Doctor Who_ The Algebra of Ice - Lloyd Rose [18]
‘Yes,’ said Molecross wonderingly, as if he had forgotten that. ‘The air. . . too cold to breathe. Tasted like metal.’ His eyelids fluttered.
‘One more question,’ the Brigadier said quickly. ‘Do you know what hit you?’
Molecross rolled his head heavily from side to side. Tears seeped from his closed eyes. ‘I shouldn’t. . . I was. . . ’
‘You weren’t in the wrong place,’ said the Doctor gently. ‘They were off-target.
That’s why you were hit. It wasn’t your mistake.’
There was no response, and the Doctor wasn’t sure he’d even heard. But as he and Lethbridge-Stewart went to the door, Molecross stirred. He seemed to Chapter Four
39
have momentarily come up from under the drug, and his tear-filled eyes were clear. He said something.
‘What?’ The Doctor bent over him. Unexpectedly, Molecross grabbed his wrist. ‘It came to me,’ he whispered. ‘I felt it. I knew it.’
‘What? What came to you?’
‘The universe, its beautiful infinity. . . Do you understand?’ His grip tightened. ‘Do you understand? It was worth losing a hand.’
The Doctor went for a walk. UNIT HQ had been carefully built away from A roads, down in a dell. If not hidden, it was at least isolated. There was open land and bits of forest nearby. The Doctor climbed over a stile and made his way across a pasture. The grass was brown, the sheep droppings dried out and crumbling.
He hadn’t witnessed any of those time rewrites since Ethan’s flat, but that didn’t mean they weren’t happening elsewhere. When he’d called up the events again from the TARDIS files, the records had been interesting. None of the changes had in fact influenced the main timeline. Poe survived but never wrote again, so there were no later works to influence other writers. Oates’ death had followed hard upon his rescue, and all that was missing from history was the story of his heroism. Pompeii had avoided destruction by volcano only to succumb to a plague; the survivors had left, and shortly thereafter Vesuvius had erupted and buried the city. Ethan’s storming out hadn’t made any difference since the photographs that he was to comment on so astutely hadn’t even been printed yet. The bumps were very slight. So far. He could only hope they didn’t get worse while he was trying to work out what was going on.
He had run the time sensors again, hoping to locate Patrick Unwin, but the focus remained on Ethan. Had the boy contributed something vital to Unwin’s theories? No, they didn’t even know each other, and Ethan had dismissed Unwin’s work. The Doctor shook his head. There was nothing to do but keep an eye on Ethan and continue to search for Unwin. In the meantime, he’d work on this problem of Lethbridge-Stewart’s, which was alarming enough in its own way.
He thought about Lethbridge-Stewart.
He hadn’t seen him since telling
him about the destruction of the Daleks – an event some forty years in the Brigadier’s past. They had different attitudes about the matter. Obviously they were both glad that the threat was gone forever. But Lethbridge-Stewart was a soldier with a soldier’s straightforward attitude: destroy the enemy. When that was accomplished, you had done your duty. The Doctor didn’t know what his 40
The Algebra of Ice
duty was. To time and the universe? To the individual ethical action? Long ago, in his fourth body, he had been given a chance to destroy the Daleks and hadn’t. It was not his place to, as the Earth expression went, play God; he refused to destroy an entire race. And since then, how many billions had died for his virtue? So, given a second chance, he had turned the Daleks’ planet into a fireball. And how many billions had died for his justice?
The Doctor came to another stile, but instead of climbing over he sat on the fence. His house in Allen Road was only an hour or so away; perhaps he should go over there. It might need a bit of sprucing up. Then again, another of his selves might have visited and done that already. Or he might have himself. Or some future self might be heavily into drugs and cutting-edge music – though he rather doubted