Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [72]
To do it...
The Doctor heard Leela gasp, gulping and swallowing air as though sudden cold had taken her breath away. She said, ‘It is telling me...’
‘Yes?’ the Doctor asked, eager for confirmation or contradiction of what he thought he was seeing.
‘Killing is what I am. More killing gets better and more...
balanced.’
‘Fight it, Leela,’ the Doctor said in a low voice. ‘Don’t look when it shows you yourself. There’s some kind of a feedback system operating.’
‘I think death is balance,’ Leela said. ‘Perfect balance.’
She snorted, and sheathed her knife. ‘No, I do not think that.
It is not true, is it?’
‘No,’ the Doctor agreed, ‘it’s not true.’ Our essence is change. We are movement. Being out of balance is life.
Perfect balance. Stasis. That is death. Life yearns for perfection. Death is perfection. And he wondered which came first to this alien chamber: the runner or the madness. Did he learn that nonsense in here, or did he bring it with him like a virus? And where was he? The Doctor had expected to confront him here, finally, in the flesh.
‘Can we get out the same way we got in?’ Leela asked, putting her hand on the bright surface of the moving images.
A whisper of electrical charges prickled against her skin and she found to her surprise that she could not penetrate the hardness. ‘This is a trap,’ she said. ‘It let us in but it will not let us out again.
‘Don’t panic,’ the Doctor said reassuringly.
‘I was not panicking.’ Leela’s voice was flat. ‘I do not panic.’ She was coldly angry. Was this thing still working on her reactions?
‘We found the way in,’ he said. ‘We’ll find the way out.’
Leela glared at him. ‘If the prey cannot find a way in, it is not a trap.’
She was still pushing against the rigid crystalline structure which was the inside of the membrane. Where her hand touched, an image in the dreaming drift of colour and virtual feeling held its place and resisted the general flow. It eddied and gathered focus as if drawn to the hand. It was a vision of the pine forest where the Doctor had walked in the beginning.
Gradually, the detail extended and intensified, and behind Leela in the brightly glowing inner dome the Doctor could see the reality take shape until it was complete and functioning independently of the physical cue.
‘Take your hand away from it,’ the Doctor said.
Frowning, Leela did as she was told.
‘Look.’ He nodded at the artificial forest behind her.
She turned and stared. ‘It is magic, she whispered. ‘We are lost. We are the playthings of a mightier magician than you.’
‘Don’t go primitive on me,’ the Doctor said, brusquely.
‘Ignorance is no excuse for stupidity. There are no magicians.
This is a machine. What you see is the work of technology.’
She looked at the forest and then back at the image now drifting away from them round the gallery wall, and then back at the forest again. ‘That is out there on the surface, is it not?’
she said.
The Doctor moved round the viewing edge staring out across the vista of pine trees. It was perfect in every detail and perfectly lifeless. ‘The question is,’ the Doctor said, ‘did we just make that from scratch or did we call up some sort of surveillance of what was already there?’
‘Who called us up?’ Leela said.
The Doctor smiled. Now she was thinking again. He was about to congratulate her on it when he remembered how she felt about being patronised. ‘I was thinking about that myself,’ he said. ‘It’s possible that we stepped through our own images and that set it off. It’s difficult to tell now, of course, because it doesn’t all move at a uniform