Shada Read online

  Chapter 33

  CHRIS COMPLETED HIS circuit of the tiny white room. ‘So there are no doors,’ he began.

  ‘Correct,’ said Romana, who had drawn up her feet and was sat next to K-9, her chin propped in her hands.

  ‘So,’ said Chris, ‘we must have been transported here, wherever here is, by some form of matter transference.’

  ‘Very clever,’ said Romana, staring straight ahead.

  ‘Commendable deduction, young master,’ said K-9, and Chris could have sworn they exchanged a glance that was not entirely favourable to him.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Chris, feeling confident enough to throw a little sarcasm back their way. ‘I suppose you two do this sort of thing all the time.’

  Romana sighed. ‘Yes, actually.’

  There was a silence. Chris was never loath to take the opportunity to fill a silence. ‘Do you know, I was meant to be delivering a paper to the Physics Society next week.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ asked Romana.

  Chris nodded. ‘Finally disproving the possibility of teleportation.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, I can always deliver it the week after. Means a complete rewrite, though.’

  He sat down next to Romana, crossing his legs. ‘You’re very calm,’ he said. ‘And that makes me calm. Thank you.’

  Romana smiled. ‘Actually, Chris, I’m desperately worried.’ She turned to K-9. ‘K-9, do another scan. Can’t you pick up any trace of the Doctor?’

  K-9’s ears rotated. ‘Negative, Mistress. Every signal is shielded. Suggest that this is a primitive zero environment, isolated from all external sources.’

  ‘That’s one of the things that has me desperately worried,’ said Romana. ‘Skagra’s technology, it’s frighteningly similar to our own.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Chris, ‘similar to yours and the Doctor’s in particular, or to the Time Lords in general?’

  ‘Both, in a way,’ said Romana. ‘The shielding around this Ship. The invisibility screen. Now a zero environment. And how did he know to find the book here in Cambridge? The Professor was surely the only person in the universe who even knew it had been stolen from Gallifrey.’ She dug her chin harder into her hands. ‘What does he want from the book anyway? And who or what is Shada?’

  ‘Could Skagra be a Time Lord?’ asked Chris. ‘A bad one? There must be some bad ones.’

  ‘Let’s hope the Doctor’s finding that all out now,’ said Romana.

  ‘You’ve a lot of faith in him,’ said Chris.

  ‘He’s saved your planet many, many times. And not just yours. He’s the most wonderful man in the universe,’ said Romana, quickly qualifying her remark. ‘If you tell him I said that, I’ll kill you. Same goes for you, K-9.’

  Chris’s mind was buzzing with questions. If they were stuck here for a bit, it was time to ask a few more questions. And it might distract Romana from her worries. ‘I always thought,’ said Chris, ‘that aliens, if they existed, would be gas globules or big bat creatures or something, or something we might not even recognise as life. No offence.’

  ‘There are plenty of creatures like that in the universe,’ said Romana.

  ‘But you and the Doctor and the Professor,’ went on Chris, ‘you look just like us, really. You even drink tea and ride bikes. You’d think that would be disappointing. But as a scientist, I think it’s actually a good thing, it opens up so many areas of thought and theory as to the parallel evolution of the humanoid form.’

  Romana seemed to have the glazed fascinated expression falling onto her face now, noted Chris. She turned her attention to K-9, pressing a sequence of some of the flashing buttons on his top side. ‘I suppose we could try altering K-9’s sensors to overlap rather than influx.’

  Chris abandoned his questioning and decided to go for a decisive course of action. He sprung up and examined the inward-curving walls of the white room. They felt neither warm nor cold. In fact, though he could most definitely touch them, they felt like nothing at all. ‘This wall. It’s made of a very curious substance.’

  ‘Zero technology again,’ said Romana casually. ‘Give me a year, I’ll explain it to you.’ She finished her reprogramming of K-9. ‘Try again, K-9. Overlap scan this time, there’s just a chance it could penetrate the null interfaces of this place.’

  Chris tapped the wall. ‘Even looking at these walls is hard. It’s as if there’s nothing there at all, though I can see there is.’

  ‘Your senses can’t operate properly in a zero environment,’ said Romana. ‘Don’t try to understand.’

  K-9’s ears whirred around again. ‘Overlap scan commenced.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chris, ‘so the senses of my lot, Earthlings I suppose you’d call us –’

  ‘Among other things,’ said Romana, bending over K9 anxiously.

  ‘– Earthling senses can’t fully comprehend this wall,’ went on Chris.

  ‘Negative scan, Mistress,’ said K-9.

  Romana sighed and ran her hands through her hair in frustration.

  There was another awkward silence.

  ‘I suppose the thing about this wall—’ began Chris.

  Romana banged her fist on K-9’s side in frustration. ‘Oh, blast the wall!’ she shouted.

  ‘Affirmative, Mistress,’ said K-9 brightly. A bolt of bright red laser-light shot from his snout with an ear-splitting zap.

  ‘Duck!’ shouted Romana. She grabbed Chris roughly and flung him to the floor.

  The red laser bolt ricocheted wildly around their tiny prison, lancing inches from them. It had no effect on the walls whatever, but Chris was not so hopeful about their chances if it hit them.

  Suddenly, Romana tore off her hat and threw it with expert timing up into the air, directly into the path of the laser bolt. There was a small explosion and the hat was reduced to a cloud of ash that rained down on them.

  Another silence followed.

  ‘Apologies, Mistress,’ said K-9 finally. His head and tail drooped. ‘Action was precipitate.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Romana, letting go of a big sigh and getting to her feet, dusting the ash from the pristine white lace of her dress. ‘It was a good try, K-9.’

  Chris got up and found he was grinning. ‘One thing you’ve never solved out there in space, then,’ he said. ‘Computers, however advanced, just do whatever you tell them to. Whatever it is, however stupid, they just do it. On Earth we call it the sophisticated idiot problem.’

  K-9 spun to face him. ‘In this unit’s memory bank regarding Earthling behaviour, instances of idiocy outnumber instances of sophistication by a ratio of 77 to 1.’

  Before Chris could take him up on that, and there was certainly no chance of taking the dispute outside, K-9’s sensors whirred again. ‘Mistress! I am picking up faint telepathic signals.’

  Chris and Romana knelt at his side.

  ‘Must be the sphere again,’ theorised Romana. ‘To be detected in here, it must be active again. And enormously powerful.’

  ‘Can you let us hear it?’ asked Chris.

  ‘Affirmative, young master. I have calibrated the signal so that your unsophisticated Earthling senses can hear it.’

  A new noise issued from K-9.

  To Chris’s ears at first it sounded like a lot of static and interference, like Radio Moscow on long wave during a blizzard. But instead of announcements on tractor production and the progress of the glorious revolution, Chris could just make out the thin distorted babble of inhuman voices, all speaking together. The words were indistinguishable. The effect was haunting, like the lamenting of lost souls. He shivered.

  ‘Yes, that’s the sphere, and it’s active,’ said Romana. ‘But it sounds different this time.’

  ‘Different how?’ whispered Chris.

  ‘Ssh,’ she ordered. Her face was creased in concentration as the ghostly voices cried out.

  For a second, Chris thought he recognised one of the voices. Deep, dark and distinctive tones, so far away, so insubstantial.

  Romana gasped. ‘K
-9, did you hear that?’

  ‘A new voice has been added, Mistress,’ said K-9.

  ‘Oh please, no,’ said Romana, her eyes suddenly wide and wet.

  K9’s head drooped. ‘It is the voice of the Doctor.’

  Romana’s face was a mask of horror. She reached out automatically to grab Chris’s hand, and he saw the light go out of her eyes.

  Chapter 34

  CLARE SAT IN an armchair in Professor Chronotis’s study and found that she was literally twiddling her thumbs.

  Hang on. Hang on.

  It was at least twenty minutes since that little porter person had gone off to ‘ring around’ and find his perfectly reasonable explanation. Incredibly, thought Clare, yet another man had told her to stop worrying her little head and go and wait for him to sort everything out. And yet again she had obeyed him. At least she fancied Chris, and had been overwhelmed by the Doctor’s force of personality. The little porter was just anybody, so she had even less excuse this time.

  She leapt to her feet and glared around the room, searching for any clue to what had befallen Chris, the Doctor and the Professor and, come to that, this girl the porter called Ramona or something. If he had been any of the other men in the faculty, she might have suspected Chris was off gallivanting somewhere with this mysterious Ramona character, but in his case that would be ridiculous.

  Determined to initiate some positive action of her own, Clare started a methodical search of the Professor’s rooms. She went into the little kitchenette and ran the taps, and though the pipes groaned and wheezed it was nothing like the groaning and wheezing she’d heard before. She caught her reflection in the glass door of a cupboard and winced. Her hair was all over the place, and she looked tired and crumpled in yesterday’s clothes and make-up.

  She went back into the study and began opening drawers, peering under tables, and rifling through sideboards. There was nothing but mess and confusion. Heaps of paper, tattered files and random odd objects like an orange, a catapult and a loose cassette tape marked Bonnie Tyler’s Greatest Hits. Clare huffed. Bonnie Tyler had hardly had enough hits to warrant such a collection. I mean, she thought, apart from ‘Lost In France’ and ‘It’s A Heartache’, what had the woman done? She looked closer at the cassette. There were more song titles printed on it, songs she didn’t recognise. She squinted at the little smudged white letters of the copyright information. She blinked and squinted again.

  This compilation © 1986.

  Clare was at a loss. Why would anybody bother to make such a thing, have it done so professionally, then just leave it lying around? Clare tapped the cassette with her fingers, intrigued.

  The simplest explanation? It was real. It did come from 1986. Somebody from the future, somebody who could travel in time, had brought it back with them.

  No, no, that was the stupidest explanation. If somebody had travelled back in time from 1986 wouldn’t they have brought something more impressive from the future? A new kind of digital watch or a videophone? Not Bonnie Tyler’s Greatest Hits.

  She didn’t know what to think any more.

  So she put the cassette down, and grabbed Chris’s jacket. She could smell the cheap washing powder of the St John’s communal launderette.

  ‘Oh, where are you, Parsons?’ she said aloud.

  And then a very curious thing happened. Her eyes were drawn to a cupboard in a far corner that she hadn’t noticed before. It wasn’t the normal way your eyes are drawn to something, thought Clare. It was as if some exterior impulse had entered her head and made her look in that direction, literally turning her eyeballs to the cupboard.

  She folded Chris’s jacket over the back of a chair and went to the cupboard. It was a big, old wooden-panelled thing, quite an antique. It was also firmly locked. Which was odd because nothing else had been, even the Professor’s front door.

  She looked around the room. Presumably there must be a key somewhere in all this mess.

  Suddenly, a thin shaft of sunlight shone through the small gap in the closed curtains of one of the windows. It seemed to be coming in at a very peculiar angle. It illuminated a particular section of the cluttered mantelpiece like a spotlight.

  Clare stared, blinked – although all this blinking didn’t seem to be doing her any good – and saw, in the very spot the light was shining, between a stopped clock under a dome and a bust of Dryden, a small brass key. The sunlight made the key glint and sparkle in a ridiculously magical way, as if it had been lit by a Hollywood movie’s production team.

  ‘No, ridiculous,’ Clare said, out loud again.

  Behind her there was a crash. She jumped and spun around. One of the teetering piles of books had chosen this particular moment to overbalance.

  Clare gawped at the titles of the books that had collapsed, fanned out on the rug like a window display.

  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Secret Garden. The Phoenix and the Carpet. The Box of Delights. And finally, inevitably, what looked very much like it could be a first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  Clare was briefly transported back to a childhood world of wonder, adventure and excitement where anything could happen. Secret passages, hidden treasures, mysterious gateways, epic journeys through imaginary lands.

  It was as if the room was encouraging her into a world of magic and –

  Rubbish. She was an adult, she was a scientist, there was a rational explanation for this, and she was going to find it.

  She grabbed the key, stormed to the cupboard and opened it, almost daring it to reveal an enchanted kingdom.

  Inside were a pair of cricket pads, some ancient spiked running shoes, a punter’s paddle and an old, folding wooden toolbox. Clare angrily flung them aside. There was nothing at the back of the cupboard but the back of the cupboard. So she kicked it.

  With a hydraulic whirr the back of the cupboard swung around like a revolving bookcase in a corny horror film. It revealed a triangular brass panel at waist height which swiftly extended itself forward with a grind of gears.

  It took Clare a moment to comprehend what she was seeing. The brass panel was old and weathered, but it was covered with levers, switches and dials whose function she could only guess at, many of them marked with curious circular designs similar to the scrollwork on the front of that strange book. There was a row of little glass bulbs at the top of the panel, unlit.

  Whatever this thing controlled, it was obviously inert, thought Clare. So there’d be no harm in touching it.

  She reached out and pressed a button at random. It switched in with a satisfying, springy ker-clunk, like a channel button on a television set.

  All the little bulbs lit up.

  Clare had just one second to raise an eyebrow. The next second, the faint humming noise suddenly rose in volume, loud and insistent. The curtains at every window swished shut. The lights in the room flared and dimmed, flared and dimmed. There was a tremendous creaking and cracking like splintering wood. The vestibule door slammed shut. She heard that wheezing, groaning noise again, but this time it was even more pained and protesting.

  And then she felt the ground move under her feet.

  She was thrown violently backwards on to the floor. A bookcase toppled towards her.

  Clare had a sudden vision of her gran standing at her bedroom door in their old flat. ‘Ruddy books!’ she was saying. ‘Books won’t take you anywhere, young lady.’

  Then Clare blacked out.

  Wilkin knocked on the door of Room P-14. ‘Miss?’ he called. ‘Are you in there, miss? I’m afraid I haven’t been able to locate Professor Chronotis. Miss?’

  The plumbing was kicking up a hell of a row again. She probably couldn’t hear him over that din. Gently, he pulled open the door.

  And staggered back.

  The little vestibule of Room P-14, with its coat hooks and welcome mat was just where it should have been. But beyond it there was a howling blue vortex. A whirling, distorted tunnel of impossible beauty and complexity
extending for ever.

  Wilkin slammed the door shut.

  He straightened his tie, adjusted his hat, and, deciding to ignore the vortex completely, he knocked once more and opened the door again. He would give the room a chance to sort itself out and behave like a respectable part of St Cedd’s college.

  This time, beyond the vestibule, there was no vortex. Just a view onto the backs of the college and a large, flattened area of mud, surrounded by flowerbeds, to mark where Room P-14 should have been, but was decidedly not.

  Wilkin did not believe in third chances. He slammed the door shut, turned on his heel and went to find a policeman.

  Chapter 35

  SKAGRA HELD THE book open in one hand. The sphere rested in the upturned palm of the other.

  Now, at last, he would learn the secret of Shada.

  Skagra entered the Doctor’s mind. A bewildering array of colourful images spewed into his own head. Planet after planet, face after face, monster after monster. The Doctor’s mind was dizzying, undisciplined. It babbled like an excitable child with irrelevant observations and irrational thoughts.

  Skagra drew a deep breath and steadied his own consciousness. He took a look at the body of the Doctor, where it lay slumped in the command chair. At least he had stopped up the mouth of the prattling idiot, where so many others had failed.

  Reinvigorated, Skagra returned his attention to the sphere. This time he searched directly, using the Doctor’s stolen knowledge and faculties, and turned to read the book.

  The symbols remained obstinately what they were. Symbols.

  Angrily, Skagra pushed further, deeper into the Doctor’s mind. He caught glimpses of the man’s training, his long years of study at the Academy on Gallifrey.

  Ranks of students attired in the long black gowns of novices, sat at their desks, ranged in a semicircle before their tutor. The tutor was talking of the Artefacts, of the codes, secret mysteries and legends of the Great Heroes of the Old Time.

  And the Doctor – curse him!, thought Skagra – was staring out of the window into the orange blasted outer wilderness. ‘That would be a lovely spot for a picnic,’ he was thinking.