Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [55]
‘I didn’t love him,’ she said quickly. ‘I liked him, he was a friend.’
‘That’s all I meant,’ the Doctor said.
She was watching him. ‘You’ve been through this before, haven’t you?’ she asked.
The Doctor let the memories wash over him. ‘Many times.’
Larna was still watching him carefully. ‘If you could change the past, would you bring her back?’
‘You can’t change the past,’ he said automatically.
‘That’s not what I asked.’
‘I’ve found that it’s better to look to the future than live in the past.’ He paused, a feeling of elation sweeping over him.
‘Of course!’ he was on his feet, grabbing Larna, kissing her forehead. ‘I have to get back to the Sontarans and the Rutan.’ He was halfway across the refectory before he’d finished the sentence. ‘I’ll see you later.’
A small army of Time Lord scientists and specialists jostled for places around their monitor screens, scrutinising the data they had collected. And as they checked and rechecked their observations, they had discovered that the breach was widening, propagating across almost half the known universe, spreading ever outwards. It was as if the universe was a sheet of ice, and this was a crack developing in it, spreading, branching out, growing wider.
‘Is it as dangerous as it looks?’ the Castellan asked finally.
As an administrator rather than a scientist, he was standing a little way back from the monitors.
The Magistrate broke away from the pack to face him.
‘That, of course, is the question. There were no effects whatsoever when the breach passed through Gallifrey last night, not even at the subatomic level.’
‘No effect?’ Voran echoed.
Lord Norval joined them. ‘It is rather the opposite. It is as if it has picked up every single particle, looked at it and then put it carefully back where it was found.’
The President was watching over them all. ‘Can we be sure that history hasn’t changed?’
‘Yes.’ The Magistrate indicated the image of the universe on the main viewer. ‘The effect has passed through roughly half of the known cosmos. So, this half of the universe has yet to be affected – it is the “before”, if you like. We are in this half, the “after”. Both are identical.’
Norval shook his head. ‘They can’t be completely identical.
There will have been changes at the quantum level, and that must have had some effect at the macro scale.’
The Magistrate scowled. ‘Of course. I meant no significant change, obviously.’
‘But the potential is there for catastrophic change?’ the President asked.
Lord Norval was gazing at the image of the universe. ‘If the effect could be controlled, then literally everything in the universe could be manipulated. Judging by the shape and nature of the effect, this alteration could be retroactive.’
‘It has the power to change established time?’
‘Nothing can change the established past,’ the Keeper of the Matrix insisted. ‘Our entire science, all our knowledge, is based on that one principle. History cannot change.’
The Magistrate sighed. ‘My Lord President, this breach is so large, so powerful, that the most surprising thing about it is that the past hasn’t already been affected.’
‘Gallifrey is under threat?’ a monk muttered.
The Magistrate nodded. ‘It is like a fire or a cancer, spreading unchecked through the structure of the universe.’
The President rubbed his beard. ‘Can we stop it?’
Lord Hedin nodded. ‘Whatever it is, once we identify the source and understand the processes at its heart, it should be possible to seal it off. It will require intervention on our part.’
Norval was busy calculating something. ‘Better than that, we might be able to harness the power in some way.’
The Magistrate raised an eyebrow. ‘Take control of it?’
Norval nodded. ‘Oh yes. No reason why we couldn’t. You say it’s like a fire – well, our ancestors found fire rather useful once they understood it. Something like this that can make quantum observations without affecting what is being observed. It’s pretty close to an Agathon Engine, a holy grail of Gallifreyan science. It would allow us to observe both position and velocity of