Doctor Who (13 page)

He looked at the children, taking in each of their expressions in turn. He couldn’t quite work out what their reaction was. They looked back at him. Jenibeth tugged at Sabel’s arm, pulling her up the steps to the console, following Ollus. They all looked around at the controls. Ollus leaned over to touch a lever.

The Doctor made an urgent, sucking noise with his mouth. Ollus moved away from the lever.

‘Sorry,’ he said simply. But, the Doctor thought, this little boy was clearly deep in thought.

The children exchanged looks. For all the world, it looked as though they were in some kind of telepathic communication. Which they weren’t, thought the Doctor. That would be impossible. But all the same, they seemed to come to some kind of unspoken agreement between them. Jenibeth nudged Sabel closer to the Doctor. Clearly, the eldest girl had been elected spokesperson.

‘If this is a time machine …’ started Sabel.

Then it struck the Doctor what was coming next. He felt a pang in his hearts. His eyes closed and he put a hand to his face as he turned away from the children. Of course, of course,
of course!
He had brought three children into his TARDIS. Three children who had just lost their parents … in the recent past. And he had told them that they were in a
time machine!

The Doctor turned back to them.

‘No,’ he said, simply, and then busied himself with the controls on the console. He was not doing anything in particular, just trying to
look
busy. Trying to look at anything other than the children.

Sabel moved to his side and tugged at his jacket sleeve.

‘Won’t you even listen to what I have to say?’ she asked him.

The Doctor gave a long, long sigh. An outward breath that heaved with the experience of many lifetimes. He found he could still not look at her.

‘Doctor?’ she said in a tiny, frail voice. He could tell that she was starting to cry; but he could not bear to look at her.

This was the bad side of time travel. There was so much wonder, so many limitless possibilities, so much sheer … adventure and joy. But then there was also this. The terrible tricks of history that any sane person would want to see undone. Since the death of all loved ones causes so much terrible pain, if you have a time machine and could go back and stop that pain … Then why not do it?

The Doctor could still hear Sabel’s crying. And when a big sister cries, he thought, so would her little brother and sister. He was right. He could hear Ollus and Jenibeth start to sob.

Here he was, thought the Doctor. The man who could bring empires to their knees, stand up to and defeat the most terrible creatures the universe had to offer … And when it came to children crying, his arsenal of rhetoric, ingenuity and witty reposts was utterly bare. For a moment, all he wanted to do was run away. How could he tell the children he couldn’t go back and save their parents?

All at once, the Doctor found himself standing by the TARDIS doors, his back still to the children, his hands over his ears. In that moment, his instinct to get away from the problem had driven him away like a reflex reaction. He must have dashed down the steps, holding his ears. But he had no recollection of doing it.

A little ashamed of himself, he spun round and faced the children. They were looking at him from the control platform, almost in disbelief, their eyes wet with tears.

‘Where were you going?’ asked Ollus.

‘Where was I going?’ said the Doctor. ‘No idea. Don’t
worry. It’s pretty usual for me. Sorry about that.’

He looked down at his toes, not really knowing what else to say. Then, without warning, Ollus suddenly blurted out the words the Doctor had not wanted to hear.

‘If this is a time machine, we can go back and stop Mummy and Daddy from dying.’

The Doctor looked at them. He saw hope in their eyes. A desperate, ragged hope. It felt like it was smothering him.

‘I … can’t,’ he said. ‘I just can’t.’

Jenibeth collapsed into sobbing again. She fell to the floor, sitting at the top of the stairs. Sabel knelt by her side, hugging her tightly, staring at the Doctor.

‘Why not?’ asked Ollus, who, in this instant, seemed more confused than upset. ‘Doesn’t your machine work properly?’

‘Er … well, mostly it does,’ said the Doctor. ‘Yes, yes, it does!’ he corrected himself, feeling defensive again. ‘But … well …’ How could he say this? ‘There are rules.’

‘What rules?’ asked Ollus.

Of course Ollus was going to ask this. He would just go on and on asking, wouldn’t he? He was a child. That’s what children do, thought the Doctor. He was going to have to tell him everything.

‘My people—’ started the Doctor.

‘
Your
people?’ asked Sabel, her eyes filled with incomprehension. ‘Who are
your
people?’

‘It …’ The Doctor faltered. All this explaining! Explaining felt like the worst thing ever. ‘It doesn’t matter, they’re dead. But my people had rules about this
sort of thing. You can’t just take people back in time to change things.’

‘Why not?’ sobbed Jenibeth, looking up at the Doctor, accusingly.

‘Because you could bump into yourselves!’ said the Doctor, a little too harshly, he thought. ‘Sorry,’ he added. ‘It’s all very … timey-wimey and complicated.’ He tried a confused smile, hoping for some sympathetic understanding from the children. Then he realised how silly that hope had been.

‘Look,’ the Doctor tried again. ‘If we go back and save your parents, then they may never send the distress call, so I won’t have come back to save you. So then, we won’t be able to go back and …’ The Doctor ran out of steam as he saw Jenibeth and Sabel slowly starting to look away from him. Like the shock of their parents dying had just happened all over again.

‘I see …’ muttered Ollus, in a remarkably adult fashion.

‘Sorry,’ said the Doctor again, feeling rather helpless and inadequate. ‘What do you see?’ he found himself asking, unable to suppress his curiosity about the little boy’s response.

‘If you do things in the past, you could break the future,’ said Ollus. ‘Daddy read me a story … 
Souder Thunda
, it was.’

‘Souder?’ the Doctor wondered, almost to himself.

‘Some men went back to see the dinosaurs on Earth, and they ruined it,’ said Ollus, as if that explained everything. And in a way, it did. The Doctor realised Ollus was talking about
A Sound of Thunder
by a human
science fiction writer called Ray Bradbury, in which a safari back to Earth’s prehistory had caused Earth’s entire history to be rewritten. These truly were the children of great scientists, thought the Doctor.

‘Daddy never read
me
that story,’ said Sabel, accusingly. ‘Why does one silly story make it all right not to bring them back to life?’

‘Or the rules of a race long gone …?’ muttered the Doctor to himself.

‘Who’s gone?’ asked Jenibeth, barely hearing the Doctor.

The Doctor was thinking fast now, feeling a hotness around his neck. It was that feeling of taking a terrible risk, of leaping into the unknown, of maybe making a huge mistake … But the trouble was, it appealed to him. The death of Alyst and Terrin Blakely had been more or less caused by the Daleks. The Doctor had heard their distress call and had tried to respond. But the TARDIS had been somehow pushed off course by … something. What was that something?
Who
was that something?

Someone was interfering. Someone was
already
interfering in the timeline. Two wrongs didn’t make a right, but if the Doctor was up against a situation where the so-called rules of time were already being manipulated and abused, maybe any manipulation of events by him would be no worse.

‘Maybe,’ the Doctor found himself thinking out loud.

‘Maybe what?’ asked Sabel, starting to move down the stairs towards the Doctor.

He found he could say no more, because it felt like he was holding a terrible secret within him. In fact, he
was
holding a terrible secret. He was going to break the rules. He was going to give these children their parents back. He was going to undo the terrible work the Daleks had done.

He strode up the steps to the console. As he reached the top, Sabel and Jenibeth grabbed his hands. Needing at least one hand free to operate the controls, he quickly pulled Jenibeth up. She threw her arms around his shoulders and hung on, leaving one of his hands free. He started to tap away at some keys on the console. He pulled down a few levers and punched a number of buttons. Already the TARDIS was starting to groan, like an old ship being forced to turn against the wind. A shudder came up from the bowels of its structure. Sabel let go of the Doctor’s hand to steady herself. He instantly used the free hand to make further adjustments.

As he pulled at more levers, pushed more buttons, turned more dials and dashed from one panel to the next, still carrying Jenibeth, he was aware that Ollus was dashing up the steps to join them. Like Sabel, he too grabbed hold of the console for support.

A steady, thundering vibration was now building up. The Doctor could feel his teeth vibrating in his head. He glanced at Sabel and Ollus to reassure them, but their faces were filled with intense anticipation and a growing joy. The Doctor slammed home a few more levers and the vibration became almost intolerably vibrant. Deep crashing noises were whooshing around the control room now, as if gigantic gears were smashing into each other. The groaning of the engines had split into two – one high-pitched whine and one deep, grinding roar.

‘A sound of thunder!’ cried the Doctor, triumphantly.

‘What?’ asked Jenibeth, very close to his ear.

‘Doesn’t matter!’ said the Doctor, smiling broadly. ‘Here we go!’

He had no idea what they would do when they got back in time to the point before Alyst and Terrin took their lives, but he would do something. Something … good. Something that would wrong-foot whatever devilish Dalek plot was already in motion.

But then …

Everything in the TARDIS suddenly fell silent and still.

‘Oh no,’ whispered the Doctor.

And then it happened. It was almost the same as the enormous shunt that had occurred when he had tried to go to the rescue of Alyst and Terrin … but this time it was a thousand times more powerful.

Some vast pulse of energy hit the TARDIS and now it seemed to the Doctor that his beautiful old ship might tear itself apart.

Hogoosta was proud of his team. He relaxed back onto his three hind legs, his two mouths settling into a satisfied smile as he observed the team going about their work on the gigantic monument before them.

They were an eclectic bunch, fussing about the great structure, carrying out all manner of complex tasks. He had recruited them from planets across the galaxy. Some he had worked with before, others had been recommended to him by other eminent archaeologists … None of them had disappointed. He knew they were the right people to crack the code of the ‘Cradle of the Gods’ and discover the truth about the function of this ancient slab of almost mystical technology that sat, four-square in the middle of the Gethrian desert.

It might take years, Hogoosta reflected. He knew that. It might take a lifetime. Maybe longer. Maybe others that followed him would have to pick up his work and carry on with it. In that case, he hoped that
one day the secrets of the Cradle of the Gods would be uncovered and entrusted to those who best knew how to deal with and honour them. And that was enough for Hogoosta. He was a truly patient creature.

The only part of all this that troubled him was the fact that he feared that the power contained within the Cradle would present a terrible danger to the galaxy. He had explored the cosmos all his long, long life, seeking out the secrets of ancient civilisations and technologies, and he had developed a feel for dormant and awesome power. On a couple of occasions, this had led him to keep his findings secret, for fear of them being exploited by conquest-hungry, unprincipled minds. And he had this fear now.

When he had engaged Alyst and Terrin Blakely, via inter-space communications, to help him with certain physics-related problems vital to the work on Gethria, he had been mightily impressed by their work and was convinced that they were on the verge of unlocking the secrets of the past. Then it occurred to him that the work they had done, transmitted as it was across open space, could so easily fall into the wrong hands. He had immediately told Alyst and Terrin to cease their communication, destroy all physical record of their conclusions and come straight to Gethria to continue their work with him in person. And beware of anyone trying to get the information from them.

That had been some time ago, and now the lack of communication from his friends Alyst and Terrin Blakely was worrying him. They should have arrived on Gethria already. But he dared not investigate, for
fear of drawing attention to them and the secrets they carried in their heads.

As to the nature of the real purpose of the Cradle of the Gods. Every day for the past forty-seven years, Hogoosta had pondered that conundrum. And as every year passed, he became more and more certain that the complex, planetary inscriptions on the walls of its inner chambers and the often reported supernatural episodes experienced there were a signal that truly devastating powers were housed within the Cradle.

Hogoosta was not a believer in the supernatural, but he was experienced enough in the field of interplanetary archaeology to know that the unexplained effects of long-dead technologies could sometimes feel like visitations from beyond the grave. He himself had felt it, while alone in the Cradle’s inner chambers. That feeling of someone or something else being there with him, when he was certain the chamber was empty. There had been times when the air had felt so thick with the presence of ‘something’ that he had found himself to be genuinely fearful. He did not speak publicly of these experiences, but he bore them in mind and was convinced that what he was experiencing was the stirring of some unimaginably powerful technology from galactic prehistory. He was determined that one day, if at all possible, he would know its secret. And then, he thought, then he would decide if the modern civilisations of the galaxy were ready to learn about it.