Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [26]
The High Council had relaxed their non-intervention codes by a degree or two and allowed a limited degree of observer-only travel to intergalactic scientific conferences, or sites of special interest. Once again the TARDIS time capsules travelled the universe on official Time Lord business. Savar had set out on such an expedition.
A decade later, they’d found him.
The rematerialisation of his escape pod had been detected in the depths of space. A TARDIS rescue crew had been dispatched straight away. What they had found was horrifying – a capsule stripped bare of virtually everything but its pilot, left squatting alone in darkness. Savar had been mutilated, his eyes had been removed. Both eyeballs, every millimetre of optic nerve, even the lobes of the brain that dealt with vision had all been taken. However it had happened, the experience had driven Savar mad. He’d been returned to Gallifrey and his body had been healed, a new pair of eyes had been spun for him. But his mind, some even said his soul, had gone. He’d babbled about his eyes, how his eyes had taken his eyes, how he’d fallen off the edge of the universe and that he’d seen the face of god. The surgeons couldn’t repair his soul. Even a couple of regenerations later, Savar was a broken man, a once-great scientist and traveller reduced to a harmless distraction. Most Time Lords ignored him. Those that didn’t, like Larna and the Doctor, tended to treat him like a small child. Neither fate appealed to Waym.
‘I think I’ve found God again,’ Savar concluded sadly.
Larna smiled at him. ‘Do you mind if I take the controls?’
‘Not at all, my dear.’ He stepped back, to let Larna through, and Waym took his place alongside her.
Waym checked the settings. Savar had reprogrammed it, knocked it off all the carefully selected co-ordinates that Waym had been trying to monitor.
‘We need to see the arrival of the alien fleet,’ he told Savar.
Savar chuckled, pointing at the display.
Space and time unfolded gracefully and the two space fleets faded into view in their allotted positions, one over each pole of Pazithi Gallifreya.
This time, the display was awash with annotations, added by Savar’s hand. Larna froze the image and began leafing through the notes. Waym already knew where to look, and could see that there really was something unusual there.
‘There’s a wall of… something,’ Larna concluded. ‘Like a ripple in spacetime.’ She pointed it out on the display. There was an almost imperceptible disturbance, across the whole picture, originating behind Pazithi, sweeping towards and through Gallifrey in as much time as it took the Vortex gates to open. It was like the image on a viewscreen being a pixel out, nothing more.
‘You did well to spot this,’ Larna concluded.
‘What is it?’ Waym asked.
‘It is the end of the universe,’ Savar said simply, ‘and there is nothing we can do about it.’
The other Doctor had clambered over to them and they stood next to each other, like twins.
‘Doesn’t this violate the Laws of Time?’ the Magistrate asked, unsure which of the Doctors he should be addressing.
‘Not all of them,’ the Doctor replied, laughing at his own joke.
‘I wish I’d said that,’ whispered the Doctor.
‘You will, you will,’ the Doctor mumbled back.
The Magistrate looked at the newer arrival. ‘You are from the future?’
‘I’m him from an hour and a half in the future. I’ve just popped back here after greeting the Rutan delegation.’
‘Did everything go smoothly with them?’ the Doctor asked himself.
‘You know I couldn’t possibly answer that without serious implications to the Web of Time. It went fine, and judging from the grin that’ll be on my face in an hour’s time, the Sontarans were no trouble either.’
Both Doctors checked their wristwatch. ‘We’d better get into place,’ they concluded.
‘No need to synchronise watches,’ the Magistrate observed. ‘Or Doctors.’
The earlier Doctor slapped his counterpart on the shoulder. ‘I’m off to the Western Platform. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ he advised, before he began clambering