Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [69]
wall, trying to remember what happened, I’m going to tell a story It’s semi-autobiographical, about a man called the Doctor who is faced with an impossible situation. He’s facing his future self, and he’s just pulled the lever that destroys his home planet, and he thinks he’s going to die, and instead he hears footsteps and then. . . Well, I’m going to imagine what would have happened next.’
He put pen to paper.
A full minute later, the pen hadn’t moved across the paper.
This was going to be harder than he thought.
The lamp on the top of the police box started flashing and the strangest grinding, roaring noise filled the air.
‘No!’ Marnal shouted, running towards the police box. By the time he’d reached the corner of the garage he was the only thing there.
He looked around, suddenly terrified. ‘Can you feel that?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Rachel admitted.
Marnal was making adjustments to his ray gun.
‘What are you doing? You’re not planning on shooting anyone?’
He considered the question. ‘I need to be prepared. There’s only one way out of here now.’
‘There are dozens of police, a lot of them have guns.’
142
‘Yes, but this is a maser.’
‘Maser. What’s that? Is it like a phaser?’
‘I’ve never heard of phasers.’
‘They’re off Star Trek.’
‘Oh. I wrote an episode of that once, but they changed it so much I took my name off it.’ He finished what he was doing. ‘This is an advanced weapon. It uses microwaves to work on the nervous system.’
‘Yeah, I saw you use it on the Doctor.’
Marnal shrugged. ‘That was a crude stun. The Doctor is a cunning opponent, and the irony is that means any attack on him has to be swift and brutal enough to render him helpless before he can try his tricks. But this weapon has more subtle settings.’
Rachel frowned, looked at the gun properly for the first time. ‘Subtle? What use is that?’
‘It can induce emotional effects ranging from intense euphoria to deep depression.’
‘You’re kidding! Where did you get it, the planet Prozac?’
He was clearly trying to place the name. ‘No. It’s an old Gallifreyan weapon, military issue. Making your enemy shy or aphasic can be far more effective than a bullet.’
‘And if you don’t kill people it doesn’t affect the time lines.’
Marnal’s mouth flickered into a smile, clearly pleased with her reasoning.
‘No, at least not as much.’
‘What are you going to do to the police?’
‘I’ve set it to Serious Indifference. Anyone I shoot will have no real interest in their surroundings or situation for an hour or so. They won’t understand why they feel that way –’
‘– or care,’ Rachel noted.
‘Indeed. So we should be able to exploit confusion in the police ranks. If it comes to that.’
He looked distracted.
‘What is it?’ Rachel asked.
She felt strange now. A funny feeling in her water, as her nan would say. It felt like a panic attack was coming, but. . . like it was biding its time.
‘Something very weird is happening,’ she concluded.
She had the sense this had nothing to do with the police; it was far bigger than that.
The Doctor had finished his novel. It was about thirty thousand words. That sounded about the right length, he thought. It had taken him just over two hours to do.
143
He’d drifted off the subject a little.
It opened at a literary festival, where a pair of young English professors, Edmund and Julia, were lecturing about Jane Austen. They were approached by a famous entrepreneur called Sir Thomas Bertram, and paid a great deal of money to go to his stately home on a mysterious assignment that he insisted only they could complete. On the helicopter ride there they met Rushworth, a post-structuralist who dressed in black and spouted drivel. They went on a tour of the facilities. Bertram had established a theme park in his grounds.
He’d used the latest memetic engineering techniques to re-create some of his favourite fictional characters and he wanted the experts on literature to make sure he’d got it right, then to write nice things about him for the travel section of the Times Literary Supplement. Edmund and Julia