Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [81]
Extract from The Monkey to Time saga
( circa November 2001) by Marnal
Chapter Ten
Ask Not. . .
The Doctor laughed out loud.
It was like a magic trick, or Sherlock Holmes’ deductions, or the GU equation. When you put it that way it was so simple, so self-explanatory, so beautiful, so obvious that what had seemed the most Gordian problem was instantly almost mundane, and its elegance was its own proof. How had he not asked that question before?
Now he stood up. He had to tell someone.
He sat down again. No. First write it down, to be on the sate side.
He scratched out six words, autographed it with a question mark, read the six words back to himself, and he laughed and laughed and laughed.
Twenty minutes ago, the Doctor had reached a dead end in his efforts to work out what had happened. So he’d come back to the control room to act out the scene so far, to see if that triggered any associations. Seconds before Gallifrey had been destroyed he’d done something clever with the TARDIS
computer. So, to re-enact that, he’d hovered at station one, examined the library computer, toyed with a few of the buttons. The panel and controls had been smashed by the explosion, but he was still able to retrace his steps.
It made no difference; he couldn’t work out what he’d done. Cryptic clues, hints, answers not-quite spelling out other answers. It was like the hardest crossword puzzle in the universe.
So he’d sat down, cross-legged on the control-room floor, frustrated. The TARDIS was still days away from its destination.
He’d sulked for a little while, but didn’t enjoy it. Instead, he reached over for the book bag and fished out one of Marnal’s novels. A slip of plastic had fallen out. There was a paragraph of text, in a language that looked like Greek at first until the Doctor realised it was an equation, and solving it resulted in a short message. An extraordinary way of communicating that was half-writing, half-maths. It was only after he read it that it struck him that it ought to have been impossible for him to decipher it.
It said it was a ‘matrix projection’ about ‘the destruction of the cicatrix’ that went on to predict dire consequences for the Time Lords. The slip of plastic showed no sign of age, but the book it had been in was covered with dust and 169
looked as though it hadn’t been touched for a hundred years.
The slip was an artefact from his home planet. The Doctor knew that he and the TARDIS were from Gallifrey, but this was different, somehow, because it was something new. He didn’t know what the slip of plastic was referring to, and wondered if he could find out from looking up information in the handful of Marnal’s books that he had with him. It hadn’t taken him much longer to work out that the plastic slip was being used as a bookmark.
He’d started to read the book eagerly, but the words were drier and dustier than it was. It was a description of the ‘Matrix’, the Time Lords’ central computer. It was amplified and panatropic, whatever that meant. It had exitonic circuitry, but the term wasn’t explained. They used it to monitor the whole of time and space. . . then did nothing but observe. The Doctor’s eyes had slid off the page before he reached the end of the first paragraph, and his mind began to wander into stray thoughts. First, about how hard the floor was, next about how bare the room was, then about what he might do to redecorate.
Ten seconds later, ten seconds ago, he’d asked himself the right question, the one that had been eluding him. And he’d laughed.
Now the Doctor read back what he’d just written, with a real sense of triumph:
What did I gain in return?
Trix thought she felt Fitz’s hand on her hip, his kiss on her forehead. But she hadn’t. She’d woken alone. It wasn’t quite light outside and the second moon was screwing up that way of telling the time, anyway. As she checked the bedside clock she couldn’t work out how many hours it had been since he’d gone, with all that travelling through time zones. Her watch was still on New York time. Her nostrils and shirt still smelled