Part 6 (2/2)

'Something is wrong!' Adric cried.

At first it seemed like a trick of the light, some reaction of the eyes to the fluorescing.

But as they watched it became clear without any doubt. The TARDIS was smaller!

Tegan turned to the Monitor. 'You'd better do something,' she snapped.

The Logopolitan shook his head in dull amazement. 'I don't understand . . . I don't understand . . .'

'Look!' Nyssa exclaimed, although all eyes were already on the TARDIS. 'It's still shrinking!'

Alarm was spreading among the gathering of Logopolitans, who were drawing back from the sight. The TARDIS was now no taller than a man's height, and still diminished slowly as they watched.

Adric grabbed the Monitor's arm. 'But the Doctor's in there!' he shouted. At a distance from the horrified crowd, elevated by the height of the smooth fold of rock on which he stood, the translucent watching figure remained immobile, waiting his time. And he knew that time was coming. But not yet - not quite yet.

7.

The Doctor's young friends pressed in around the Monitor, and Tegan's voice was louder than the others. 'It's your numbers doing this. You must be able to do something to put it right.'

'Quick! Please, we must get him out of this!' Adric demanded, tugging at the Monitor's sleeve.

A greyness glazed over the fine features of the Logopolitan. 'This is unheard of . . . A fault in the computations?' He pushed his fingers, some ornamented with simple rings, through the neat silver curls of his hair. Then the moment of hesitation was over. In a voice crisp with authority he spoke to the distressed crowd around him. 'Collect the visitor's machine. The honour of Logopolis is at stake.'

And Adric thought he heard him add under his breath, 'And more than our honour . . .

much, much more.'

The TARDIS was now no bigger than a large cabin trunk, and even a child of ten would have had to stoop to get in through the miniature door. It was still fluorescing intermittently, but its surface didn't seem to be hot to the touch when the Logopolitans hoisted gently it into a horizontal position.

Nyssa had run forward to supervise the lifting of the TARDIS. Now as the procession swept towards the city she fell into step beside the Monitor.

'What are you going to do with the Doctor?'

The Logopolitan Leader turned his head towards her gravely. 'Our best. That is all we can do.'

And they hurried on to the Central Register through the winding maze of Logopolis, not knowing if the Doctor, inside that shrunken and still shrinking toy, was alive or dead.

The Doctor himself was little wiser. He had been only part of the way through the tedious business of reading the figures off the data block and keying them at the console when the room began to fill with an insidious buzzing sound, like an infuriated mosquito caught in a jam jar.

It was then that the distortions started. He first noticed a curious truncation of the time column, as if he were looking down on it from the perspective of the ceiling. His own hands, working at the keyboard, suddenly seemed a long way off. The buzzing grew, until he wasn't sure whether his head was in the room or the room was in his head. As he folded to his knees the floor rose smoothly to meet him halfway, like a well filling with dark oil.

An idea came swimming towards him through the thick buzzing blackness: dematerialise. Whatever was causing the spatial anomaly might be local. There was a chance of escape, if only...

The console was a giant mushroom that towered miles above him. He tried to struggle to his feet against some huge pressure. But he fought it, and eventually in agonising slow motion his knees straightened, and he found himself thin and tall, stretched like an over-tightened violin string between ceiling and floor.

His hand, almost an independent creature at the end of his long arm, managed to pull the dematerialisation lever. The buzzing continued to grow. He tried to conjure power from the auxiliary b.u.t.tons arrayed around the lever, but still nothing worked - only the viewer screen, which was now filled with a jolting picture of rose-coloured rock perforated by shadows that the Doctor's brain only dimly registered as a hugely magnified image of a Logopolitan street.

And still the buzzing grew louder and higher in pitch until his whole body vibrated to it.

And then, as if the violin string had snapped, the Doctor staggered and col apsed to the floor.

The procession of dark-robed figures hurried on with the tiny TARDIS. Logopolitan courtesy, and a real concern, made each one anxious to accompany the Doctor to the Central Register, so on this occasion the streets behind them were left rimmed with empty cells. There was, however, one cell on the route that was not empty.

From behind a yellowing, fluted column set just inside one of the dwelling places a face appeared, dark and spikily bearded. The thin lips parted, uttering a chuckle dry as the dust that was still settling in the train of the receding procession.

'At last, Doctor!' smiled the Master. 'At last I've cut you down to size.'

The Doctor knew nothing of the proximity of his oldest and deadliest enemy, indeed at that moment he knew little of anything. The TARDIS viewer offered a juddering succession of clues: a sea of serious faces, pink stone walls, flashes of bright sky. The image of a large building, approached by a flight of steps, lurched across the screen.

And then a carved stone staircase, followed by the sharp white light, streaming from the interior of a lofty room, where the jolting giant images finally came to rest. Gargantuan in proportion, the face of Adric loomed in, filling the viewer screen. Behind him the ballooning features of Tegan and Nyssa signalled the vast scale of their concern.

The Doctor saw none of this. His crumpled figure lay at the foot of the screen, inert beneath the weight of that unstoppable buzzing.

By the time they had reached the Central Register the TARDIS had been small enough for two Logopolitans to carry. They set it upright and now stood back, waiting for new orders from the Monitor.

Adric, Tegan and Nyssa knelt around it. The fluorescing had died down, and in every respect the TARDIS looked entirely ordinary - except that there was now no room for anything larger than a new-born kitten through that doll's-house door.

'Hold on, Doctor. The Monitor is going to help us.'

But there was no point in Nyssa calling, Adric pointed out. The Doctor might be able to see his surroundings on the TARDIS screen, but due to a long-standing fault it couldn't carry sound.

Adric straightened up and looked around him. He felt so powerless in this alien room with its high white walls and rectangular racks of equipment whose purpose he could only guess at. He remembered what the Monitor had said: it was a logical copy of the Pharos Project. Why had they made the copy of a computer instal ation when Logopolitan computations ran without computers?

The Monitor was stationed in front of the long grey console. That part of the installation must be Logopolitan in origin, thought Adric, the hub from which 'the Numbers'

emanated, and to which the computations returned. Just as he had done before, the Monitor was leaning forward, intoning into the black aperture that Adric had first mistaken for a screen.

'Etra secque secque eram nol. Etra secque kayrie gorrock gorrock kayrie zel. Kayrie nerus nerus kayrie zel . . .'

The sound was hypnotic. And then Adric almost jumped out of his skin as a sharp grating noise split the air close behind him. One component of the Earth technology had sprung to life, a flat cream-coloured box, the front panel of which now glowed with light.

Adric deduced from the paper covered with figures that emerged from the top that it was a sort of primitive printing mechanism.

The Monitor was beside him now, reaching to tear off the print-out. 'It's somewhere in the dimensioning routine,' their host p.r.o.nounced, scanning the paper. 'We can trace it, if there's time.

'Perhaps I can help?' Adric suggested. He explained about the Alzarian Badge for Mathematical Excellence - not boastfully, but just so that the Monitor would understand he wasn't dealing with an ordinary boy who would only get in the way.

The Logopolitan Leader explained that the printer was producing a machine-code dump of the routine that had caused the trouble. 'Can you read Earth numbering?' he asked.

He tore off the print-out and handed it to Adric, who studied it for a moment.

'Yes,' the boy said. 'The Doctor taught me.

'It's a copy of an Earth machine, so I'm afraid we have to make do with their clumsy symbols.'

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