Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [56]
CHRIS: No.
DOCTOR: Most people don’t even try to make a difference.
CHRIS: No, no.
DOCTOR: I don’t know what to say. I don’t. . . I just don’t.
CHRIS: I know. What is this human thing called ‘feeling’? (Pause) I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.
DOCTOR: The Room. . .
CHRIS: It’s just a dream I keep having.
DOCTOR: No.
CHRIS: It must be so frightening.
DOCTOR: I don’t have time to be frightened. No room for angst, no room for self-pity. Just get the job done and then gibber in a corner.
CHRIS: (Small laugh) Yeah.
It went on like that for another ten minutes, before the Doctor sent Chris out on some errand or other. Te Yene Rana powered down the fly, sending it instructions to come back on line if another conversation started.
She didn’t know what all that had been about, and she didn’t especially care. All that damned babble hadn’t left her any wiser about what they knew about ‘the pod’.
‘Thanks,’ she muttered, and settled down with another raw fish. To wait.
The Doctor had sent Chris off to see to the horses. Now he sat alone in the room in the inn.
He remembered fainting in the garden of Doa-no-naiheya Monastery, on his first day out of the Life-Prolonging Room. The pale sunshine against the wall, the smooth texture of the wood under his hands as he fell against it, the hoe dropping from his fingers. The soft dirt catching him.
He remembered trying to open his eyes as Chiyono argued with the head monk, Kadoguchiroshi’s predecessor, a terrible old grouch who was forever knocking his students over the head in the hopes of enlightening them.
The old master hadn’t been interested in the nun’s explanations. As far as he was concerned, this layabout was long overdue to leave the monastery.
Somehow or other the Doctor had managed to get back to his feet and get on with the gardening, the sun a bright and painful blur at the edge of his vision. The old Roshi had snorted and wandered off to find someone else to berate.
Sometimes all you wanted to do was sleep.
114
There was a small, neat knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ he called, after a moment.
Penelope slid the door open, looking uncomfortable in her slippered feet.
She looked up and down the narrow corridor outside, weary with the pressure of curious eyes, and came inside, closing the door behind her.
She sat on the floor, her legs folded to one side. ‘I’ve been thinking –’ she began.
‘ I’ve been thinking about your time machine,’ he said. He pulled the miniature table to him. There was a scroll map draped across it, along with scribbled diagrams of Penelope’s Riemann engine. ‘Now, if it couldn’t have powered your trips through the fourth dimension, how was it you came all this way?’
Penelope frowned, annoyed at being cut off, but waited to hear what he had to say.
‘It’s my guess,’ said the Doctor, ‘that someone brought you here. They were aware of your attempts at dimensional transference, and sent forward the energy needed for you to actually make the jump.’
‘But why forward the first time? And why so many stops along the way?’
‘Perhaps they could only send you enough energy for short steps, instead of the whole journey.’
Penelope was nodding. ‘They must want my machine for some reason,’
she said. ‘But surely, if they can send such energy through time, they could construct their own time conveyance.’
‘Small-scale projections like that are actually quite simple,’ said the Doctor. ‘But a working dimensional engine is something else again. Put the two together, and you have a functioning time machine.’
‘It was a call for help,’ concluded Penelope. ‘Perhaps another time traveller is stranded here –’
‘Or an alien or aliens. Someone with the technology to displace those packets of temporal energy.’
‘– or in an even earlier epoch than this one. Wait, the time conveyance didn’t stop working until we arrived here. . . that is, now. So they must be now. Doctor, it must be the galliform creatures that Mr Cwej was talking to.’
‘The Kapteynians? That’s an interesting possibility.’ The Doctor shifted the table until Penelope could see