Doctor Who_ The Algebra of Ice - Lloyd Rose [61]
‘Praise from Caesar is praise indeed. You know I haven’t any clothes. I’m not putting on that suit again.’
‘Bugger.’ She opened the wardrobe and pulled out a harlequin-patched coat.
‘No,’ he said immediately.
‘As if you have any style sense. I rather like it.’
‘No.’
She sighed and pulled out a brown velvet frock coat that was much too large for him. There were some trousers his size, but for a stouter man. ‘There’s nothing in here. I don’t know why he keeps these; he’ll never wear them again.’
‘It looks like he can’t wear them now.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Well. . . We’ll just have to borrow something from him.
You’re about the same size.’
‘Does he even have other clothes? I’ve only ever seen him in that suit.’
‘Oh yeah, he’s got others. They’re not so nice as the suit. He’s well elegant now, but you should have seen him when I first met him. Something out of an old clothes bin he was. He must have some proper clothes in the house.’ She darted down the stairs.
When she returned with a pair of checked trousers, red braces, and a sleeve-less jumper out of some sartorial nightmare, Ethan thought he might just stay in bed. But the trousers fitted and the shirt was acceptable. She helped him downstairs to the kitchen. The Doctor was not to be found. ‘Probably in the TARDIS.’ Ace started rummaging in the cupboards.
‘It’s nearby then?’
‘Yeah. Tinned soup. Surely he has more than that. He usually keeps cheese.’
She opened the refrigerator. ‘Right. And some eggs. Cheese omelette all right?’
‘Anything.’
In the event, she made him three omelettes and he finished each of them in about ninety seconds then drank half a litre of orange juice in a gulp. Ace hadn’t found any bread, but there was blackberry jam so they ate this from the jar with spoons.
The Doctor sat at a computer examining for the third time Unwin and Ethan’s combined calculations. He took Ethan’s word for it that he hadn’t contributed Chapter Fifteen
127
any additions while he was a prisoner. Which meant that all Unwin had was the work Ethan had done under the Doctor’s guidance, which, according to Ethan, Unwin hadn’t managed to do much with. Nor would he, the Doctor was concluding. Even running the computations through the TARDIS computers, which were perfectly able to handle them, took several hours. At the rate Unwin was going, he’d be stuck for years before he worked out the next step.
That would keep the threat at bay until the Doctor could find a permanent way to thwart it.
So the crisis was far from imminent. Still, though it hardly seemed necessary, he might as well check the status of that fragile place in the barrier. He pressed a button and the sensor panel lit up.
The worn spot was gone.
In the morning, it snowed. Ethan got out of bed, softly so as not to wake Ace. Balancing on the toes of his wounded foot, he hobbled to the window and looked out into the silence. The snow was already an inch or so deep. He wondered why the Doctor kept an old police call box in his back garden.
When he came down to the kitchen, he found the Doctor making pancakes.
A bottle of syrup sat on the table, along with orange juice and hot coffee.
The Doctor glanced at him, said without irony ‘Stylish trousers’ and flipped a pancake onto a plate. Ethan sat down and picked up the bottle. Maple syrup from America. A small covered dish contained a mound of fresh butter.
‘The others on your planet, are they like you?’
‘No.’ The Doctor set a plate of pancakes in front of him.
‘How are they different?’
‘Oh, homebodies. No sense of curiosity or adventure.’
‘So you just travel around doing what? Fixing problems with Time?’
‘For the most part. You’d be surprised how many there are. Rents, unravelling, undone hems, grease spots.’
‘Something odd happened last night. Ace said it was a time shift.’
‘Yes, those are peculiar, aren’t they? They’re what first alerted me to this particular problem. Fortunately, we won’t be having any more of them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it was the disruption of