Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [27]
‘Sorry?’ said the Doctor.
‘It’s just. . . ’ The Doctor waited patiently. ‘I don’t want anybody else to die because of me,’ whispered Chris. ‘That’s all., And how do you answer that?
The Doctor let a few minutes pass. When it became clear that Chris had nothing to add, he said, ‘There’s only one way of guaranteeing it.’
‘I know,’ said the boy. ‘Lock myself in the TARDIS and never come out.’
The Doctor sat back on his stone and drew his thoughts together. ‘Do you think she’ll be more useful to us if she’s frightened, or if she’s not frightened?’
‘Penelope? I hadn’t thought of it that way,’ Chris said.
No, thought the Doctor, of course you hadn’t.
‘It’d be better if she wasn’t scared,’ the young man decided. ‘If she trusts us, she’ll be more likely to tell us things. And besides, it isn’t fair to hold a non-existent threat over her head.’
‘I’m not the only thing she’s afraid of, though. . . What should we do about it?’
‘I’m going to talk to her,’ said Chris. He was frowning as he walked away.
The Doctor sighed.
When he looked back to the flower, it had fallen from the branch.
Out out
Penelope sat cross-legged by the smoking firepit. In her lap she held the Doctor’s rainbow egg.
56
Tanganyika had never been like this. She would have preferred the African heat to the cold Japanese spring, the rough floor of a tent to the smooth floor of the house. Travelling where she pleased, in that one wild year before her marriage, instead of being trapped in a foreign, ancient place.
Where her fingers contacted the egg’s surface, the colours rearranged themselves. The object in the shrine had left a trace on her, marked her in some way. The Doctor assured her it was nothing to be concerned about. Nonethe-less, she felt contaminated.
She sighed, watching the play of colours over the strange machine’s surface. She had spent the better part of an hour attempting repairs on her time conveyance, but she still could see nothing wrong with the mechanism. It simply would not function. The electrical battery’s indicator showed that it was still half full; it was as though some other, hidden source of power had been extinguished.
Despite the emptiness of the room, she felt that the walls were too close. It was a familiar feeling. She had experienced the same sense of enclosedness, of trappedness, in her home in London. In the cluttered bedroom and the overfilled study. In the dining room every evening when her husband had begun one of his interminable lectures.
Penelope shook herself. She was free of that suffocating residence at last.
But what did her freedom mean, if the mechanism by which she had achieved it no longer functioned?
The sense of confinement rose up in her suddenly, like a wave of panic. She had to find some way out of here.
Joel knocked on the doorframe, awkwardly, and ducked under it. Penelope tucked the glowing egg away in her jacket. ‘Mr Mintz,’ she said.
‘How’s the horseless TARDIS?’
‘My time conveyance?’ Penelope frowned. ‘I owe you an honest answer. My repairs have made no difference. We appear to have two options, neither of which I find appealing.’
Joel sat down near hen ‘Either we’re stuck here, or we ask the Doctor for help.’
Penelope’s scowl deepened. ‘I am disturbed at being forced into relying on him.’
‘You’ve got nothing to worry about, Miss Gate. He’s one of the good guys, he really is. Besides, I already asked Chris if they could give you – us – a lift home.’
‘I don’t wish to return home. You know that, Mr Mintz.’
‘Oh, come on!’ said Joel cheerfully. ‘Think of the acclaim, even if there are still a few bugs in the ol’ time machine! Even the Wright brothers did the odd nosedive.’
57
‘No doubt,’ said the inventor. ‘Though if my time machine had truly made any scientific impact, you would have heard of it in the late twentieth century.’
Joel looked glum. ‘Well, anyway. . . ’ he said.
Chris glanced up at the sky. It was a clear, cold day. He could smell blossoms and turned earth and smoke. There