Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [65]
The Doctor’s eyes were gleaming as he worked out the problem in his mind. ‘So long as we fixed handles of some kind to the rug we could manage to pull it,’ he said. ‘Like the travois system used by the native Americans.’
‘The what?’
‘Very clever people, but for some reason they never invented the wheel. Just didn’t get around to it. No one in the American continents ever did. Or perhaps they lacked the perceptual structures that would have made it an inevitability.
Instead they dragged their loads along behind their horses using a kind of sledge arrangement. Referred to as a travois.’
‘Fascinating.’
The Doctor had also paused now, halfway along the upper hallway. ‘You can drag remarkably heavy loads in that manner, you know.’
Benny could see that he was warming to the idea.
‘Actually, maybe the hose-’
‘And then,’ said the Doctor, ‘all we’d need is a secure arrangement of ropes and we could slide the cylinder gently down the stairs.’
Benny’s mind was immediately filled with an alarming image of herself assisting the Doctor as he used an elaborate system of ropes to lower a giant, fragile glass cylinder slopping with green fluid and containing a comatose naked man. Lowering it clumsily down the long staircase.
Benny winced as she imagined the ropes slipping, the cylinder sliding out of control, jolting down the steps to the hallway below. Smash. Glass, blood, green fluid.
‘No, no, this is fine,’ she said hastily, picking up the hose again. And then the Doctor grinned and she realized that he’d been teasing her. This made her feel angry, or at least feel that she ought to feel angry.
‘Why, for God’s sake, do we need to run the hose all the way to the kitchen?’ she said, in a voice which she hoped would convey her displeasure.
‘I thought I explained. We need to drain the fluid from the cylinder. That’s why the other end of the hose is in the kitchen sink.’ The Doctor sounded smug.
‘Why not just run the hose out of the window? We could drain it into the garden and then we’d only need about three metres of it.’
‘What? Drain the fluid into the rose-beds?’
‘They’re a mess anyway.’
‘At least they’re alive. We don’t want to expose plants to the fluid from a life-support cylinder.’
‘Why? What exactly is it?’
‘Life-support cylinder fluid,’ said the Doctor, unhelpfully.
Benny sighed and carried the hose towards the library, unspooling it as she went.
The Doctor popped the top off the cylinder using car tools. He had to stand on a pile of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to reach it.
When he got it open Benny passed him the end of the hose and he fed it into the murky green liquid. He whistled tunelessly as he worked. It sounded like something by Bach.
He’d been in an odd mood ever since the man in the cylinder had begun to stir. Jubilant. Triumphant. Insufferable, thought Benny.
‘Here, could you hold this for me, please?’ Benny obediently held the hose for the Doctor as he trotted back down to the kitchen. She heard his footsteps on the stairs and then, a moment later, the sound of the small electric pump he’d brought in from the garage.
The hose made a startling slurping noise, like a glutton sucking soup. The fluid in the cylinder began to stir turbulently. Benny was tall enough to hold the hose over her head but it was starting to make her arms ache. She climbed up on to the pile of encyclopedias the Doctor had vacated.
Now she could assume a more comfortable position, holding the hose at waist level, plus she could peer inside.
The pump continued chugging in the kitchen and the liquid pulsed in time with it. She peered over the lip of the cylinder and watched the thick green liquid bubble as it started to drain, passing up into the hose on its long journey to the kitchen.
Benny stared down into the