Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [28]
‘I’ll look around,’ Rachel told him. He didn’t acknowledge her; he was too busy tutting over the controls.
Rachel quickly found an alcove containing what looked for all the world like an MFI kitchen. She didn’t touch anything. If an old man could be an immortal alien and a police box could be a time machine, then a fridge could be a nuclear reactor or something. The bookshelves in another area looked innocuous enough. She plucked a book at random. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. This was worth a bit of money if it was a first edition, which it was. She opened it to check for damage. The first page had been crossed out, and someone had scrawled ‘No, no, no, no, it didn’t happen like this at all’ in red ink. Rachel sighed, and put the book back on the shelf with its nine sequels.
Marnal was heading out of the door.
61
‘You’re not leaving me in here?’ Rachel asked.
‘I need some of my books and notes,’ he called back.
Rachel was alone in the time machine.
She went over to the console, both hands tucked behind her back – she wasn’t going to risk pressing anything. There were hundreds of switches, levers, buttons and dials. Various displays too, from blinking lights to a small television screen. It was all brass and polished wood, almost self-consciously Jules Verne. The Doctor wore clothes from the same period too, she recalled.
And Marnal had been here long enough to have met Verne. Either Victoriana had been the fashion on Gallifrey, or the two of them shared an affectation.
She paused. There was a handbrake, clearly labelled – in English – as a handbrake.
The only other thing she recognised was a display giving the time and location: Humanian Era, Earth, 6 June, 11:23:05, 2005. Each of the displays looked as though it could be adjusted. If she reached her hand out, just changed one setting, she could make it 2004 or 2006. She could go anywhere.
Her hand had snaked out and was heading for the console.
Rachel pulled herself away, then took a couple of steps back.
Marnal had returned with an armful of books and notebooks.
‘You haven’t touched anything, have you?’ he asked.
Rachel shook her head.
Fitz was a fairly cosmopolitan bloke nowadays, he thought, equally at home in the muddiest huts of history or the soaring plastic towers of the future, but 1963 would always be the present. Some things about the twenty-first century baffled him. Take the advertising hoarding opposite the police station.
Fitz couldn’t even work out what it was for. Adverts were meant to tell you what they were advertising. ‘Drink beer.’ Not ‘Here’s a hummingbird wearing boxing gloves hovering over a volcano, you work it out’.
Trix had found him.
‘Not staying in there?’ he asked.
‘The Doctor can deal with all the formalities. He’s getting nowhere at the moment.’
Fitz nodded.
‘So, what’s up?’
He glanced down at his cigarette packet. ‘Smoking kills, apparently. And there’s a hummingbird over there who can stop me getting Spam all over my computer. Something of a specialist product, I’d have thought.’
‘You don’t know what spam is, do you?’
‘It took me a while travelling with the Doctor before I got used to the idea that someone could own their own computer. It’s not the meat stuff, I take it?’
62
‘Spam spam spam spam,’ she sang, not as helpfully as she clearly thought.
Fitz shrugged.
Trix huddled up to him. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t care if this is the future. Let’s do it. Let’s leave.’ She took a deep breath.
‘Why not?’ he asked.
‘Because you’re upset. It’s a big decision, and it needs both of us to sit down and talk it through.’
‘This isn’t about Sam.’
She looked at him.
But it wasn’t about Sam. ‘I liked Sam, of course I did. I didn’t think of her like that. A little young for me. Well, y’know, I’m male. And there was that one time with that parallel universe version of her when we ended up –’
‘You should probably shut up,’ Trix suggested.
‘It’s not Sam,’ he told her firmly. ‘It’s the Doctor. I think. . . I think I’ve grown out of him. The more I think about the future – my future,