Doctor Who_ The Algebra of Ice - Lloyd Rose [65]
‘There are no marks; they haven’t tried yet.’ Brett came carefully down across the rubble. ‘I’ll have to check later.’
‘I’m not coming up here again. I don’t know why you insisted on my being here in the first place.’
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The Algebra of Ice
‘I thought it would interest you,’ said Brett, stepping past him and starting the descent to the road and the car.
Or possibly, Unwin thought with trepidation, you were afraid I might run if you left me alone. Had Brett sensed he was wavering? Would he tie him up in a cellar? He’d thought he knew the man in front of him, but he hadn’t. Not at all. He was in a terrible position.
He watched Brett moving cautiously in front of him. What if there were an accident. . . ? Brett looked back. Unwin started and smiled nervously, and knew he could never do it. Never, never do it. And Brett knew it too. Unwin hated him again. As if he had read the thought, Brett smiled.
‘Come along, young Pat. Back to the warmth.’
Lie, thought Unwin as he followed him. Lie. He would never come out of the cold again.
Ace wondered guiltily if Ethan’s headache, which had literally knocked him over, had been brought on by the succession of so many weird things so quickly.
The Doctor had done something that relieved the pain and left him to rest in the quiet dark. Ace sat by the bed for a while, not saying anything, until his breathing told her he was asleep.
She missed him. She wanted to show him the Alps. Show him that there were good things about travelling with the Doctor, that it wasn’t all torture and dreadful threats and chaos. Except, she admitted to herself, it mostly was. ‘This isn’t life,’ she whispered as she left. ‘You mustn’t hole up in your flat again. Life can be wonderful.’
In his sleep he heard her, and he dreamed of her and wonderful things.
When she returned to the console room, the Doctor had made one of his mysterious departures.
‘Bugger,’ said Ace. She went outside. The car the Doctor had rented was gone. Git. He’d gone on without her. Sulkily, she kicked a stone. He knew how much that irritated – all right, all right, hurt – her. And he should know that most times he turned out to need her after all.
She surveyed the scene morosely. The TARDIS stood in a cluster of dark green firs on the slope of a shallow valley. About a quarter of a mile distant lay a little Swiss village, at the end of which glinted a frozen pond complete with ice-skaters. Ace had sniffed to the Doctor that it looked like some naff Disney film, and he had replied, in that know-it-all way of his, that it ought to since Chapter Sixteen
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the major designer for Disney’s early animated features was Gustav Tenggren who came from. . . She couldn’t remember. Some place with Alps.
There wasn’t even much snow.
She moped back into the TARDIS. Ethan was asleep. The Doctor was gone.
What was she supposed to do? Bake biscuits or something? Well, what the hell. She went into the little kitchen annex off the food-machine room. A can of green pea soup with the lid missing sat unappetisingly on the counter.
Maybe she’d take a swim.
In bathing costume and terry-cloth robe she started down the corridor that led from her bedroom to the pool. It was about a five-minute walk with, it had always seemed to her, a needless number of turns. Why couldn’t the Doctor just reconfigure things so that the trip was shorter? She’d asked him, and she knew he’d meant to, but something else always took his attention. Giant metal insects or something. It’s not as if it would take that much time, she though irritably as she turned a corner and walked into Molecross.
The Doctor examined the glacier. Though the wind was fierce, he still wore only his suit, his one concession to the temperature being a disconcerting paisley scarf. He had driven the car up to a lay-by from which a footpath snaked steeply through the till. The climb turned out to be neither long nor difficult; he presumed that in the summer this was a destination for walkers.
The glacial ice was greyish, which didn’t surprise the Doctor. He knew that silt from erosion made