Doctor Who_ The Dying Days - Lance Parkin [16]
The Doctor led her along the maze of particle accelerators, oscilloscopes and lasers to the microscope section. He ignored at least two electron microscopes, a holographic magnifier and a dimensional revisualiser in favour of an antique brass microscope that he had clearly kept clean for years by lovingly polishing it. Either that or the day before yesterday he'd popped back a century or so and bought a new one.
The Doctor took the test tube from his pocket. 'A cork stopper,' he said.
'Is that important?'
He shrugged. 'It might be. The stopper is tight. This tube hasn't been unsealed for ages.'
He flicked the tube open and sniffed the contents. 'No discernible odour.'
He tapped the soil out onto a glass dish. It was red, with a texture somewhere between sand and clay.
‘It looks like cocoa powder,’ she observed.
‘Well it isn’t,’ he snapped. Benny swallowed, surprised by the strength of feeling behind the Doctor’s reply. She kept her mouth closed as the Doctor placed some more of the dust on a slide and put it underneath the lens. He poured a little more into another piece of equipment at the side of the desk and flicked a switch on its side. The box chugged into life, lights flashing on its surface.
Benny leant over. The dust looked familiar from somewhere.
The Doctor peered through the eyepiece of the microscope. 'It's not from Earth, that's for sure. Let's see: Fe2O3.3H20. Limonite. Hydrogenated iron oxide.'
Why was it making her feel nostalgic?
Tickertape spewed from the box at the side of the desk. Without taking his eyes away from the microscope, the Doctor tore the tape off. Then he straightened up to read what it said.
'Found only one place in the solar system - '
' - Mars,' the Doctor and Benny declared in unison.
17
'Wel done,' the Doctor said, a little awestruck. 'I worked it out by spectrographic analysis with access to one of the finest mineralogical databases in the universe. How did you know?'
'As you'd know if you'd read my first book,' Benny announced authoritatively, 'I made my reputation as part of an expedition excavating the tombs of the Mare Sirenum,'
'Those tombs are carved from spotless blue crystal,' the Doctor objected in a wounded tone of voice.
'There was soil like that in the egg chambers.' - Benny realised she was blushing - 'I was twenty-four and there was a lad called Tim in the same group. We spent a fair amount of the time rolling around together up there. That soil gets everywhere, trust me.'
'The odd thing is that it has been chemical y treated. The main question is, how did it get here?' The Doctor peered down at the sample, as though he was expecting it to confess the answer.
'That's no big mystery,' Benny said, 'Humanity has got to Mars by now.' Her knowledge of history was a little sparse in places, but the late twentieth century (or more precisely 1963 - 1989: The Kennedy Assassination to the Fall of the Berlin Wall) was one of her specialities. Within a couple of years of the Americans landing on the Moon, the British had put a man on Mars. It was al part of the superpower space race, with Britain still trying to play with the big boys. Like al races, it was over quickly and didn't really amount to much. The United Kingdom felt good about itself for a couple of years and put itself even further into debt. There were no significant technological or scientific consequences, and al anyone had to show for it in the end was about five hundred kilos of red rock and rusty soil. Most people in the nineties probably wouldn't remember the names of any of the Mars Astronauts. There were a couple of disasters towards the end, Benny recalled. Something to do with astronauts going mad. Hardly surprising when they spent a total of sixteen months in a tin box the size of a Transit van.
The Doctor drummed his fingers on the bench top. 'Yes, now you mention it they were mounting Mars missions when I was exiled here. I remember helping them out that one time.'
'There was a report on the television news this morning