We should be able to outrun them.’
Roz looked out of the window. It was getting dark, so it must be coming up to six o’clock. George was off on a secret mission somewhere, and she was alone in the room. They had come back from the interrogation room with a sense of fatalism. All it seemed that they could do was to wait for the German attack.
The attack that was due around now.
Air-raid sirens had been sounded along the whole of the south coast, and millions of citizens were huddled in their shelters awaiting their fate. The RAF had every available plane in the air; the radar operators had been warned. The listening stations were monitoring every known military frequency. On the ground, watchers had been posted, barrage balloons had been set up. Firemen and ARP
wardens stood ready. Searchlight beams swung across the evening sky, thousands of antiaircraft batteries stood ready.
Roz didn’t think it would be enough.
Steinmann sat in the control tower of the secret airbase.
Keller was scribbling down a telephone message. The young officer was on crutches, shot by Lieutenant Cwej.
Steinmann snatched the sheet from him as Keller brought it over. The test signal had ceased transmission. The frigate Vidar reported losing visual contact with the plane shortly afterwards. No air patrols had intercepted them. The Doctor had worked it out.
Steinmann crumpled the paper and dropped it to the floor. ‘The air patrols are to widen their search.’
‘But, sir, they’ll enter British air-space.’
Steinmann didn’t answer.
Benny clambered over the bombsite. She didn’t know how old she was any more. It hadn’t really mattered before — if anyone asked she’d probably have lied.
Her mother had been thirty-one when she had died, and Benny was definitely older than that. A weird feeling — a child older than her mother. It was a landmark she’d passed without realizing it. She pictured her mother as a middle-aged lady, grey hair tied up into a bun, her eyes still warm and kind. It hadn’t happened that way. Benny couldn’t remember what colour her mother’s eyes had been, not for certain, and she didn’t have any photographs. With a time machine of course, it would be possible to go back and see her again, just one last hug before...
Benny found herself sobbing, bent double.
Everything was ruined. Underneath her hands were scraps of paper, chipped pieces of brick, what had once been a library. How could anyone bomb a library? How could anyone bomb mothers and daughters?
Above her, something loomed. False perspective, no way of judging size. Blue. Square and solid. Humming softly, as though it were living.
The rules change with time travel, don’t they?
What was it they used to say a few decades from now —
you can’t uninvent the Bomb. It was the reason given for stockpiling nuclear weapons — an excuse that had held until the Southport Incident. Well, she could uninvent the atom bomb, assassinate all the war criminals before they did anything nasty, show the people here how to build a cheap solar cell and save the panda from extinction. Would humanity be grateful, would they use these miracles to begin a new life on a clean, safe planet? No, they’d carry on as they always had: fighting in the mud like children. A thousand years from now, they’d still be murdering and enslaving, whether they called themselves Nazis or Christians or British.
Why did the Doctor bother? These weren’t even his own people. Why not just explore the wonders of the Universe, why not spend time amongst civilized, peaceful