Shada Read online

  Part Three

  Out of Sight, Out of Mind

  Chapter 25

  SUDDENLY THE DOCTOR heard the greatest sound in the universe, more delightful than the dawn chorus, more lovely than the laughter of children, more sweet than a mountain stream. It was the wheezing, groaning sound of the relative dimensional stabiliser of a Type 40 TARDIS in materialisation mode.

  The sphere buzzed in confusion, detached itself and dipped back, distracted from its task momentarily by this intrusion. The Doctor took his one opportunity. He leapt to his feet and dived for the still-forming doors of the police box as it solidified up from transparency at the mouth of the alley.

  Romana slammed the big lever on the control console as the Doctor burst through the doors. He was red with exertion and collapsed breathlessly on the floor.

  ‘Mistress!’ called K-9, alerting Romana to the scanner screen.

  On the screen, Romana saw a small grey sphere buzzing angrily through the air outside. Every so often it launched itself against the TARDIS doors like a confused wasp trying to pass through a window. A grating vibration echoed around the control room each time it made contact, setting her teeth on edge.

  ‘Can it get in?’ she asked K-9.

  ‘Insufficient data, Mistress,’ said K-9. ‘Suggest immediate dematerialisation.’

  ‘Do it, K-9!’ Romana ordered.

  K-9 trundled forward, probe extended, and set the dematerialisation sequence in operation automatically. A moment later the central column was rising and falling as the TARDIS vanished from the alley.

  Romana knelt down to check on the Doctor. He blew out his cheeks, coughed, and patted her on the arm. ‘Romana,’ he finally managed to gasp, ‘thank you, thank you very much, thank you so much, thank you…’ Then he shouted, ‘You took your time, K-9!’

  K-9’s eye-screen flashed huffily.

  ‘It was K-9 who traced you,’ said Romana. ‘I heard those voices again and he traced their location. Say thank you.’

  The Doctor got to his feet and adjusted the loops of his scarf. ‘I said thank you.’

  ‘Say “Thank you, K-9”,’ prompted Romana.

  ‘Thank you, K-9,’ said the Doctor. ‘So – that great big silver bauble. It’s the source of those voices.’

  ‘Affirmative, Master,’ said K-9.

  ‘What is it then, tell me that?’

  ‘Unidentified, Master,’ said K-9. ‘Origin and composition of sphere unknown. Primary purpose of sphere seems to be psycho-active extraction.’

  The Doctor brushed a hand over his forehead. ‘I could have told you that,’ he said. ‘I could feel it plucking at my mind.’

  Romana swallowed. She had to tell the Doctor the bad news. ‘The sphere attacked the Professor,’ she said falteringly.

  ‘The Professor!’ exclaimed the Doctor. ‘Yes, I thought I heard him, mixed up with all those voices. How is he?’

  Romana found she couldn’t reply.

  The Doctor’s face fell. ‘How is he?’ he repeated levelly.

  It was K-9 who answered. ‘The Professor’s life is terminated, Master.’

  Romana would have given anything not to see the look that then passed across the Doctor’s face. For a second his composure – the composure that had remained solid against Davros and the Black Guardian – vanished completely and he just looked tired and old and sad.

  ‘The Professor is dead?’ he muttered.

  Romana nodded. ‘We think that sphere thing stole his mind.’

  ‘You think?’ The Doctor’s eyes flashed angrily. ‘You weren’t there? You were meant to be looking after him, I left some pretty specific instructions!’

  ‘I was looking after him,’ said Romana weakly. ‘I just came back in here for a second.’

  ‘Leaving him alone,’ said the Doctor. ‘Why? Why did you leave him alone?’

  Romana swallowed. There was no way of avoiding the truth and her culpability in the death of the Doctor’s old friend. ‘I just came back in here for some milk.’

  ‘For some milk,’ the Doctor repeated evenly. Romana got the impression he was trying not to look disappointed in her, for her sake, knowing that she couldn’t bear it after all they had been through together.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘I see,’ said the Doctor coolly.

  ‘Well, otherwise he was going out to get some himself,’ began Romana.

  The Doctor waved a hand. ‘You needn’t explain,’ he said wearily and crossed to the console, where he began to adjust switches and levers with the casual experience of centuries.

  ‘And the book?’ asked Romana, biting her lip. ‘Have you got it?’

  The Doctor closed his eyes. ‘I had got it,’ he said, not looking up. ‘But then I dropped it.’

  Romana flushed. He’d let her go through all of that! ‘You dropped it!’

  ‘Yes, I dropped it!’ the Doctor said fiercely. ‘We’ve neither of us exactly covered ourselves in glory today!’

  There was a terrible silence for a few seconds, disturbed only by the ever-present hum of the TARDIS systems and the grinding of the gears in the console’s central column.

  Finally Romana put out a hand to the Doctor’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry.’

  The Doctor flinched from the sincerity of her physical contact. ‘So am I,’ he said, moving to another facet of the console to handle delicate navigational instruments. ‘But we don’t have time for any of that.’ He looked deep into the red heart of the column. ‘We may not have time for anything.’

  Chapter 26

  CHRIS PARSONS WAS in a riot of confusion.

  Seconds after K-9’s pronouncement of the Professor’s death, Romana had suddenly clutched her hands to her temples and said she was hearing a babble of thin, inhuman voices. K-9 had replied that he could sense something too – ‘telepathic activity peaking at 8.4 on the Van Zyl Scale’. Chris could hear nothing at all.

  Then K-9 and Romana had bundled themselves into the TARDIS police box, Romana shouting a parting order to Chris to guard the Professor’s body. A moment later the big blue light on top of the police box had started to flash, there was a horrific wheezing and groaning noise like an elephant in the throes of childbirth, and the police box had faded away, leaving a square indentation in the carpet.

  Chris decided not to be surprised about that. The interior of the box was obviously a vehicle of some kind, so what could be more natural than it should vanish into thin air?

  He found it much more disturbing to be left alone in a darkened room with a corpse. He’d never seen a dead body before, not unless you counted Bony Emm or the various skeletons and skulls that friends from the medical faculty insisted on littering their rooms with. And Chronotis had not gone gently into that good night. His features remained horribly pained and contorted, picked out in the last glow of the day.

  Chris got up and switched on a table-lamp, but this only made it worse. The glassy dead eyes of the Professor were staring at him as if to say It’s all your fault. Chris took off his jacket and covered the Professor’s body.

  Tentatively he stretched out a hand to close the Professor’s eyelids, like they did to dead people in movies.

  He felt a tingle of something like electricity but which clearly wasn’t electricity and leapt back in shock, congratulating himself as he leapt on still being able to feel shock after the last few hours.

  An aura formed by particles of golden light began to dance around Professor Chronotis’s body.

  ‘No, please, don’t do this,’ urged Chris to nobody in particular, remembering Romana’s last urgent instruction. ‘How can I guard you against this? I’m just from Earth. Please stop it, please stop all this glowing.’

  The golden aura grew brighter, the tiny particles whizzing faster and faster around the Professor’s supine form. Chris suddenly realised he could see what remained of the threadbare carpet’s pattern through the parchment-thin skin of the Professor’s face. Seconds later the glow had faded to leave only the carpet, Ch
ris’s jacket and a pile of atlases. The Professor had vanished completely.

  ‘Oh great,’ said Chris.

  He had a sudden compulsion to clear off out of this place and put this whole thing behind him. It was none of his business. Then he reminded himself of the incredible opportunity he had stumbled across. He, Chris Parsons, had made first contact between the human race and alien beings. First knowing contact, anyway; plenty of people must have been baffled or irritated by old Chronotis over the years without suspecting he was actually from the planet Zoot or wherever.

  Chris shook his head. He wished Clare was here.

  Clare! She was still back at the lab, possibly with this Doctor person who had gone to fetch the book. He looked around for a telephone and then remembered the Professor didn’t have one. There was a call box just outside the college gates, he could use that maybe –

  Suddenly the elephantine groaning started again and Chris blinked as a powerful blue light began to flash illogically in mid-air. Seconds later, the police box shell of the TARDIS had faded up from transparency, solid and four-square in exactly the same spot it had stood in before.

  Chris gulped and prepared himself to explain his failure regarding the Professor to the icy stare of Romana.

  Instead an extraordinary figure in a long coat and trailing multicoloured scarf vaulted from the box and came to a screeching halt at the sight of Chris, eyes bulging. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded angrily.

  ‘Chris Parsons, Bristol Grammar School and Johns,’ Chris responded automatically, cursing himself for sounding such a fool.

  ‘Never heard of you,’ said the stranger, and then continued in exactly the same tone, ‘You’re the one causing all the trouble!’

  Chris wasn’t having this. ‘I haven’t done anything!’ He peered at the stranger more closely. ‘It’s you!’ he said.

  The stranger’s huge blue eyes blinked. ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘You nearly knocked me off my bike,’ spluttered Chris, ‘along Pepys Street. I ting-ed at you.’

  ‘You what at me?’ asked the stranger. Behind him, Romana and K-9 emerged from the TARDIS.

  ‘I ting-ed at you when I was coming back here,’ said Chris. His face fell. ‘Oh. Are you the Doctor?’

  The stranger nodded.

  Chris smiled. ‘Oh good. So you were going to get the book, no wonder you were in such a hurry.’ A terrifying thought jabbed at him. ‘Is Clare all right?’

  ‘All right? Clare’s lovely,’ said the Doctor.

  Chris nodded. ‘Did she give you the book, then? Where is it?’

  Romana looked around the room. ‘Where’s the Professor?’

  Chris swallowed. ‘Well, I just, I just, I just…’

  ‘You just what?’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Well, I just don’t know,’ spluttered Chris at last. ‘There was a golden glowing sort-of thing and he just disappeared into thin air. You know, like people don’t do.’

  The Doctor exchanged a glance with Romana. ‘Where was the Professor?’ he asked.

  Romana pointed. ‘Right there.’

  The Doctor knelt down and examined the empty area of carpet, running his long fingers over it and then rubbing them together. ‘Residual traces of artron energy,’ he told Romana.

  Romana looked down guiltily. ‘He must have been on his very last regeneration.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Chris asked feebly.

  Romana sighed. ‘We don’t have time to explain everything to you—’ she began.

  But the Doctor stood up and put a friendly arm around Chris’s shoulder. ‘There are people out there,’ he said, waving his other arm to indicate the entire universe, ‘who would tear this planet apart for the body of a Time Lord. The Professor’s regeneration cycle was completed, so his last act must have been to will his own corporeal destruction to avoid any nastiness of that kind.’

  ‘What’s a Time Lord?’ asked Chris.

  ‘Doctor, we really don’t have time,’ said Romana.

  ‘I’m a Time Lord, so’s Romana, so was the Professor,’ explained the Doctor.

  ‘I am not a Time Lord,’ said K-9 perfunctorily.

  ‘That makes two of us,’ said Chris.

  ‘The Time Lords of the planet Gallifrey are awesomely powerful, even if we say so ourselves,’ the Doctor told Chris grandly. ‘And the ancient Artefacts of Gallifrey, like that book you so annoyingly borrowed from the Professor, and which I even more annoyingly dropped, are even more awesomely powerful—’

  Romana interrupted. ‘Doctor!’

  The Doctor caught her eye, coughed, and removed his arm from Chris’s shoulder. ‘What? Oh yes.’

  ‘Whoever stole the Professor’s mind tried to do the same thing to you,’ said Romana.

  ‘Yes, I met him,’ said the Doctor. ‘Calls himself Skagra.’

  ‘Skagra!’ exclaimed Chris and Romana at the same time.

  ‘You know the name?’ the Doctor asked Romana, then wheeled on Chris in astonishment and said, ‘You know the name, Bristol?’

  Chris nodded. At last he could be of some help. ‘Just before the Professor died, he said three things. “Beware the sphere”—’

  ‘Now he tells me,’ said the Doctor a little sadly, looking down at the carpet.

  ‘“Beware Skagra”,’ Chris continued.

  ‘I shall, I shall,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘And “beware Shada”.’ Chris waited for a reaction from the Doctor.

  ‘Shada?’ The Doctor shrugged.

  Romana shrugged too. ‘Means nothing to me.’

  The Doctor turned to Chris. ‘Mean anything to you?’

  Chris rather liked the way the Doctor was including him in things. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Shada not in my memory bank, Master,’ piped up K-9, obviously irritated at not having been consulted.

  ‘Yes, thank you, K-9, I was about to ask,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘How about Skagra, K-9?’ asked Romana.

  ‘No information,’ said K-9. ‘Epistemological analysis of the name Skagra suggests sixteen thousand, four hundred and eleven possible planets of origin. I shall adumbrate them in alphabetical order—’

  ‘Ssh, ssh,’ said the Doctor. K-9 fell silent.

  Chris smiled at the thought of so many inhabited worlds, so much wonder and potential in the wide glorious universe.

  ‘Why are you pulling that face?’ asked Romana. ‘I can’t see anything to smile about.’

  Chris pulled himself together. ‘Sorry. You know, like I said, this is all marvellous.’

  ‘It’s very far from marvellous,’ said the Doctor. ‘Skagra, whoever he is, has killed a Time Lord, who was a very good friend of mine.’

  ‘And now he’s got the book,’ Chris pointed out helpfully.

  ‘And now he’s got the book,’ said the Doctor, closing his eyes as if in pain. To Chris it was as if a light had gone out in the room.

  There was a sombre silence.

  Finally Romana stood forward. ‘We have no choice, have we?’ she asked the Doctor.

  The Doctor suddenly opened his eyes. ‘None.’

  Romana made to enter the TARDIS. ‘I’ll send the signal.’

  The Doctor raised a hand. ‘Wait, wait!’

  Romana halted in the door.

  ‘Not that way,’ said the Doctor. ‘Skagra might be able to intercept any message sent through the telepathic circuits.’

  He sat down in the big armchair and riffled in his pockets. He tossed out an orange, a catapult, a ball of string, a collection of odd-looking loose change and a cassette tape. Chris theorised that the pockets worked on the same bigger-on-the-inside principle as the TARDIS and congratulated himself on not saying ‘Wow!’ or ‘How did you do that?’ or even asking how a circuit could possibly ever, ever be telepathic.

  Finally, the Doctor clicked his fingers as if remembering something, and reached inside his coat, into the breast pocket. He took out six white squares about five-by-five inches and shuffled them like a deck
of cards. He set them down on the table before him. Then he put his fingers to his temples and stared at the table, wearing a deep frown of concentration.

  Chris’s eyes widened in awe as first one, then all six of the squares danced into life, arranging themselves neatly into a white cube. There was a clear chiming sound and a bright white glow shone suddenly from within.

  ‘Wow,’ said Chris. ‘How did you do that?’

  K-9 trundled forward, looking a little anxious thought Chris. ‘The Doctor Master is sending a thought message to Gallifrey,’ he whispered. ‘He is requesting their assistance in apprehending Skagra.’

  ‘Oh yes, I see, and Gallifrey is the planet of the Time Lords,’ said Chris, anxious to keep up.

  K-9 raised his voice. ‘Master. This unit strongly advises against this course of action—’

  ‘Shut up, K-9!’ shouted the Doctor. ‘When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it!’

  ‘Entreat, Master!’ bleated K-9. ‘My prognostication for this course of action is highly inimical—’

  ‘Ssh, K-9,’ said Romana, a lot more gently than the Doctor. She patted him on the head. ‘We know how dangerous this is. That’s why we’ve got to do it.’

  ‘Negative, Mistress,’ wailed K-9, sounding more and more frustrated. ‘This unit strongly insists that you consider—’

  The Doctor cut him off. ‘Silence!’

  K-9 flashed his eye-screen resentfully and trundled back a fraction.

  The Doctor picked up the box and looked to Romana. ‘I’m sorry it’s ended this way,’ he said.

  ‘Like I said,’ sighed Romana. ‘We’ve no choice. We can’t handle this on our own.’

  The Doctor nodded, grinned suddenly and then threw the box into the air overarm as if he was bowling a cricket ball.

  The box hovered in mid-air, twisting and turning, and then the glow from within brightened until Chris had to shield his eyes. Slowly the box began to vanish into thin air, a thing that Chris was now getting used to other things doing.

  Suddenly K-9 shot forward. There was a low whirring noise and a stubby black rod extended from his muzzle. A moment later a bright red laser beam shot up from it and struck the box.