Doctor Who_ Psi-Ence Fiction - Chris Boucher [5]
'I am sorry I asked,' Leela said. 'You are making fun of me.'
'Never,' the Doctor said emphatically, but still smiling. 'I never make fun of you for asking questions. Even ones I can't answer.'
'But you do get angry'
'No. I am patience personified. You should know that by now.'
The TARDIS narrowed the multiverse options, gradually slipping towards the asymmetrical
anomaly that was attracting it and pulling it towards a choice.
'Very well. Do you know where we are going then?' Leela asked.
That is not a question,' the Doctor said. "That is a deliberate provocation.'
He looked around for his hat.
Leela said, 'Your hat is in the pocket of your coat.'
'I doubt that,' the Doctor said, finding it in the left-hand pocket of his long overcoat almost immediately and pulling it out. I wasn't looking for my hat as it happens.'
'Your jelly babies are in the other pocket,' Leela offered.
'Now you are beginning to annoy me.' The Doctor's smile was losing some of its spontaneity.
The TARDIS coalesced all the remaining chances into one inevitability, ground towards it, settled into it and, satisfied with its efforts to reach a balance, unlinked itself from the probability grids. As the systems disengaged the central column of the control console drifted calmly down to a stop.
The Doctor reached for the switch which, Leela knew, would turn on the observation screen and show them what was outside. 'Are we where you think we are?' she asked innocently.
'I think so,' the Doctor said.
'And that is where?' she prompted.
'Here,' the Doctor said.
'There you see,' Leela said triumphantly. 'You said you would not make fun of me for asking questions and you are making fun of me for asking questions.' She knew it was not really worthy of a warrior, but she had found that she relished such small victories. The Doctor talked so much more fluently than she did. He knew so much more than she did and he made no attempt at all to hide it from her. Sometimes it had made her angry though this was not such a time.
'You were trying to make me angry,' he said reasonably. 'To prove a point.
A rather pointless point as you'd see if you thought about it reasonably.'
Leela shrugged. 'You do not know what I was trying to do.'
The Doctor flicked the switch and looked at the observation screen. 'You think not?' He was grinning wolfishly now.
'You do not know everything,' Leela went on.
'Of course not,' the Doctor said cheerfully. 'So you can stop sulking, can't you.'
'I am not sulking,' Leela said, sounding sulky even to herself.
'Look.' The Doctor nodded towards the screen. 'Here's a particularly frustrating example of what I don't know.'
The on-screen field of vision was slowly widening to show that the TARDIS
had fetched up in a wood of some kind. Beyond the thickets of silver birch and elm scrub interspersed with mature oak trees, a cluster of glass and metal buildings could be seen in the distance. The low, square towers and black, shiny blocks looked new and carefully proportioned but still they stood out starkly in a wide landscape of long hedgerows and scattered islands of old broad-leaved trees.
I don't know where we are,' the Doctor said.
Leela stared hard at the screen, scanning the undergrowth for predators.
Chapter Two
They were walking past the parapsychology laboratory when John Finer, physicist and one of the more respected of the younger professors in the University of East Wessex, suddenly spoke. 'Charlatan?' he said loudly, as though in the middle of a conversation. 'No, I wouldn't say the man's a charlatan.' Then he scowled, squeezing the habitual half-smile from his long, narrow face.' To call Hitchins a charlatan would be a gross insult to charlatans everywhere.'
Bill Parnaby, philosopher and a friend despite their fundamental disagreements on almost everything,