Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [20]
The intruder vanished from his brain.
The Doctor grinned.
W8!
‘What’s the problem, O Great Provider?’
42
Now it was the Doctor’s turn. His mind surged down the headset, into the computers then out to the boys’ and girls’ handsets. As he ran through the electric labyrinth of the printed circuits, he carefully shut down the Great Provider’s mind, dismantling and deleting it. The Provider had run a simple set of instructions to each of the children. The Doctor undid every one of them, line by line.
CONNECTION FAILING. SIGNAL LOST. NO CARRIER.
‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ the Doctor shouted up at the ceiling.
The girls had collapsed on the floor, their phones melting as though they’d been dipped in acid. He’d have to call the police and get their parents to take them home. The computers were sparking and fizzing, their tapes unspooling and fraying. The mast was silent.
The Doctor headed out, back to Miranda and the car. She was waiting for him at a new gap in the wall. She ran over to hug him.
Behind them, the mast disintegrated in a mass of blue sparks. ‘What did you do?’ Miranda asked.
‘The person behind this wanted the contents of my brain. But my mind is. . .
Well, let’s just say there’s more to it than meets the eye.’
‘He’s gone?’
‘Oh, he won’t be in any position to bother Earth again for decades.’
The Doctor and Miranda drove away, ready for their next adventure.
43
Chapter Three
The Time Trap
Rachel swallowed. It was very strange seeing herself as an eleven-year-old.
These days a lot of new parents bought camcorders, so many people would end up with such a window on their past, episodes of their lives recorded as though they were characters in a soap opera, but they’d know they were being watched.
She’d always wondered why she’d been wary of getting a mobile phone.
‘That was the man we saw,’ Marnal confirmed.
‘Do you know he’s a Time Lord?’
‘Yes. He had two hearts. So. . . he calls himself the Doctor?’
‘Do you know him?’
Marnal shook his head. ‘There was no reason to think I would know him personally. So, he had a daughter. And he seemed to be trapped on Earth at the time. No TARDIS? And he said something about not having all his memories. Interesting. I will have to do more research.’
‘Could you look at anything using that bottle universe?’ Rachel asked. Everyone had things they didn’t want other people to see. For that matter, everyone had plenty of things they didn’t want reminding about.
‘Anything,’ Marnal said, busy scribbling in a notebook. ‘Now I have his trail, I should be able to follow his entire time-stream.’
‘It would change the world,’ Rachel said. ‘To see the past like that. Instead of trying someone in a court you could just play the tape.’
‘It doesn’t just view the past,’ Marnal said offhandedly, ‘it shows the present and future too. It’s all relative.’
‘The future?’ she said. She was getting that twitch in her leg that she got when she was really scared. ‘I could see my future?’
Marnal turned the notebook over. He’d filled the second half of it with impenetrable equations. ‘It’s a little more complicated than that. You have free will. If you could see your own future, you could alter it.’
Rachel nodded, a little relieved. ‘If I knew I was going to be run over by a bus when I was still a young woman, I could avoid buses for a few years.’
‘You could certainly try,’ Marnal agreed.
45
‘This. . . thing,’ she said, waving her hand over the bottle universe. ‘It’s like magic. Cold fusion and going to other planets? We’ve at least heard about those. We can’t do them yet, but it can’t be much longer before we work out how. But. . . this?’
Marnal gave her a condescending smile. ‘Your race hasn’t even reached Type 1 on the Kardashev scale. It doesn’t control the resources of this one planet, let alone a solar system or a galaxy. The Time Lords were the Type 4
civilisation. We had no equals. We controlled the fundamental forces of the entire