Part 4 (2/2)

'How... how do you know that?'

'Because if you had, the consequences would have been catastrophic. You would have released forces that are infinitely more powerful.'

'And they... started to scream,' says Pelham, disbelieving her own words. 'I ran to help and then... then they turned round. Prahna and Erik turned on him, attacked him, started to... I ran. I panicked. I've never been so afraid in my life.'

She lapses into silence. All the Doctor can hear is the grinding of the chains that haul them up and up.

'Where are we going anyway?' asks Romana. 'Who is pulling us up?'

Pelham smiles but with little humour. 'You may wish you had stayed in the tomb.'

'What do you know of Valdemar?' asks the Doctor abruptly.

'He would have been destroyed millennia before the birth of humanity.'

'Over a million years.' Her reply is muted. The Doctor hopes he is taking her mind off the horror she experienced in the cavern. 'And Valdemar is my job. I found him and I re-invented him.'

'Would someone mind explaining to me,' Romana asks patiently, 'just who this Valdemar is?'

The Doctor and Pelham begin to speak at once, both eager to tell their stories.

'Valdemar was a G.o.d...' says Pelham.

'Valdemar was a cancer...' says the Doctor.

And all the time the chain pulls and pulls... lifting them higher, to Paul Neville.

For the Doctor, memory is a hazy thing. He recalls events and names more clearly than he recalls himself. Who was the man who found the Daleks on Skaro, ready to emerge from their metal city and make war with the universe? Who was the man who tricked the Great Intelligence, deep in the tunnels of London? Who was the man who solved the riddle of Peladon? He does not know.

Someone, it must have been him because he remembers, was once young. Centuries young.

He recalls the two students hooked up to the Matrix, their joint consciousnesses wired into headsets for the illegal terminal they had lashed-up, to prove that they could. Two students, in Prydonian robes. One dominant, clever, cunning. The other cautious, patient, thorough. Him.

At the Academy. Where his friend, the Time Lord who went bad and became the Master, revealed to him: Valdemar.

When the universe was young, younger than he, younger than even the range of a TARDIS, a race now known only as the Old Ones (a translation, but typical of the colourless, literal and long t.i.tles ascribed by the Time Lords. Old Ones was a name they gave to any long-dead, highly technologically advanced alien beings with incredible powers.

As if they were afraid to give them real names) disappeared.

Exterminated.

Why?

Valdemar.

The Doctor and the other student had travelled back, through the Matrix safeguards, tapping back through Gallifreyan history, through universal history.

Nothing was left of the Old Ones, except warnings.

They had released or created something, some black ma.s.s of life. Valdemar may have been the name of the first Old One, which it took for itself, or perhaps it was always called that. No one knew. For the two students, a.n.a.logues of Valdemar portrayed it as a stain, blotting out stars, consuming planets, transforming races into servitors to sustain itself. Valdemar the Unstoppable, the Destructor, the universe at its mercy.

And then, somehow, the remnants of the Old Ones defeated it. No record survived of how. It just stopped. Correlations from dozens of races' mythologies were processed by the Matrix, the result an aggregation of them all: Valdemar was killed and its body placed in a tomb. The tomb was sealed for ever under acid skies, lest Valdemar transcend death itself and return again to complete its destruction.

The students had emerged from the Matrix, the eyes of one them s.h.i.+ning. 'The power.' he shouted joyously, 'Think of the power.'

The Doctor had stared at his friend and wondered just who, what kind of person, would gain so much unrestrained pleasure from such a nightmare.

Pelham, for her part, is finding life a little too much. She can't... won't remember what happened down there in the tomb... Erik and the other one, she has already forgotten his name. Her worst fears confirmed. Then these two strangers.

The woman in a mishmash melange of styles from the last two decades and the man with no recognisable style at all.

Both talking gibberish. Is this some plot by Valdemar to drive the last remnants of sanity from her, an arcane revenge for all those stories she wrote about him?

They have to be from Hopkins, they have to be Hopkins's agents. There is no other sane explanation. Which, as it's true because it must be, means that more trouble awaits them in the palace. She feels the b.u.mp as the bathyscape is jostled by the core updraught. Suddenly their ascent, already speedy, becomes stomach churning. The updraught of gases pushes them on, threatening to loop the giant chain.

The Doctor is staring out of the porthole, eyes a-goggle, staring at the rus.h.i.+ng coloured air pulsing upwards. 'You know Romana, I do believe I know where we're going. That is a core updraught. Superheated gases from the planet's core rising in a high-yield energy stream.'

Romana stops preening herself to rise and look upwards through the gla.s.s. 'I've seen it proposed as a theory, but never realised on any kind of scale.'

The Doctor turns to Pelham and suddenly she finds that her hand is in his, being warmly shaken up and down.

'Congratulations, Ms Pelham,' he beams. 'You've discovered the principle of atmospheric flotation, about six hundred years early. How did you do it?'

'I don't understand,' she stutters.

'How did you ensure stabilisation?' asks Romana curiously.

Pelham believes the woman is serious. 'Wide-band streaming? Retro thrusters? Rotational spin?'

'I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about,' she replies, suspiciously. 'And to answer your question, we didn't do it we found it.'

'Ahh. That explains a lot,' says the Doctor.

'Not to me it doesn't.'

'You knew the tomb was here didn't you?'

'We guessed.'

'You're some kind of historian? Archaeologist?'

'Novelist.'

'Really? That's interesting.'

'I'm glad you think so.'

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