Part 28 (2/2)

'Then you ... know the other choice.'

I put my hand over hers, felt the force fields part to allow us to touch. 'I know.' I put my hand on hers. The sting of acid made me cry out. She moved her arm until my hand was resting on the force-field emitter.

'Please.'

'I love you.' 'It hurts.' 'I know.' 'Please.'

I remembered-something then, something I once heard but never understood. We never realize what we have until it's gone.

What a lesson to learn. What a way to learn it, a quarter of a million miles from the world of my birth, holding the woman I loved and trying to prepare myself to end her life.

Tears coursing down my face, I groped for the control which would shut down the force field and allow Bernice to die quickly by suffocation, instead of by suffering the lingering death I had inflicted upon her.

As I touched the control, a hand gripped my arm. Chris. I looked up, saw the big lunk through a rippling veil of tears. 'You don't understand. I have to.

I have to. It's what she. It's what. It's - 'No.' Chris's voice was suddenly very firm. He pulled my hand away from Bernice. 'Roz told me. In the helicopter. Roz told me.'

'Told you what, for G.o.d's sake!'

Chris smiled. It was the smile of an Angel. 'AG,' he said. 'CT. CT. AG. AT.

ACG. TTCT. TCAGC. CT. CT. There's more. I've got a good memory.'

I gaped. 'What the h.e.l.l are you = Bernice tugged my arm. 'Base pairs. Codon sets. Alien codon sets. It's a gene map for a virus. It's the cure, Jason. Chris knows the cure!'

I gaped.

In the helicopter. Roz told me. Imorkal.

Humans and Earth Reptiles won't be able to work together for centuries.

Chris was from the twenty-ninth century.

I had just been the backup. The one that failed. Imorkal had telepathically planted the gene sequence for Liz's antivirus in Chris's mind!

I glanced at the laptop as Chris scooped Bernice into his arms. 'Sorry, Benny. Might hurt a bit. Not for long though?' I thought I heard her whisper, 'You big lunk,' as we turned towards the tunnel entrance to the Ark, a quarter of a mile away.

I was too busy looking at the computer screen. The clock read 00:00:30.

'Chris? We have to get her to the LRV Now!' But the rover was gone.

Tammuz had taken it? We had run out of time.

'Burt the Turtle says, ”Duck and cover,”' Bernice whispered. She collapsed.

00:00:00.

The sky turned white.

I expected to die. Of course I did. I was blind for some time, though the force field saved my sight as well as my life. The most horrible part was not being able to move? It brought back memories of my incarceration on Cthalctose. I'm afraid I did panic, rather? Still, being trapped in a plain of radioactive gla.s.s will have that effect, I suppose.

We were all there, Chris, Bernice and myself. Flies in amber. After my sight came back I could see perfectly well. We were only inches below the surface. It was enough to keep us motionless, paralysed. About half a mile away I could make out a dark, irregular shape in the gla.s.s. The LRV I couldn't see Tammuz, but I knew he was in that half melted tin can. I could hear him. He was talking to himself. At times he would shout, at others scream, at still others, his voice would subside to a childlike muttering and he would pray.

A long time after my sight came back I felt the ground shudder. The gla.s.s cracked around us. Aftershocks? I thought not. I thought it was probably something far more horrible.

Something about the size of a grain of sand which weighed considerably more than the average star.

Two somethings, in fact. I was right.

The singularities were free.

Shortly after I came to this realization, Tammuz began to scream. The screams didn't last long. They didn't so much stop as drop sharply in pitch, as if Tammuz was being sucked away through a long tunnel at a speed no human body could withstand.

I wondered what it felt like to be crushed out of existence by a singularity, to be ripped apart by tidal forces and smeared out around an event horizon no bigger than the end of a biro.

I lay there and waited to die.

Above me I saw the Earth erupt with flashes of silver, like. cleansing fire in the sickly yellow pus that was its atmosphere.

After a while Bernice woke up and started to moan.

I listened to her cries of pain and waited for the Doctor to come rescue us.

At times I felt like crying myself, but I was all out of tears.

Epilogue.I suppose it's fairly obvious what happened next.

The combination of Liz's codon sets and the Doctor's genetic material resulted in an almost perfect antivirus. The pity of it was that there was simply no time to fast breed enough to bombard the infected areas before the growth of Agent Yellow became unstoppable. I suppose we were lucky that the Doctor's own antivirus had stabilized the damage to the TARDIS just enough to allow him to control the singularities in their orbits through the Earth.

For my own part I think of that time, imprisoned in the 'bomb crater surrounding the Ark and I wonder if I would have got through it had Jason not been there with me. Not that I was there very long. But when you're turning into a puddle of hydrochloric acid, while watching a tenth of all life on your home planet be wiped out by X-ray bursts from pinhead singularities, life can seem terribly unfair.

n.o.body else who was with us on the Moon died. The Doctor inoculated them properly and took them back to Earth, scattering them throughout the population to act as vectors for Agent Scarlet. Even the livestock.

When he told me that I smiled. 'You're telling me a sheep saved the Earth?'

His smile was wistful. 'It was a vector, like the rest, a way to get Agent Scarlet into the food chain. Think of it like mad cow disease in reverse.'

That made me chuckle. G.o.d knows I had little enough to chuckle about. I had been scarred both physically and mentally. The physical scarring will heal with grafts and time. The mental scarring ... well I don't know about that.

After marriage it's hard to simply be alone, much less heal.

Jason and I agreed to a divorce on the same plain of radioactive gla.s.s in which we had been trapped, beneath an Earth that glimmered like a Christmas tree ornament. Each tiny rainbow sparkle signified the death of thousands. It was a curious affair, solemn, private, with few words spoken.

There were no rows, no screaming, no arguments. Jason symbolized our decision by handing me back the time ring he had stolen from me. He also decided to stay on Earth. 'I'm not my father,' he said. 'I don't run away from my responsibilities. At least not any more?'

I thought of the world he had made. That world had taken a hard knock.

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