Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [98]
The first section was a straightforward autobiography. Too straightforward. Why did Pallant have to give his mother’s name, the names of his brothers and sisters? The Doctor couldn’t think of a reason why Pallant would need to make a note of such banalities. Any other generation might have written for posterity, but there wasn’t a posterity any more, there was only fifteen years of future left. Who was he writing this for?
Were they all amnesiacs?
That could be it… ‘Every morning we wake up and find ourselves here’, that’s what Pallant had said. So he’d check in his diary, and find out who he was. If they all had problems with their memories that might explain their rather odd behaviour and conversation techniques. It would explain why they were trying to piece together their pasts from the scraps of knowledge they uncovered while looking for fuel. Perhaps the Effect was affecting them in some way. Writing a diary like this would be a very good way to cope with time distortion and reality shifts.
No, There was something wrong with the theory. These diary entries were meticulous, almost obsessive, in their details. Here: the account of his arrival. Times, descriptions of the Maltraffi, exactly which books he had picked up. Exact word for word quotes, and how Pallant felt. The person that had written this hadn’t got anything wrong with his memory.
The Doctor paused and re-read the last paragraph on the current page. It described how Pallant had lost the diary, how the Doctor had enjoyed the mushrooms and how he’d gone off to be by himself.
The Doctor stared back over towards the fire, where the four men were still about their tasks. When had Pallant had time to write this?
He wet his finger and turned the page.
The Time Lords attacked the Librarinth without warning, defeating us. There was nothing we could do that could be done, our every move was anticipated and counter‐ anticipated. Two of their kind moved through our ranks as if we were not there.
He turned the page.
Helios was gone, Willhuff was seriously wounded, though he was restored by the golden light. The Magistrate and his fleet were gone, as was our god. What good had come of this day?
Now that was rather odd.
A diary from the future? But no… the Doctor instinctively knew that these people weren’t time travellers. They… he fished around for the answer. Had someone already written the script, and they were just players?
The Doctor gave up and checked today’s diary entry.
‘Of course!’ he whispered.
‘Of course!’ he exclaimed. ‘You remember the future. Only the future, not the past. How odd. Oh, I found your diary by the way.’ He threw it at Pallant, bowling a real googly, but Pallant knew where the book would end up, and he caught it easily. The Doctor grimaced. The following conversation might well be a little awkward.
‘It is a curse,’ Willhuff said glumly.
‘I don’t know. It’s useful, really. It saved me a lot of time when I trying to work out what was going on: I just flicked to the next page and saw the answer. You get to win the lottery every week and back every winning horse, it’s great if you’re playing cards, all your guesses are correct, you only need buy insurance in years when you know you’ll need it, no nasty shocks around the next corner or an unexpected bill, you get to avoid all the traffic jams… well, here you get to avoid the Maltraffic jams, you’ll know straight away whether you’ll hit it off with a new friend.’ The Doctor hesitated. ‘But you’ll know how every love affair ends before it even starts and the punchline to every joke you hear, you’ll know what you’re getting for your birthday, you’ve heard every song you’ll ever hear already, you remember growing old but not your childhood