Doctor Who_ The Algebra of Ice - Lloyd Rose [96]
‘You don’t know him very well, do you?’ She set off down the corridor and, with a sigh, Ethan followed. As usual, Molecross brought up the rear.
Chapter Twenty-four
197
‘I’ve seen the most amazing –’
‘Not now,’ Ethan snapped. He was jealous of Molecross’s time in the library, and when he realised this, he was embarrassed. It wasn’t as if his last few hours hadn’t been extremely well spent.
‘This it?’ Ace had stopped at a door that looked to Ethan like every other door he’d seen.
‘Might be.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, as if she’d spotted a sign invisible to the rest of them, ‘this is the one.’ She pushed the door open. The Doctor wasn’t inside.
For a moment, Ethan didn’t even notice – he was caught by the image on the monitor screen. He crossed to it slowly, his eyes following the lines of the graph as they swept into peaks and dropped into valleys.
‘Where’s he got to, then?’ said Ace irritably. ‘Oi, what’s that?’
‘It’s a landscape. He’s graphed himself a three-dimensional landscape from the elements of the code.’
‘Right. Now try that in English.’
‘You can take equations and state them another way as a graph. Translate them, in a sense. That’s what he’s done with the primes that formed the basis of the worm’s code.’ Ethan bit his lip, thinking.
‘Why would he do that?’ said Molecross. ‘What’s it for?’
‘My God,’ Ethan muttered, ‘I think –’
‘He’s gone in there,’ said Ace. ‘The git! He’s gone bloody in there, hasn’t he?’
She ran to the screen and slammed her hands against it. All she hit was a flat surface.
‘Why would he do that?’ said Molecross bewilderedly. ‘Why on Earth would he want to go in there?’
Ethan ran his hands through his hair and crossed to the computer he’d used earlier. Its screen showed nothing but equations. He stared at these while Ace continued to beat helplessly at the wall screen. At last he said slowly, ‘We’ve seen that the aliens can’t properly exist in our reality. Nor could we in theirs, probably. So if you wanted to communicate with them, you’d have to construct a middle ground where the two of you could co-exist.’
Ace stopped pounding, her face white. ‘You mean he’s gone to meet them?’
‘I think so.’
‘Oh bloody hell!’ She was almost crying in frustration.
‘He’s brilliant.’ Ethan looked back and forth between the two screens. ‘Absolutely brilliant.’
198
The Algebra of Ice
‘And bonkers!’ she cried angrily. ‘He’s gone in there without anyone to help him, and what if he fails? Pop goes the cosmos, right?’ She kicked the screen.
‘He thinks he can do anything!’
Looking at the graph, Ethan wondered if perhaps he could.
‘Right then,’ said Ace. ‘We’re going after him.’
‘Very good,’ said Ethan. ‘Why don’t you tell me how?’
‘You work it out. You’re the genius.’
‘I could be Einstein, for all the good it would do us. This is beyond anything human.’
‘There’s a wall,’ said Molecross. ‘Like glass. How did he get through?’
‘Ah, excellent point.’ Ethan scrolled through the equations. ‘I’m betting he arranged the wall to form after he’d gone through. It’s a door. And he’s locked it.’
‘To keep himself in?’ said Ace, confused.
‘To keep us out, I imagine. And other things in.’ Ethan went over to the screen and examined it closely. ‘I wonder if there’s any physical form of lock to correspond with the logorithmic one, since the graph corresponds with the computer’s equations.’ He lay flat and ran his fingers along the lower edge of the screen. ‘Hm. Come here, Ace.’ She knelt beside him. ‘Can you feel anything?’
She placed her hand where his had been. ‘Yeah, like a little box.’
‘That’s it then.’ Ethan got to his feet. ‘Not that it helps us. I’ve no more idea how to unlock this than I do the other.’
‘Unlock it, balls!’ Ace grabbed him and Molecross and shoved them into the corridor. She wheeled in the doorway, her hand going to her pocket.
‘Oh no,’ Ethan gasped. ‘Ace –’
‘Be prepared,’ she spat, ‘that’s my bloody motto,’ – and launched something like a tiny grenade at the bottom of the screen. The explosion knocked them