Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [21]
‘Four years after we were there. . . Hey, did he make a surprise visit and not tell me?’
Joel shook his head. He leant on Chris’s shoulder and whispered into his ear. ‘It wasn’t the same one.’
‘Whoah,’ said Chris. ‘Whoah, whoah.’
‘Yeah,’ said Joel. ‘When he saw me he gave me this look and said, and I quote because I remember this word for word, “Second chances are rare. Be careful not to do something you’ll regret later. And this conversation never happened.”’
‘Did you ever find out what it meant?’
‘Not yet,’ said Joel. ‘Not yet.’ He tipped the sake flask upside down. ‘No more.’
‘We better go to bed then,’ said Chris.
The Doctor moved through the blackness, cat-silent, holding the rainbow egg in one hand. He had recalibrated it to work in flavours instead of colours. He 43
was following a trail of limonene through the streets of the village. He could hear the peasants breathing in their sleep.
He stopped beside a hut, brushing his fingertips over the surface of the ovoid. He accessed the recording of Penelope’s temporal aura. In this mode, it was lemon crush with an edge of battery acid, mouth-wateringly intense.
Whatever it was he’d come to find, she was saturated with its essence.
Analytical Engine, indeed!
He followed the trail into the forest, just a little way. The air was sharp and cool. Distantly, a bird cried out.
Penelope’s time machine was a converted hansom cab, a dark shape amongst the trees. A horseless carriage, thought the Doctor. He pulled open one of the doors, smelling leather and machine oil.
There were seats for four, one of which was taken up with a weight of machinery, like something escaped from a Victorian textile mill. The Doctor climbed up into the cabin, pulling out his flashlight, and examined the vehicle’s workings.
‘A clockwork time machine,’ he said, after a few minutes. ‘How quaint.
Come up here, I want to talk to you.’
‘Sir,’ said Penelope from outside, ‘remove yourself from my cab, or I will be forced to take steps.’
He turned. She was holding a musket rifle, fuse burning, the barrel carefully pointed at the ground. ‘Do get down,’ she said.
The Doctor got down. ‘I can’t even see a power source,’ he said, pocketing his flashlight. ‘How does it work?’
‘It moves through the fourth dimension,’ she said. ‘I have adapted a miniature Analytical Engine to make calculations. My equations are based on Riemann’s metric tensor.’ The Doctor laughed. ‘It works,’ bristled Penelope. ‘My presence here is all the proof you ought to require!’
‘You’re a scientist.’
‘I am,’ said Penelope, moving the tip of her musket in small agitated circles. ‘And one who is very weary of being constantly patronized. At least this machine is the work of my own hands.’
‘But is it?’ The Doctor took out the rainbow egg, and recalibrated it with his thumbnail, watching as the slick of colours spread over its surface. ‘Your horseless time machine isn’t the primary source of the temporal distortion.
Look.’
He tossed her the egg. Penelope caught it with both hands, and suddenly realized that she wasn’t holding the musket any more.
The Doctor licked his fingers and quenched the smouldering fuse with a pinch. He said, ‘There’s something else here, an intermittent but powerful 44
source of temporal fluctuation. Unless I miss my guess, it’s the power source for your time machine.’
‘My machine has its own source.’
‘That mutated Tzun battery?’ He shook his head. ‘It generates enough power to run the Engine, but nothing like the amount needed to actually distort the dimensions. Without a real power source, your conveyance is nothing more than a toy.’
‘Which distant century are you from?’ Penelope held the egg close to her face. ‘Is your arrogance pure egotism, or do even the greatest scientific advances of my age seem like the dabblings of children to you?’
She threw him back the egg. He plucked it from the air with one hand.
‘Miss Gate,