Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [111]
As on many previous occasions, the Doctor found himself posing a question that he seemed to be asking more and more these days. Would all of this still have happened if I hadn’t been here?
It was inevitable, perhaps, that the mood in the bunker should push him into such introspection. But, as he had told Tyrone on the hill overlooking Los Angeles a few days earlier, once again he had concerns about his life style and the nature of the evil that he fought and continued to fight.
At what point does battling with monsters make you a monster yourself?
The business with Turlough, especially, troubled him. The boy was old beyond his years, the Doctor knew that. And, though Turlough was guarded about his background and anything else before the Black Guardian and Brendon School, the Doctor knew him well enough to be certain that his experiences in the apartment must have affected him greatly.
One doesn’t get tortured in a good way.
Turlough was sitting on one of the beds, seemingly wrapped in the fog of his own thoughts, staring into space with vacant, clouded eyes.
‘Hello,’ said the Doctor crouching down beside his friend.
It took Turlough an age to reply. ‘Oh hello,’ he said at last. ‘I’m sorry, I was miles away.’
‘Literally or metaphorically?’ asked the Doctor, expecting no reply and receiving none. Perhaps that, in itself, was a relief. ‘I just wanted to ask if you were recovered,’ he continued, sitting beside Turlough and giving him a reassuring pat on the back. ‘It was a dreadful experience and . . . ’
‘I’m fine,’ said Turlough, though his eyes told a different story.
The Doctor stood up. ‘I’m glad,’ he said, genuinely. ‘But if you ever want to talk about it . . . ’ He let his voice trail away. Turlough turned briefly towards him, as though he had something vitally important to tell him. But then the moment was gone and the boy returned his attention to his own thoughts. A private world marked ‘keep out’.
Once again, the Doctor found that he was actually relieved.
And that horrified him.
∗ ∗ ∗
211
Night and day lost all meaning as the vigil continued.
The first bad news came when Tegan reported that the grid had broken somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. The strain of maintaining the network over such vast distances had finally become too great in the early hours of the second day of the battle.
‘Nothing too significant has been affected,’ she noted. ‘There’s not much civilisation there.’ She realised what she had said just as Paynter began laughing and pointing at her.
‘Shut up!’ she said, and slapped him playfully on the top of the arm. ‘The tear’s miles from Australia.’
‘I’ve got a cousin in Hawaii,’ said Mel Tyrone from the far side of the bunker, making himself a sandwich. ‘I hope she’s all right.’
That silenced the hilarity.
Lethbridge-Stewart, inevitably perhaps, was the person to say the right thing at the right time. ‘That’s all any of us can hope,’ he noted. ‘But we have to be positive.’
So they were.
‘What would you miss most about the world if it were to blow up today?’
asked Natalie suddenly.
The Brigadier was rather taken aback by the question. ‘If the world were to blow up, Private Wooldridge,’ he said sharply, ‘then I should imagine that I’d blow up with it. Therefore the question doesn’t apply.’
Natalie, for possibly the first time in her life, raised her voice to Lethbridge-Stewart. ‘Just suppose,’ she said, testily.
The Brigadier thought for a moment. It was, he was forced to concede, an interesting question. ‘The seafront at Bognor,’ he said. ‘Especially when I’m walking along it with my wife and the beach is virtually deserted. After about a mile we can turn round and look at the tracks of our footprints along the sand. And the feeling of the rain and the wind on your face. Which should be unpleasant but, sometimes, isn’t.’
‘I’d also miss the ocean,’ offered Mel Tyrone, sitting down beside them. ‘I love to go down to Pacific Park at night when it’s quiet and watch the moon on the surface. I don’t know why, you can’t explain those kind