Part 11 (1/2)

But the dismal wasted world of Logopolis presented the Doctor's sometimes facile optimism with one small ray of hope. He thought - though the calculations to confirm his theory would have taken several days - that a dematerialising TARDIS would have to create a major disturbance to the unstable landscape, something they were bound to notice. Apart from the constant cracking and s.h.i.+fting of the ground beneath their feet there had been nothing on that scale since the landslide Tegan had caused. If the Doctor's guess was right, the Master was still on Logopolis!

On the basis of this long shot they were trekking the dangerous territory, hoping to run into the man the Doctor hated most in the whole universe. Tegan's dark doubts grew with every precarious ruin they explored. But she was the one who found the glove.

'Doctor! Over here!' She knelt and peered at the s.h.i.+ny black object. It was lying palm up, partly covered by a mound of pink dust that had piled up around the base of a flat fluted pillar lying horizontally along the back of the cell.

The Doctor seemed a long time coming; perhaps he had missed the cave. With the idea of going to the entrance to cal again, she reached out to pick up the glove.

The black leather fingers closed tightly around her hand.

The Doctor heard Tegan's screams and arrived at a stumbling trot. In struggling to escape she had pulled the hand out of the ground, revealing a flailing length of arm.

She was also in danger of bringing down what remained of the roof. The Doctor clapped one hand firmly over her mouth and grabbing the disembodied arm with the other heaved backwards with all his strength.

The Master's face emerged from the sand beneath the pillar. 'Just in time, Doctor,' he said, spitting out dust. 'I have almost had my fill of Logopolis.'

The Master had stumbled through a mult.i.tude of ruins before finding the fat fluted column jammed tightly into one corner of the cell, supporting the sagging roof. In the geological upheaval it had s.h.i.+fted too close to the wall for him to be able to open the door.

At first he had tugged at it impatiently, and then with violence. Powdered rock plummeted from the roof, the pillar teetered and then crashed down towards him, bringing with it a fresh cascade of rubble. The settling dust had brought an uneasy silence to the cell. Trapped under the immense weight of his own TARDIS there was nothing to do but wait.

Patience had brought its reward. Scrabbling with their hands at the loose ground Tegan and the Doctor finally managed to prise the Master from under the pillar and pull him to his feet.

The Master dusted himself down as best he could. 'I'm grateful, Doctor.'

'Splendid,' said the Doctor, 'because now it's your turn to help us.' He glanced down at the pillar, and noticed that the door, normally concealed by the fluting, had come ajar, hinting at the inky vastness of the interior. As the three of them hauled the column upright, the Doctor added, 'One good lift deserves another, don't you think? Next stop Earth.'

Adric had come to think of him as 'the Watcher', this strange friend of the Doctor's who came and went like pictures in the fire, and never spoke. The Watcher seemed to prefer solitude; now he wasn't even allowing them to share the console room with him. It reminded Adric of the time the Doctor had put him outside the door while he answered the cloister bell, except that now instead of Milton, Adric had Nyssa to share the corridor with him. 'But the Doctor usually lets me help him.' The boy's protest went unheeded and the door closed.

'I don't think he needs our help,' Nyssa said. 'He seems to know what he's doing.' When he had fetched her from Traken he hadn't said anything, just beckoned. But there was something oddly familiar about the strange figure that had stopped her feeling afraid. He seemed very like the Doctor in many ways, but so solemn, as if he carried all the troubles of the world on his shoulders. 'It's as if he was watching over me,' Nyssa said.

So Nyssa had that same feeling! Adric told her about the name he had privately given him. 'I'm not afraid of the Watcher either,' the boy added. 'But I would like to know who he is.'

Adric slowly turned the handle to peep into the console room. Through the narrow crack in the door he could see the Watcher's hands drifting over the console controls. 'He's setting the co-ordinates . . . no, he's . . .'

Adric had to stand on tiptoe to see better.

Nyssa hadn't approved of the idea of spying on the Watcher, but now she said impatiently, 'Wel ? What is he doing?'

Adric caught his breath. 'He's unsetting the co-ordinates! He's disconnecting the co-ordinate sub-system . . . But he can't do that. Not in mid-flight!'

'What is it? What's the matter?'

The boy slammed the door shut, and by way of answer to Nyssa's question grabbed her and threw her roughly to the floor. At the same moment the TARDIS rocked violently.

For several sickening oscillations the two companions rolled back and forth across the pitching corridor. Then, as the movement stabilised, the solid walls around them appeared to melt and glow, and everything within vision began to merge into a single featureless field of brilliant white. A roaring sound filled the corridor. Over it Adric heard Nyssa's voice. 'Adric? What's happening?'

He had to shout to be heard above the mounting noise. 'It's the Watcher. He's taking us out of time and s.p.a.ce altogether!'

Adric remained conscious, but for a long time he seemed to hover on the very edge of existence, like a thought in search of a mind to think it. From time to time he caught the sound of Nyssa's voice amidst the rush and roar that filled his head, but the words were indistinct and may have been in his imagination, or perhaps in hers. His mind brimmed over with the whiteness that had no boundary in s.p.a.ce or time. And then, slowly at first, the shapes came back. The twisting line where one corridor wall met the floor, the horizontal plane of the door, the perfect circles of the roundels inlaid into the panels, appeared one by one like fresh pencil-marks on blank paper. Eventually the roaring died, leaving them in a silent, airy brightness that was unmistakably the TARDIS corridor, but somehow infinitely more s.p.a.cious between its insubstantial bounds.

Nyssa was sitting beside him on the floor, 'Is that where we are?' she asked, as though nothing had interrupted the conversation. 'Outside s.p.a.ce and time?'

'Yes,' said Adric. 'And hovering. The TARDIS isn't supposed to do that.'

Nyssa stood up. 'We seem to be safe.'

Adric scrambled to his feet beside her. 'Safe, yes. That's the point, I suppose. The Doctor's told the Watcher to look after us.'

'I'd rather be with the Doctor,' said Nyssa.

'Me too,' Adric said. 'What are we going to do?' The boy knew, even as he asked, that it was an empty question. Guided by the Watcher, the TARDIS had made the only possible escape from the deadly collapse that was spreading out from Logopolis. But the Doctor was in the middle of it, and now there was nothing they could do to help.

Nyssa's reply was calm and practical. 'Well, if the Watcher won't let us in the console room, you'd better show me round the rest of the TARDIS.'

The technician reached out for the paper cup that stood somewhat incongruously in front of the high-technology switches and LED indicators of the computer console. He had been trying to crack the problem since starting his six o'clock s.h.i.+ft that evening, and here he was on the other side of midnight and range errors of two of the global variables were still slipping through the compiler.

That was typical of the Pharos Project - month after month of no data coming in from the antenna meant you filled in the time chasing petty errors out of the software until your eyes popped. The moment he lifted the paper cup he realised it was empty. The strains of Tchaikovsky's 'Nutcracker Suite' pouring into his ears through the lightweight headphones were no subst.i.tute, coffee was what he needed. He got up, stowing the ca.s.sette recorder into the pocket of his white lab coat, and, crus.h.i.+ng the cup and lobbing it expertly into the wastepaper basket, went out into the corridor to wring fresh inspiration from the beverage dispenser.

The Pharos Project computer room was illuminated by a single lighting bar over the console, which left pools of shadow in the remoter areas where the tape and disk drives hummed on stand-by. No sooner had the technician moved out into the corridor than a new voice joined the gentle chorus: a kind of chugging noise emanating from a rapidly thickening patch of yellow that stained the gloom in one corner. The shape congealed into a stubby pillar, Ionic in proportion, but with a leafy capital and base reminiscent of the Corinthian order. A door, not a usual feature of its Ancient Greek antecedents, opened up on one side, and the Master stepped into the room.

'You see,' he said quietly to the Doctor, who followed him, 'we have materialised exactly on the co-ordinates.'

'Spot on,' the Doctor conceded. 'I envy you your TARDIS, Master.'

'Excellent, Doctor. You're improving. Envy is the beginning of all true greatness.'

Tegan followed the two Time Lords out of the TARDIS, and found herself in a room so like the Monitor's Central Register, as it was before the disaster, that at first she thought the destruction of Logopolis had only been a bad dream. And then from the corridor she heard the jingle of coins in the automat; unmistakably an Earth sound.

The Doctor pul ed her back against the wall. The Master was on the other side of the door when the technician came back into the room, sipping at his coffee. As the door swung shut behind him, Tegan saw the Master taking an unpleasant-looking piece of technology from his coat. He seemed to be levelling it at the technician.

The Doctor was beside him in an instant. 'No!' he said in a fierce whisper, pulling the Master down behind a disk drive cabinet.

The Master calmly handed the device over to the Doctor. 'The light speed overdrive from my TARDIS. You'll need it for transmission.' His eyes twinkled with a mockery of innocence.

'I'm sorry,' said the Doctor. 'I thought . . .'

'That I would kill him, Doctor? Why should I, when you have the time and patience to explain our presence to this gentleman.' There was no mistaking the sarcasm in the Master's voice.

'Yes, well . . . I can try.'

Signalling to Tegan to get the memory boards from the Master's TARDIS the Doctor stood up. The technician was totally immersed in his music and his computations; it was certainly going to be awkward, the Doctor realised, to announce their presence without frightening the life out of him.

Such humane considerations were no hindrance to the Master, crouched behind the cabinet. Unfortunately for his plans he had just aligned the re-dimensioner on the precise site of the posterior cerebellar notch at the back of the technician's skull when Tegan re-emerged from the TARDIS with the printed circuit boards. Instinctively she cried out.

The Doctor's head swivelled round immediately, and at the same time the weapon flashed in the Master's hand. But before the energy beam had time to arrive at its target the Doctor had dived at the technician, sending him skimming across the room on the casters of his chair.

The Doctor turned his fury on the Master. 'There must be no more deaths!'