The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [58]
They were back where they could talk safely, in the Doctor’s room, a room deemed suitable for a philosopher and a scholar with no money and no influence; bare of frivolous decoration, with simple wooden chairs and a hard plank bed with a straw palliasse for a mattress. Now that they were back – and after the breathless rush through the bowels of the keep, Sarah was glad to sit down even on the unyielding seat of a philosophical stool – the Doctor’s haste seemed to have quite disappeared.
‘Because my beard was coming off,’ he answered when she now asked him why he had hurried so. (So that was why he’d bolted the door.) Sitting down and taking a small 204
looking-glass from his pocket, he propped it up on the table and added, ‘And because I have to have time to consider what to do.’
‘How to stop him, you mean?’
He sighed. ‘My dear Sarah Jane. You are looking at a man, for want of a better word, who is a convicted criminal.
I have been judged guilty by my peers of the unutterable sin of intervention in the affairs of the peoples of this universe; one of the worst crimes any time traveller can commit, or so I’ve always been told.’
‘Changing the course of history, do you mean?’
He peered into the mirror and started to peel pieces of whisker from his face. ‘That’s an expression with no meaning. I admit, as a quick way of making a point, I’ve sometimes fallen victim to its seductive charm, but…’ His voice trailed away as he squinted into the mirror, seeking loose hairs.
‘There is no way you can change the course of history.
History is simply what has happened. The present moment is all that exists; there is no future yet; the past has gone.
You mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that the future is sitting there already, waiting for us. The future is simply the sum total of the logical consequences of this moment, compounded with all the decisions made by creatures of 205
free will – and there are more of those than you might imagine.’
He pulled off a few more tufts of whisker and inspected them closely. By now, he looked as if he was suffering from some hideous moulting disease.
‘We haven’t come back to put right something that went wrong the first time round. There is no first time round apart from this one. The very fact that we are here means we are included in it. At this moment there is an infinite number of possible futures. But once this present moment has gone by, from the point of view of the future it has happened, it is history; and from the point of view of the past, it was going to happen. Are you still with me?’
Sarah’s head was beginning to spin. ‘Hanging on to your coat tails,’ she said. ‘I think.’
He laughed. ‘I like the image,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you another one. The course of time, if we could stand back and look at it the way the TARDIS does when she’s in the Time Vortex, is like a mountain stream, a waterfall tumbling through the rocks; a cascade of events, constantly flowing but with a clear shape formed by the interaction of the moving streams. Now, if I throw a small pebble into the water at the top, is it going to change that shape?’
‘I guess not.’
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‘No, not in the normal course of events. But a great rock? Who can tell what might happen? And for that matter, even a small one might change the flow of one small stream of water in the torrent, and that might work on the bank at a weak point and nibble at it and nibble at it until the bank collapses – and the whole course and shape of the river has been changed.
‘So have I changed the course of history? Now that it’s happened, it was always going to happen. But the responsibility for my choice is as heavy now as it is in any present moment I find myself experiencing.’
He was beginning to look a bit less moth-eaten now, as he repaired