Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [10]
‘Everything happened like I said it did,’ he told her firmly. ‘Everything.
That’s the whole point of writing it down. Humans might not be able to write what happened down without skewing it and ruining the truth of it. I can, and I did.’
He continued his search, in silence. Rachel made a half-hearted effort to do the same. Almost straight away, though, she found what they were looking for.
‘ The Time of Neman, page 127,’ she said.
Marnal snatched the book from her, and scanned it quickly. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Well done.’
‘Er. . . Now what?’
23
‘We build one of these,’ he said, stabbing his finger at the page and passing the book back to her.
‘A temporal monitoring chamber?’
‘Yes.’
‘Er. . . ’
‘If you know the true way to read it, this book contains codes and hints for building a pocket universe that maps every aspect of the real one. Using such a device, we’ll be able to see Gallifrey.’
Rachel looked down. ‘That book?’ she said.
Marnal’s eyes glinted. ‘If you clear a space on the dining table, I’ll show you.’
After half an hour Marnal had assembled all sorts of things from the garage and various piles of junk around the house. A big glass bottle from a home-brewing kit, an old portable television, what looked like a section from a recording studio’s mixing desk. After about an hour’s work connecting them up with cables to a row of smelly old car batteries, he stood back.
To Rachel’s amazement, the inside of the glass bottle had gone dark, then tiny bright dots had started to resolve.
‘Galaxies,’ Marnal assured her. He was twiddling with the mixing-desk controls, checking the television screen, which was full of what looked like Greek symbols.
‘Greek?’ she asked.
He smiled condescendingly. ‘No, these are letters of the Gallifreyan omega-bet.’
‘Which is like an alphabet, but superior?’
‘The last word, you might say.’
Rachel peered into the bottle. Wherever she looked, she was able to focus in and in and in and in and in. So the galaxies became stars, became planets, became patches of land. It made her eyes go funny, and she had to blink and start again a couple of times. She saw something that looked like the moon, only the rocks were more jagged and there was a strange purple sky. Things that looked like woodlice were burying themselves in the soft sand.
Aliens, she realised. She was looking at alien life forms.
Then the contents of the bottle faded away, and she found herself staring at Marnal’s face on the other side, distorted in the clear, curved glass. He was holding the power cable, which he’d unplugged from the car batteries.
‘These will go flat in a matter of minutes. I need a better power supply,’ he told her. ‘I’ll construct a cold-fusion reactor. Shouldn’t take long.’
‘But no one knows how to do that,’ Rachel said.
‘No one on Earth. It’s child’s play to my people. Your human children rub sticks together to make fire?’
24
‘I was a Girl Guide, but I was useless at all that.’
Marnal gave her a forgiving smile. ‘Well, fusion is just a simple matter of rubbing helium nuclei together to make energy.’
‘And it’s safe?’
‘Oh yes. Completely clean.’
‘You could solve loads of problems on Earth,’ she told him. ‘The energy crisis, the dependence on fossil fuels, air pollution, cheap space travel. . . ’
‘Yes, but there are more pressing matters. I have one last car battery.’
He connected it up and started scanning star systems.
‘Now, it’s towards the galactic core, it should be around. . . ’ He paused. ‘I don’t understand. It’s gone.’
‘What do you mean gone?’
‘If I could answer that question. . . I can’t find Gallifrey. I can’t even see Kasterborous. Anywhere in space or time.’
‘You don’t want to go to a genuine Roman orgy?’ the Doctor said, astonished.
They were standing in the marketplace. The farmers and merchants had all gone home for the night, cleared their stalls and tied back the bright