Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [87]
The waiter sighed. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘Pieces of myself. Now, do you remember when Ship exploded?’
‘I wasn’t there, sir.’
‘No, and neither was I, happily. But Ace lost her combat suit, again, and I lost everything I had been carrying with me.
My very best slingshot, for instance — I still haven’t found that. But look.’ He rummaged in a pocket. ‘I found this in a diner on Bellatrix.’
He handed the book to the waiter, who turned it over. It was a dog-eared copy of The Elements of Style. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘ Ship travelled along rips in space and time. When it exploded, some of its contents were scattered along those rips. Just like these restaurants.’ The Doctor gestured with a ladle at the tables beyond the kitchen doors. ‘That book,’ he said, tapping it with the spoon, ‘was aboard Ship when it died. I’ve been searching for anything else that might’ve trickled out, landed in unexpected places.’
The waiter handed him back the book. ‘I don’t follow.’
‘Good for you,’ said the Doctor.
‘No, sir. I mean, I don’t understand.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! The analogy between my current shattered mental state and the scattering of my personal effects through the universe is an obvious one. Just when I finally got it all together,’ he concluded, ‘I forgot where I put it.’
With a triumphant flourish, the Doctor plunged his ladle into the tomato soup. The cook stepped back in astonishment.
The little man gently lifted the ladle, and tipped it carefully so that the soup flowed back into the pot —
revealing a brooch which had been sitting at the bottom. The Doctor picked it up in a handkerchief, carefully wiped away the sticky red fluid.
‘There,’ he said softly, holding up the jade brooch. ‘You see? A little piece of mind.’
The Doctor woke up with a start. He couldn’t move. He struggled awkwardly for a few moments before he realized he was wrapped tightly in a blanket.
He was in a bed, in a hut — one of the smaller ones, judging by the curve of the ceiling. The SmithSmiths’ house, perhaps. He shrugged his way loose of the blanket and sat up on the bed. His head ached, but he was compos mentis. It had been only one hundred and two minutes since he had woken up SLEEPY.
Would the SmithSmiths have kept any tea about the place? He wandered into the living-room.
Chesinen was there, looking as though sleep had caught her unawares. Without the armour, she might have been anyone’s daughter, curled up on the sofa. The Doctor frowned. The blast would have hurt her. White would probably shoot her with the biggest gun he could find for what she was doing. Why was she here?
She blinked awake, startled. ‘Are you all right?’ she said.
He nodded. ‘What’s your plan?’
‘I don’t know; I’m making this up as I go. Listen — tell me about your bet.’
The Doctor found a chair and sat on it. He said, ‘You must have got some of my memories when—’
‘Yes, that’s right, I did.’ She was tense, wound up, not sure if she was doing the right thing. ‘When White was going to — just after you sent out that message, he was going to try and get into your head. And you thought, Does this mean I lose my bet? What, have you got a bet with him?’
‘Not with him. It was an argument I had once. With a madman. I did very badly. He asked me to give him a good reason not to kill me. No — a reason why it would be wrong to kill me.’
‘Looks to me like you won,’ said Chesinen.
The Doctor shook his head. ‘He was just trying to make a point. I couldn’t come up with a logical, rational reason that murder was wrong.’
Chesinen looked at him, hard.
‘Let’s change the subject,’ he said.
‘What’s your plan?’
‘We need to get the colonists out of the dome. SLEEPY
needs to be dug up and repaired.’
‘What about the warship?’
‘We need to delay it until SLEEPY is operational again.’
‘But why? I saw — it’s just a bunch of junk crashed into the ground. The ship, I mean.’
‘It’s our best chance. At the same time, we need to evacuate as many people as possible.’
‘They’re coming to kill us, aren’t they?’ Chesinen hugged herself. She was very young.