Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [57]
The Doctor hefted his stick, performed a practice stroke and then, with great casualness, smacked his puck down the deck.
'There's plenty of other variables,' said the Doctor. 'The time period, the exact energy state of the medium.'
At first the puck seemed to be travelling in a straight line, then suddenly it curved, described a half circle around Chris's pucks, slowed down and gently nuzzled up to the red target puck. There was a scattering of applause from the watching spectators.
Chris looked at the Doctor.
'It's all in the wrist action,' said the Doctor.
Which left Chris facing a pretty problem in regards the disposition of his pucks. To score he had to get his puck closer to the red than the Doctor's blue – which was right up against the red.
Meaning Chris had to find a way to shift the Doctor's puck and get his own in between. It had to be the puck you shot, said the rules; you couldn't knock one of your earlier pucks closer. He thought he'd been clever, planning ahead, building that barrier of his own pucks but the Doctor had sailed his blue around it. He should have known better than to try and outplan the Doctor, who always had some new trick up his sleeve. Now he had two shots left and the Doctor had one.
Chris saw a way to win but he was going to have to be sneaky.
And the first step was to get the Doctor thinking about something else. 'It must take an enormous fusion reactor to drive a ship this big,' he said.
'Not really,' said the Doctor. 'What it does take is about twenty hydrogen-burning steam turbines geared to drive four very large screws.'
'Gosh,' said Chris, as he kicked his puck into position on the starting line, 'how do you know that?'
'Oh, that's easy,' said the Doctor. 'It's the steam that gives the engines away and I counted the number of funnels when we made our final approach – Oh, bad luck.'
'Damn,' said Chris. He watched his puck settle into position – right where he wanted it. 'If you're going to use hydrogen anyway why not a fusion reactor?'
'Aesthetics, I imagine,' said the Doctor. 'An ocean liner under full steam does have a certain grandeur. Have I ever told you about the Titanic?'
'No.'
'Oh, a magnificent ship.' The Doctor knocked his puck up the deck. It described a mirror-image trajectory of his previous shot before nestling up to the opposite side of the target puck. Exactly as Chris had predicted. 'Terribly advanced for its day, the Titanic – they said it was unsinkable.'
Chris caught the eye of a female spectator who was leaning against the bulkhead in the wrong place. He made furtive little waving motions with his hand until the woman got the idea and moved out of the way. He checked the Doctor to see if he had noticed. 'What happened to it?'
'It sank on its maiden voyage,' said the Doctor. 'Tragic. Bad luck really because the idea of sealable compartments was basically sound.'
Chris swung and hit his puck with such force that it was lifted clear of the deck for the first ten metres. At first everything went according to plan. The puck ricocheted off the bulkhead, smacked into the puck which Chris had placed earlier which in turn hit one of the Doctor's away from the target puck. Things began to deteriorate from then on. The first puck hurtled off at the wrong angle and smacked into one of the barrier pucks which hit the target puck just as – Chris had by now lost track of where everything was going – another puck slammed into the target from the other direction. The first puck hit yet another puck, jumped off the deck, ricocheted off the deck railing and slammed into the target. There was a crisp sound like glass cracking.
There was a scattering of ironic applause.
'Yes,' said the Doctor, 'I thought you were going to do something like that.'
They strolled down the deck to examine the carnage. The target puck had been cracked right across its top face. The