Doctor Who_ Return of the Living Dad - Kate Orman [71]
And it wasn’t because he’d been hurt there. It was because someone he loved had been hurt there.
What must it be like to be so old? To keep on living, and see the people around you hurt and killed, over and over?
‘I’m getting old,’ she murmured to Jason. Being a companion meant risking things. Sometimes your sanity, sometimes your life. She didn’t want to risk him.
Dad had been holding in a lot of emotions when he’d learnt the truth about Albinex. It was awful. They’d been working together for two decades. And now her father would be
wondering whether Albinex had always been planning this. Whether they had ever really been friends. Jason. Dad.
The Doctor. She was still juggling the three of them.
For a moment something cold in her insides said that one of them was going to have to die. And, whichever one it was, it would be because of her.
She held onto Jason for a few more minutes. Then she carefully slid out of bed and rummaged for her clothes.
The Doctor had disappeared almost entirely into the van’s engine. He was nearly upside down, with his legs sticking up, revealing one navy-blue sock and one Rocky and Bullwinkle Christmas sock.
Joel had never actually seen someone work on a car by climbing into its innards before. He just hoped nothing started up accidentally. Mind you, by this stage, something like half of the engine was scattered over the garage floor.
‘So,’ he said, ‘about this ghost.’
The Doctor said something, his voice muffled. He hauled himself backwards out of the engine. Somehow, there wasn’t a speck of grease on him.
He planted his feet on the ground and leant on the van.
‘She’s stranded,’ he repeated. ‘Trapped in the future. Just a tiny fraction of a second, but enough to have severe effects.
It’s only through a sort of temporal paradox that she’s still alive.’
He stooped down and started picking over the engine pads he’d removed, turning them around in his hands as though , they were geometric puzzles. ‘So what’s she doing?’
said Joel. ‘Why does she keep attacking us?’
‘I don’t think she sees it as an attack,’ said the Doctor.
‘She’s trying to make contact, to communicate. That’s why she’s been concentrating her efforts on time travellers.’
‘Benny told you,’ said Joel.
The Doctor glanced up at him. ‘So I was right,’ he said, and grinned.
‘D’oh!’ said Joel.
The Doctor selected a piece of van and stood up, gazing down into the engine as though he was working on a particularly tricky jigsaw puzzle and was holding a piece of sky.
‘Before you disappear back down there,’ said Joel,
‘there’s something I want to ask you.’
‘All right,’ said the Time Lord.
‘Okay,’ said Joel. ‘When I was growing up, my family had a nuclear shelter in the backyard. It was built in the fifties, long before we moved in. When I was a little kid I used to play around in it. Then Reagan got elected, and my dad decided it was time to fix the shelter up for real.’
The Doctor waited, patiently. By now Joel’s dad would’ve been asking whether this was a question or a speech. ‘He used to make Mom and me do drills, getting into the shelter in under a minute from anywhere in the house. If we blew it, we had to do it again. And again.
‘I kept asking him if we could stop, because the drills used to scare me to death. I used to lie awake at night, if there was a storm, waiting for the thunder after every flash of lightning. I used to turn on the radio just to hear that the stations were still broadcasting and the world was still there.
‘But listen... the ghost showed me... I saw the future, and I saw myself dying. And it wasn’t from nukes.’
‘You saw yourself die?’
Joel nodded. His eyes were almost as round as his glasses.
The future isn’t fixed,’ said the Doctor gently. ‘Whatever the ghost showed you is just one possible future. So if say, You saw yourself die in a plane crash tomorrow, you might avoid taking