Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [18]
The Doctor concentrated for a couple of seconds. ‘No,’ he concluded. ‘It’s a regular pattern, though. We need to get in there.’
The Doctor and Miranda walked all the way round the building, but there wasn’t a gate.
‘Perhaps we missed a bit,’ Miranda said, but the Doctor pointed to their tracks in the snow.
He was examining the wall. Miranda turned her attention to the ground.
The Doctor’s Trabant wasn’t the only thing that had left tracks in the snow.
There was a set of footprints that came up from the main road, and led off to the left.
‘Dad, look at the snow.’
‘Not really the best time for that, Mir,’ he called back.
Miranda pulled a face at him, and followed the trail. There were several sets of prints, all converging at the same point on the wall. It wasn’t a gate, though – it just looked like bricks. A big lump of snow had drifted up nearby, as though it was covering something. Miranda stepped towards it.
A hand grabbed her shoulder.
It was the Doctor.
‘No,’ he said.
‘OK,’ she replied. ‘Do you see the prints?’
They led right up to the wall. The Doctor bent over to take a closer look at them. ‘Small shoes. More your size than mine. Boys and girls.’
He placed his hand on the wall, but it was solid.
‘There’s a hidden door. How did they open it? Oh, of course.’
He took the phone from his pocket and waved it towards the wall. There was clicking sound, then the wall swirled away like water down a plughole.
‘Phased molecules,’ the Doctor said knowledgeably.
He stepped through. The wall swirled back up into place behind him.
‘Dad!’ Miranda shouted.
‘I can’t get it to open again,’ he told her, glad she was on the other side. ‘Go back to the car.’
Miranda, sulkily, agreed. She was sitting back in the passenger seat before she realised he could have thrown the phone over the wall to her, and by then she knew it would be too late to go back and get him.
The Doctor made a beeline for the radio mast. It must have been a hundred feet tall. It would be able to broadcast over a wide area – hundreds of square 39
miles, at a guess. He’d never seen an aerial with this exact configuration before. There were plenty of footprints in the snow, leading to a small building at the base of the mast.
Before going to the mast, he took a peek through a window in one of the main factory buildings, where a light was on. Sitting at a wide workbench were a dozen boys, all working to construct telephone handsets with blank-faced determination. They made a miniature production line, nimbly taking a component from the tray in front of them, fitting it into place, then passing it to the boy on their right. The last boy dropped the handsets into a large black bag, overseen by a small red-haired girl. It all happened in perfect unison.
None of them was speaking.
The Doctor took a closer look at the girl. Her telephone was clamped to her ear. Now, he saw that all the boys had handsets over their right ears, as if they were glued there.
He tapped at the window. As he suspected, not one of the children even looked up.
He made his way round to the smaller building at the base of the radio mast, keeping in the shadows. It was a more recent structure, like a Portakabin, constructed from the same metal as the mast. There were no windows, but there was a door that opened when the Doctor tried it.
He found a single room, lined with computer banks. Three girls around Miranda’s age sat at control stations, all of them staring at screens. They didn’t react to the Doctor’s arrival. They sat playing with their phones, thumbs hooked around them, pressing the buttons almost instinctively. As the Doctor watched he could see that they were compiling machine codes. Endless lines of letters and numbers were being displayed on the screens in front of them.
He recognised one of the girls as Rachel Rowley, a classmate of Miranda’s.
Then the monitors cleared, and a new message flashed up.
UPLINK READY
‘XLNT:-)’ the girls said with one voice, sounding disconcertingly like a church congregation.
The Doctor pushed one of them out