Part 4 (1/2)

The book was heavy, bound in dark-brown leather. Adric tipped it to look at the spine and saw it was called The Complete Poetry of John Milton The Complete Poetry of John Milton. Opening the book brought a smell of distant cla.s.srooms. At the same time the corridor fell silent. The cloister bell had stopped tolling.

Corridors! Tegan was sick of them. Whether you ran down them or walked, they all wound into more corridors, or branched into junctions that lead again to corridors, or perhaps opened out into halls, from whose tall archways sprang more junctions that narrowed inevitably to yet more corridors.

Her state of mind had hardly been helped by the constant tolling, distant but always with her. And now, as she paused for breath, it seemed to be ringing in her head. She listened. It was in her head. Just in her head. It had stopped.

She was lost - inside a crazy little blue phone box. And there was no one to help: just her, and the silence, and corridors from here to kingdom come. So when she turned a corner and saw the patch of daylight through a distant arch, she ran to it as a thirsty desert trekker might run to a water-hole.

The daylight was a mirage; but she only came to that realisation after she had studied her surroundings for a long moment during which fear fought with curiosity, and both were slowly overcome by a rising indignation at the absurdity of the place. The ancient stone wal s and the pillars supporting the arched roof of the walkway that circ.u.mscribed the courtyard, were all constructed inside a large dome. Some invisible source bathed this great roof with a pale blue light in emulation of the sky, even as far as the suggestion of clouds.

She sat down on a low bench and said aloud, 'This place is completely and utterly daft.'

As if in answer the stone columns around her trembled slightly to the reverberation of a faint whirring, chuffing sound. A patch of intense blue, attached to no particular object, seemed to be forming in the middle of the courtyard. Vague at first, it soon acquired corners and a flas.h.i.+ng light on top.

Tegan stood up slowly, staring in broad-minded Australian disbelief at the police box that had materialised in front of her eyes.

The book was al printed in short lines that wasted a lot of the paper on the right-hand side of the page, and they gave the narrative a c.u.mulating rhythm that Adric found unpleasant at first. But as he got into the story - it was about flying people called Angels who were at war against the Evil creatures that lived in a Burning Lake - the rhythm seemed to help the way the story built up.

The Leader of the Burning-Lake Dwellers reminded Adric of the Master. Just as the Master had once been a Gallifreyan and was still a Time Lord, the evil character in the story was refugee Angel. So although the landscape of the story, with its Thunder and Lightning and Black Fire, was so obviously a fiction, this central correspondence with the truth riveted Adric's interest.

He was ascending a huge staircase that lead to a gate built of gold and studded with diamonds when he was jolted back from the book to the normality of the TARDIS. The door was opening.

The Doctor stood in the doorway, his face pale under the wild curls of his hair. 'Well, now we know,' was al he said as he ushered Adric back inside.

'Know what?'

'The message was very faint. But it was from Traken all right.'

'Traken!' The bright angels flew from the boy's mind. 'How's Nyssa? What's wrong?'

Taking time to choose his words carefully, the Doctor closed the door. Nyssa was safe enough; it was from her that the message had come. But Tremas, her father, had vanished. 'The Master must have had a second TARDIS hidden away somewhere,' the Doctor concluded. 'There's no doubt now that he escaped from Traken.'

'And he's taken Tremas with him?'

The Doctor made a vague gesture of affirmation; he had said as much as he dared tell the boy. Tremas, the brilliant Traken scientist and trusted Consul, had been a man in his prime, whereas the Master was very near the end of his twelfth regeneration. No Time Lord had survived the process for a thirteenth time. Clearly the Master had been desperate.

Adric clutched at the Doctor's sleeve. 'Then where have they gone?'

The Doctor hesitated. He couldn't tell Adric of his fears that the Master had physically taken over Tremas. Was he living in his body now? To achieve that was beyond the capacity of a Time Lord alone, but with some of the power of the Keepers.h.i.+p still lingering . . .

Angry with himself, the Doctor suddenly thumped the console. He had the self-control to choose a part some distance from the delicate array of needles, but the percussion was still enough to set them jumping. 'I was so sure we'd got him . . . But all the time he's been two moves ahead of me. He must have known I'd try to fix the chameleon circuit.'

These were speculations he could share with the boy; indeed, he had to. After his escape from Traken the Master must have come to Earth to lie in wait, wrapping his own time machine invisibly around the police box. It was the only way to infiltrate his superior technology into the Doctor's TARDIS.

There was one thing Adric didn't understand. 'But to know you were coming . . . he must have read your mind?'

'He's a Time Lord too,' the Doctor brooded. 'In many ways we have the same mind.'

Adric looked round the familiar walls of the console room and shuddered. If the Doctor was right the Master was somewhere in the TARDIS, imbedded like a virus in living flesh. If they landed in Logopolis they ran the risk of carrying the infection to an innocent planet.

'Then we can't really land anywhere, can we?' the boy asked.

Adric heard him mutter something in reply, but the Doctor wasn't really listening. His eye was wandering around the console room as if trying to trace the invisible string of a long tangled thought. The thought seemed to begin with the console itself and wind across the floor to the big double doors and then back again, eventually ascending slowly up the walls to the ceiling.

The Doctor crossed to the small door that led to the TARDIS interior and pushed it shut, examining the way it fitted into the door jamb. He seemed satisfied by what he saw and went over to retrieve the TARDIS Manual from under one of the feet of the hatstand, where the small book spent a lot of its time compensating for an inadequacy in the hatstand design, or perhaps a slight unevenness of the floor.

The Doctor had been leafing backwards and forwards through the pages for several minutes when he suddenly looked up brightly and said, 'Actually, there is one way of getting rid of him. I'm just trying to work out how much damage it might do to the TARDIS systems.'

The Doctor explained his dangerous idea. In principle it should be possible to flush the Master out - literally - by the simple expedient of materialising the TARDIS under water and opening the doors.

'Drown the TARDIS?' Adric exclaimed. 'But you can't!'

'I can and I have to,' said the Doctor flatly. 'And that is that.'

The strange pale blue light that seemed so like daylight must have been affecting her eyes, Tegan decided. The object she was examining was as solid as anyone could wish: a perfectly normal police box, even down to the stuff about police coming to your a.s.sistance written on the front. It was everything else that was crazy. She remembered - if her memory hadn't gone completely bananas along with everything else - that the crumbling stone courtyard she was in now, along with all that spaghetti of corridors, was supposed to be inside one of those police box things. Tegan was essentially a sensible girl, and she knew when she was out of her depth. What she had to do now was find some official person, preferably the captain of the craft - and give him a piece of her mind he would never forget.

She had walked round to the back of the police box by now, just in case there was some trick to it. No, it looked, felt and smelled just like the real article. What she didn't see, as she leaned against the blue wall at the back trying to work out some positive plan of action, was the door at the front of the police box slowly edging open.

5.

He thought it was a map at first. And then as the details on the viewer screen grew larger Adric could see it was an aerial image of a real city. Traffic moved along the grey veins of roads between the buildings, many of which were stained with age, although patches of silver and gla.s.s highlighted some newer structures with gleams of sunlight.

The main feature of the city was a thick grey-green river bangled with bridges. It lay across the centre of the screen like a serpent sprawled across a patterned cus.h.i.+on.

The time column had stopped oscillating. They were hovering in mid-air.

'London,' announced the Doctor.

'Why not the sea?' asked Adric. 'You said there were a lot of oceans on this planet.'

The Doctor crossed to the console and delicately re-set the co-ordinates. 'It's an ancient tidal river called the Thames.' The watery burial of the TARDIS would be taking place somewhere worthy of respect, he a.s.sured Adric.

'Besides, if we do it this way we won't have so far to swim.'

The boy helped the Doctor with the first part of the elaborate preparations. They had to close down most of the console system, and as the twinkling lights and little coloured instrument panels went out one by one the reality of what the Doctor was planning to do came home to Adric. A flood of water would sluice in and wash out the whole TARDIS.

The console room, the corridors, the cloister room and the myriad rooms behind doors he had never opened would be drowned under tons of thick green water. It seemed such a drastic way of driving out the Master.

'But you can't just abandon the TARDIS.'

The Doctor pa.s.sed an affectionate hand over the console. 'Yes, one does feel a tremendous loyalty to the old thing after all these years.'

'I don't mean that, Doctor.' It seemed to Adric that the Time Lord was overlooking the obvious again. 'Be practical. How are you going to get to Logopolis?'

The Doctor pul ed a switch and the secondary lights at the base of the time column went out, leaving the console looking lifeless. The only working technology in the room now seemed to be the viewer screen, which still showed the serpent motif of the Thames.

'There's a gap in your education, Adric. Why are we going to Logopolis?'