Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [87]
Night had fallen, and the early spring air was chilly. Even Talker had sent most of her little group indoors, remaining by the pod to watch over it herself.
The stars burnt in the blackness overhead, astonishingly bright.
Penelope sat on a veranda, arranging the objects she had discovered. She could not identify many of them. It was as though, in these handfuls of knick-knacks and junk, she had the unimaginable future spread out before her.
Mr Cwej’s precipitate departure had saddened her more than almost anything since the beginning of this sorry adventure. His conviction that the Doctor must still be alive was so intense. The lively grin with which he had announced his intentions to return to the crude grave!
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She had not had the heart to say a word against his plan. Worse, the Roshi had not tried to stop him either. Perhaps the holy man knew mere words would not be enough to dissuade the young man from his fantasy.
And what, Penelope Sarah Gate, will become of you?
Mr Cwej could not pilot the Doctor’s time ship, as he had explained to her; with the Doctor gone, they were trapped here. The Roshi was preparing for a siege, his monks checking their narrow stocks of food. Perhaps she would be trapped here while the pod’s sad story played itself out. Eventually the samurai would overrun them, and she would be slain, or worse, along with all the others caught up in this situation.
If only they knew what the pod was. The thought of the link Mr Cwej supposed she shared with it chilled her. She looked over to where Talker sat on top of the thing, as though it was a replacement for her cold and forgotten egg, buried somewhere in a distant wood.
Penelope shivered. Was the pod watching her, through some sense she could not imagine, an icy and alien mind observing her every thought and action?
They had pleaded with Talker at length, but she would not give up the object’s secret. Penelope had wondered if the Kapteynian even knew what the pod was. But surely she and her comrades would not have battled so hard to reach the object if it was not of supreme importance to them.
They ought to lift up the pod, carry it outside the walls of the monastery, and leave it to be taken by the first person who wanted it.
Of course, convincing Talker of the wisdom of this sensible course of action might prove difficult. If not actually fatal.
There was a flurry of motion near one of the monastery’s walls. Penelope looked up. To her astonishment, Mr Cwej was striding across the courtyard.
‘You can close your mouth now,’ he joked, as he walked up to her.
‘I confess I did not expect to see you again.’
‘I couldn’t find the Doctor,’ he said. He crouched down, and started rummaging through the collection of objects she had accumulated. ‘I was right.
He was still alive. He’d even dug his way out of the grave.’
Penelope’s hands went to her mouth. ‘Mr Cwej!’ she gasped. ‘That is a horrible thing to say!’
He glanced up at her. ‘He pretended to die. Probably to force me to take charge of this whole mess.’ He looked more amused than angry. ‘I might kill him myself, when I find him. Anyway, he’s gone off somewhere, so we’re back to square one – having to cope with this by ourselves.’
He was positively jaunty. It was such a change from his earlier frightening calm and, before that, his melancholy. ‘What do you have in mind?’ she asked carefully.
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He had found the item he wanted, a flat square of coloured metal. He held it up between thumb and forefinger.
‘How much does Talker trust you?’
‘A little,’ said Penelope.
‘I think it’s time we let Schrödinger’s Cat out of the box.’
Talker was letting herself doze. These primitives couldn’t do anything to the pod. Even less than she could do to it, without Technician, without equipment, without even this Doctor everybody kept going on about.
She didn’t know what she was going to do. It wasn’t fair to have involved all of these aliens in the struggle with the Caxtarid. Eventually