Doctor Who_ The Algebra of Ice - Lloyd Rose [95]
‘I won’t be able to find my way out,’ he stalled.
‘Do you love Ace?’
The non sequitur was so jarring Ethan thought he hadn’t heard right. ‘I’m sorry?’
Chapter Twenty-three
195
‘Do you love Ace?’
‘I. . . ’ Ethan was aware that something enormous rested on his reply, but he didn’t know what. ‘I don’t know,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I mean, yes, I love her.
I’m not in love with her, nor she with me.’
‘But it could happen.’
Ethan thought about this. ‘Yes. I think so.’
‘She loves me,’ the Doctor said simply. ‘And she trusts me. And you’re right –
perhaps she shouldn’t.’
‘I never said that.’
‘Near enough.’
‘Do you love her?’
The Doctor’s shoulders shifted uncomfortably. ‘These human emotions. . .
They’re very hard for me to comprehend.’ He still hadn’t looked away from his machine. ‘Ace is hard for me to comprehend.’
‘What are you going to do? When she’s an old woman and you’ve hardly changed?’
‘She’ll get tired of me before then. She’ll start wanting a real life.’
‘Travelling with you isn’t a real life?’
‘A human life. I look like one of you, but I’m not one of you. Not in the least.
At the end of the day, she’ll have to leave me.’ Ethan waited, but the Doctor appeared to have finished. He poked at and adjusted his device. Finally he said, ‘Please go now. I have work to do.’
Without quite knowing how, Ethan found his way to the console room. He left the TARDIS and crossed the slushy garden to the house. In the kitchen, he found Ace and Molecross at the table. At least ten rumpled chocolate wrappers lay at Molecross’s elbow.
‘Bourneville Fruit and Nut,’ Molecross explained, embarrassed. ‘Go on,’ he said to Ace.
‘Well, that’s it, really. UNIT put them away in one of their super-security prisons, and I suppose they’re still there.’
‘Sheherezade,’ said Ethan. She smiled at him.
‘It’s all more extraordinary than I even imagined,’ said Molecross dreamily.
Ace glanced at Ethan, then leaned across the table toward Molecross. ‘Look,’
she said in a low voice. ‘I’m not supposed to do this, but. . . How’d you like to spend some time in the TARDIS library?’
Molecross gasped. She smiled and guided him out the door.
‘Right,’ she said to Ethan when she returned. ‘Alone at last.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Molecross sat engrossed in a holograph book of the canyons of Cevitor. Faced with the immensity of the library, he had at first only wandered dazedly. For a half hour or so, he was entranced by the merely familiar: Newton’s notes for his Principia; several Shakespeare manuscripts; scrolls labelled with Greek names, noted as survivors of the fire that destroyed the library of Alexandria; a number of Napoleon’s battle plans in the general’s hand; a notebook of pencil sketches by Goya; handwritten scores by Mozart. . . In addition to these recognisable marvels, there were papers and volumes by authors he’d never heard of on subjects that baffled him. And all this before he reached the rooms devoted to other planets.
‘Oi, Molecross!’
He looked up. Ace was grinning down at him. ‘You’ve been in here for bloody hours.’
‘Has it been that long?’
‘Time flies when you’re having fun, does it?’ Ace glanced around at the shelves. She wasn’t particularly keen on the library. ‘Seen the Professor?’
‘No.’
‘Come help look for him then. You can come back later,’ she said when Molecross’s face fell. ‘Only I need to find him. He gets engrossed in these projects and forgets to eat. He says it doesn’t affect him, but then he’s all cranky.’
Ethan was waiting in the corridor. He glanced past them at the expanse of books.
‘I wouldn’t half mind. . . ’
Ace shut the door firmly. ‘Later.’
‘You know he’s all right,’ Ethan said impatiently.
‘No I don’t, and if you’d been with him as long as I have, you wouldn’t either.’
‘He was working on