Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [95]
Willhuff said sonorously,
They had moved into a murky corridor, glowing with the same faint light. The Doctor affected a casual glance as they passed one fitting.
‘These are Thompson Lamps,’ Pallant informed him. ‘They are everlasting.’
‘Old-fashioned tungsten-filament bulbs?’ the Doctor asked.
‘Surely in a hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion years someone could have come up with something better?’
It occurred to the Doctor that they might be mind readers.
They had that annoying habit that psychics had of answering questions before he’d asked them. He framed the thought,
‘Are you a psychic?’ and aimed it the first one.
Pallant didn’t even glance his way.
Perhaps he was a psychic liar. He framed a slanderous, inflammatory and anatomically precise insult and directed it at Willhuff. He didn’t even blink.
‘We are here now. This is Helios.’
‘Er… yes, good,’ said the Doctor, a little embarrassed.
There was one point of illumination: a small bonfire in the middle of the room. There was a column of smoke, with ashes lazily ascending it. The orange flames were comforting, hypnotic. There was another man there, an older man with a large wooden staff which he used to poke the fire.
He was wearing the same loose-fitting garments as his colleagues, and had a neat white beard.
It was tempting to let his eye be drawn towards this old man and the fire, but instead the Doctor took the time to look around the room. It was a rather forbidding place and the gloom made it difficult to come to any firm conclusions. This had been a colossal dome, indeed it contained most of the structure. The uppermost part of the roof had cracked and fallen away, like a boiled egg tapped with a spoon. Wear and tear had done the trick, though, not enemy action or a natural disaster. The room was full of shelving and racking, all stacked to the point of overloading. And all around were statues and fragments of statues: men in full armour, women draped in marble cloth, horses and lions and eagles and bears.
‘This room contains artefacts from the planet Earth,’ the old man said.
‘It’s a library?’ the Doctor said. ‘Or a museum. An art gallery! Although not a very well-maintained one.’ He paused, looking over to his hosts.’ If you don’t mind me mentioning it.’
They didn’t seem to. ‘You will join us for mushrooms,’
Pallant said.
‘Our priorities are different here,’ Willhuff told him, almost apologetically.
The other men were taking their places around the fire.
Helios had been frying mushrooms on a metal tray. The Doctor sat, realising at the last moment that his seat was just a pile of great big leather-bound books. The spines had come away, the leather was faded. There were other, smaller, books lying around. He picked one up, opening it to the title page.
‘ O Time Your Pyramids,’ he read. ‘The lost novel of Borges. I thought I had the only copies of this.’ He bent over, picked up three more volumes. ‘ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Time Ships, Slaughterhouse‐ Five.’
The others barely acknowledged him, content to nibble at their mushrooms.
The Doctor looked around, saw their shadows flickering over the walls of the dome, and all the artefacts here. ‘This is the last of Earth? Preserved here?’
‘There seems to have been flooding,’ Pallant admitted, a little embarrassed. ‘Many of the books were damaged beyond repair.’ He held up one. The complete works of Milton
– the title was picked out in gold leaf on the cover. The pages, however, were crinkled and mashed into each other.
‘They are in a terrible state,’ the Doctor tutted.
Pallant tossed the book onto the fire despite the Doctor’s gasped attempt to catch it. The Doctor looked down, watched the fire consume each page in turn, watched the ashes float up and out towards the ceiling. Comus, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, Areopagitica, all Milton’s Latin poems and State letters. All gone because the Doctor anticipated that Pallant was going to throw the book to his left, and he actually threw it to his right.
‘We have no other use for