Part 11 (2/2)

'Never mind. You've solved our problem, Doctor.' He jerked a thumb towards where the technician lay, a crumpled unconscious heap against the wall. The Master ripped off the headphones and dropped them into the wastepaper basket while the Doctor checked the man's pulse and made him comfortable on the floor.

'I feel we've been spared a very difficult conversation,' said the Master.

Then he turned to Tegan, snapping his fingers. 'Come along, now. Door . . . blinds . . .

lights. If this interesting scheme is to work, there's a great deal to be done before dawn.'

Giving much thought to the task they were about to embark upon, the Doctor absent-mindedly stirred the technician's coffee with a pencil and raised it to his lips.

Despite the confusing new s.p.a.ciousness of the corridors, Adric had managed to find the TARDIS cloister room again. He walked round the perimeter with Nyssa, pointing out the crumbling stonework that had started off the Doctor on his resolve to repair his s.h.i.+p.

It looked particularly shoddy in the over-lit brilliance induced by timelessness and s.p.a.celessness.

'Things in the TARDIS often stop working for no reason,' the boy said. 'The Doctor's very good at coping with it, but it's a terrific strain on him.'

'Entropy again,' Nyssa said. 'You can't get away from it.'

Adric stopped suddenly, looking across to the other side of the cloisters. A white shape was visible through the foliage, pacing restlessly backwards and forwards much as the Doctor had done the day Adric had first discovered the cloister room.

'It's uncanny! From here . . . it might almost be the Doctor.'

The echo of Adric's whispered remark to Nyssa must have carried around the wall to the other side of the cloisters, because at that moment the Watcher stopped pacing and looked in the direction of the two companions. And exactly as the Doctor had done before, the Watcher took a pace forward and beckoned to Adric across the quad.

Nyssa wanted to hear all about what the Watcher had said, but explanations had to wait while Adric hurried her through the white brilliance of the corridors and back to the console room.

'Are we travelling again?' Nyssa asked, closing the door behind her. 'We have to log in the co-ordinate sub-systems first.' Adric waited until the row of yellow lights were al glowing above the set of initiation switches. Then he unlocked the sub-system panel, as he had seen the Doctor do so many times before.

'He actually spoke to you?' asked Nyssa.

'Yes, of course,' said Adric, smoothing out the piece of paper the Watcher had given him. He hesitated. 'At least . . . yes, he must have spoken to me.' He had the distinct impression that it had been a conversation, but when he tried to remember what the Watcher's voice was like he could only hear the Doctor speaking.

'We're going back into s.p.a.ce and time?' asked Nyssa, looking over Adric's shoulder at the writing on the paper. 'What changed his mind?'

'It didn't change,' Adric told her, surprised at his own confidence. It was impossible for him to know the Watcher's thoughts, and yet he felt sure their new companion was in some way part of the future. His mind hadn't changed because he knew - he had always known - what was going to happen.

Nyssa wanted to be shown how the TARDIS worked, but unlike Tegan her scientifically trained mind was not to be thrown into confusion by long words. Adric explained as much as he knew, but had to confess that most of the theory was too complicated even for his mathematical brain.

Luckily the Watcher had told him exactly what to do. According to the piece of paper, Earth was in sector eighty twenty-five of the third quadrant. 'The temporal settings are laid in on this panel . . .' Adric told her. 'It always looks so easy when the Doctor does it.'

'But where are we going?'

'The Pharos Project. Now just leave me alone for a bit. I have to do some calculations.'

Adric settled in front of a small keyboard set into the console. Nyssa turned to the viewer screen, and saw a starfield, a million glittering diamonds scattered across a cus.h.i.+on of black velvet. From outside s.p.a.ce and time she was looking down on an image of the whole universe.

Adric finished his calculations and came to stand beside her. Curved lines like meteorological isobars were inching across the screen, and as they advanced, the stars they covered dimmed and died. It was as though some black ink blot were spreading across the universe, indelibly staining out the light.

Nyssa pointed to the awesome blackness of the encroaching blot. 'Look at the entropy field. It's huge now.' Then a thought occurred to her. 'Is Earth on this star map?'

Adric pursed his lips for a moment, then indicated the edge of the map furthest from the invading darkness. 'This is Earth's galaxy. Somewhere here. The Earth people have a few hours left.'

'And Traken?' asked Nyssa.

The question took Adric by surprise. He waved his finger vaguely around the middle of the screen and said, 'Traken should be . . . Traken's . . .' And then he realised that it lay directly under the spreading dark stain of entropy.

'That's funny,' said Nyssa. 'I can't even see Mettula Orionsis . . .' And then she tailed off as she saw Adric's face.

'I'm sorry, Nyssa . . . I'll switch it off.'

She stopped him as he was reaching for the switch. 'No! Wait!' She wanted to look a little longer, giving herself time to absorb the knowledge that the death of her father had been fol owed by the destruction of her whole world. She had never hated the Master so much as she did at that moment. 'He killed my step-mother, and then my father . . . and now this! The world I grew up in - blotted out forever!'

Adric took hold of her hands. She looked at him for a moment, her eyes wet with tears.

Then gently releasing herself from him she reached out and flicked off the viewer.

A moment later the time column juddered into life, and the lighting began to whiten again, bleaching out the shapes around them. 'Hold on,' said Adric. 'We're going back now.'

The two companions gripped the console for support as the room filled with the roaring noise that announced the beginning of their re-entry into s.p.a.ce and time.

12.

Tegan helped the Doctor and the Master unscrew the side of the computer cabinet, then she left them with the memory boards and peeped out into the corridor. The echoing darkness hummed faintly with the sound of distant machinery as she tiptoed to a window at the end and pulled down a slat of the Venetian blinds. They were on the second floor of a building that looked down onto a fenced-off area. In the light of the high yellow lamps slung between tall poles below, the long low huts looked like a tangle of barges moored in the black asphalt. Beyond the huts the high wire fencing was interrupted by a main gate, approached by a wide open s.p.a.ce. Tegan deduced from the white markings that it was partially a car park. Over it all a huge skeletal structure rose up into the night sky like the Eiffel Tower; but instead of coming to a point it bloomed into the familiar shape of a vast metal bowl. The Pharos antenna, she thought. The original of the one on Logopolis.

The two Time Lords worked on through the night, and Tegan kept returning to the window, until the dark horizon began to sharpen with an edge of silver. 'The dawn's coming up,' she whispered, coming back into the computer room. 'And they've got security guards out there.' She had noticed dark shapes moving by the main gate.

The collaboration between the two Time Lords was not going entirely smoothly. At the Doctor's signal the Master prodded the console keyboard again. 'It's still not running.

The program is useless.'

'The Monitor gave his life trying to complete it,' the Doctor replied sharply. 'We must try to do him justice.'

'Indeed? And what makes you so sure this is going to work?'

The Doctor smiled pleasantly and took over the keyboard. 'While there's life, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other.'

'Woolly thinking, Doctor,' sneered the Master.

'Very comforting, when worn next to the skin.'

The keyboard clattered under the Doctor's fingers for a moment or two. The Master leaned over to inspect the screen, which had begun to fill with figures. 'It's running,' he said, a note of surprise in his voice. 'If you can call this alien gibberish a program.'

'We'll know once we've managed to download it onto the antenna. Now, in view of the guards out there - or rather, to avoid being in view of the guards - I suggest we pop across in your TARDIS.'

The Master tapped the light speed overdrive, which was sticking out of the Doctor's top pocket. 'Not unless we deplete this, and we'll need it for transmission.'

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