Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [100]
Don’t Look There; Try Not to Think About That.
He was about to turn on his heel and stride off in completely opposite direction when a thought stuck him in place.
‘What if the solution is in that corner?’ he whispered to himself.
He set off towards it with new vigour.
He was meant to lie down in this comer… he did so.
No solution presented itself.
His shoulders sagged. It was cold down here. He pictured himself there, lying down, just as the old warriors had foreseen.
He rolled over, peeked at them. They were all still sitting around the fire. They’d glance up from time to time, checking that he was still there.
Of course!
They only thought they saw him here. Actually he’d sneaked off, fooled them. All he had to do was fashion a dummy of some kind, something that would deceive them from this distance, in a room that was pretty murky anyway.
Except that Pallant said that they’d come over and moved him in the morning.
The fact that they saw the future was confusing him. He needed to take a step back. Picture the scene as an observer would. A bird’s eye view. He ran through a number of permutations, but the best he could hope for was that they were lying, trying to change his course of action. Why would they want to? If he did escape, they would know that they didn’t succeed. Was it a self-fulfilling prophecy? They would demoralise him so much that he would give up even trying?
Well, one of the features of a self-fulfilling prophecy is that it comes true, whatever the underhand methods used.
He’d fooled them somehow, and he’d been in two places at once.
He remembered his trick with the Sontarans and the Rutans – his stomach dropping as he also realised that he’d completely forgotten about the Conference, he had left the two leaders stuck together in his TARDIS. There was nothing he could do about that now. First things first. He’d been in two places at once then. Of course he’d used his TARDIS, and there were no time machines around here.
So what did he have to hand?
He emptied his pockets: a ball of string, sonic screwdriver, the transmat bracelet, his copy of Four Quartets, a bag of Monster Munch, a bottle of iodine and the Rutan Converter.
It was an eclectic set of items, and it took him a full ten seconds to work out how he would do it.
Helios had stood, making a half-hearted effort to stretch. The old man had glanced over at the Doctor’s sleeping form, and then picked his way across the rubble towards one of the archways.
The Doctor had seen it all from his vantage point, standing in the shadows on the other side of the room, So far, the plan was working. Now he had to follow the old man.
He slipped from the room, careful not to disturb the others.
Hellos was a fair few seconds ahead of him, and the bricklined corridors here were labyrinthine, but the Doctor could hear the old man’s boots squelching along the wet flagstones. He followed the sound, trying all the time to gain on them. There wasn’t day or night here, just night. Perhaps the Needle People slept when they wanted to.
The sounds of footfalls had stopped. There was a whirring, grinding sound. Then the Doctor heard Hellos moving again.
He couldn’t be more than a dozen yards from him. It sounded like a heavy door pulling itself open.
The Doctor peeked around the corner. There was a doorway, and a light pouring from it that would have been faint anywhere else, but which was almost blinding here. The Doctor edged forwards, looked through. It was a small room, almost a crypt. Helios was nowhere to be seen, but there was plenty of other things to occupy the Doctor’s attention.