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  Then the real work of the Universal Mind could begin. Every intelligence, every resource, would be employed to reorder creation in Skagra’s image.

  The place needed tidying up, for a start. So many solar systems were random and irritatingly erratic. He would use his new knowledge to reshape them in neat, square alignments around a precise grid-like system, with the people living their new lives in a precise, grid-like system.

  The Universal Mind would then conquer the threat of entropy. A solution would be found to the supposedly damning sentence passed by the second law of thermodynamics. Then Skagra would ensure there would be no collapse into eternal darkness and decay.

  The universe, and the Universal Mind of Skagra, would endure for eternity. Nothing could stop him now!

  Chapter 66

  DESPITE HER CRASH course in temporal mechanics, Clare was finding it hard to follow the Doctor and Romana’s plan. She could grasp the basics – it was going to involve performing a hazardous manoeuvre in the space-time vortex itself – but the specifics were well beyond her. But anything that could rescue Chris from the clutches of Skagra had to be attempted.

  Perhaps that was why she couldn’t quite follow the plan, mused Clare. The Doctor and Romana were capable of caring for the universe, which was too big a thing for her mind to get around. Her human emotions could only think of poor Chris, and how she was going to grab him and snog the very life out of him the moment he was returned to her. Life really was too short, a fact that the presence of a Time Lord knocking on 800 only served to rub in.

  ‘It’s going to be very tricky, isn’t it?’ said the Doctor, almost flippantly.

  ‘It’s going to be appallingly dangerous,’ said Romana severely.

  The Doctor shrugged. ‘Just a touch.’

  Romana sighed heavily. ‘Doctor, it’ll be terribly, appallingly dangerous for you. In fact, you stand as much chance as—’ She broke off, thinking.

  ‘As much chance as what?’ asked the Doctor.

  Romana gave up. ‘Well, as much chance as anything that stands as little chance as you will out there!’ She gestured vaguely in the general direction of the door.

  The Doctor smiled like a child at his birthday party. ‘Really? Well then, I’ll just have to be very, very brave, won’t I?’

  ‘Doctor!’ cried Romana harshly. Clare was astonished to see there were tears forming in the corners of Romana’s eyes. Perhaps she’d been wrong about the alien capacity to ignore the individual for the good of the many. ‘It isn’t funny!’

  The Doctor knocked Romana lightly on the shoulder with his knuckles. ‘Listen,’ he said agreeably, ‘I can do your part if you can do mine.’

  Romana sniffed, and then smiled. ‘I’ll try.’

  The Doctor tapped the medal on her chest. ‘You’re a genius. Remember?’

  Romana nodded.

  The Doctor turned his attention to Clare. ‘Clare?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor?’ Clare said brightly.

  The Doctor nodded to the control panel. ‘Do we have a fix on my TARDIS?’

  Clare read off the coordinates on the time-path indicator. ‘It’s on our vector. We left Shada first, yes, but they have greater relative speed.’ Clare patched through the indicator display to the main scanner. The image on the screen showed two dots, one representing the Professor’s TARDIS, the other the Doctor’s TARDIS, some little way ahead.

  ‘Right,’ said the Doctor. He waved Romana forward to the panel. He coughed. ‘First we have to catch them up.’

  Romana and Clare reached for the same lever. Their eyes locked. Clare decided she was not going to give way. After all, she had some of the owner’s natural affinity with this craft.

  Romana removed her hand with slightly bad grace.

  Clare threw the lever.

  There was a jarring jolt and the Professor’s room shuddered. The Doctor, Clare and Romana were thrown off their feet.

  Clare clambered up as the room steadied. The scanner screen now displayed an image of the two dots much closer to each other.

  ‘Good work!’ called the Doctor. ‘Now then, phase two. I want you two girls, working together and playing nicely, thank you very much, to extrude the force field out from this TARDIS.’

  Clare gasped. ‘But that’s insane!’ she said. The tampered-with part of her mind flared in alarm at the prospect. ‘I mean – that is appallingly dangerous!’

  Romana slipped past her and started adjusting the force-field controls. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him,’ she said. ‘And that’s only the beginning of his plan.’ She gave Clare a desperate smile. ‘But it’s the only way.’

  A red light started to flash on the console panel where Chris Parsons was stationed. Skagra saw it via the sphere matrix, as he could now see and sense everything that his mind-slaves, as mere extensions of his sentience, experienced.

  ‘Vortex turbulence,’ he said. ‘It is not important.’

  The TARDIS shook slightly.

  The Doctor stood by the exit door of Professor Chronotis’s rooms – or, as Clare supposed she ought to learn to refer to it, Professor Chronotis’s TARDIS. Or Salyavin’s TARDIS, considering the Professor was actually Salyavin. Or the ghost of him. Or, now, the zombie-ghost of… Clare gave up.

  ‘Ready?’ the Doctor called.

  ‘Yes,’ said Clare and Romana at the same time. Their hands hovered over particularly large levers on the console.

  ‘Right,’ said the Doctor, looking considerably less flippant and casual than he had only moments before. ‘Patch the force field through to the external door…’ He paused and grabbed at the lintel of the door. ‘Now!’

  Romana and Clare threw their levers.

  If any creature could have existed in the howling space-time vortex, and had been happening to pass the ‘place’ where the two TARDISes were drawn level, they would have seen a most extraordinary sight.

  A small Georgian ground-floor flat appeared to be sidling up to a 1950s police box.

  Suddenly, the door of the flat began to glow with bright white light. Slowly, the light began to extend towards the police box, forming a shimmering rectangular tunnel that snaked ever closer to the battered blue booth.

  Skagra flinched as sparks showered from the console panel before him, spinning from the synchronic feedback array like a miniature firework. The Doctor’s knowledge of TARDIS operations, relayed through the sphere’s matrix, suggested that this was nothing much to worry about and that this kind of thing happened all the time. Skagra didn’t doubt that.

  The hands of the mind-slaves worked busily over the five other facets of the console. Each of them frowned at the same moment as Skagra.

  ‘What is wrong, my Lord?’ asked the Kraag Commander, the only creature present not privy to Skagra’s every thought.

  ‘An external influence,’ Skagra snapped. He had no need to consult the Time Lord minds within the sphere matrix. He knew it could mean only one thing. ‘There is something else out there, in the space-time vortex.’ He twisted the scanner-screen switch with the hands of Rundgar.

  The shutters parted.

  Skagra let out an involuntary cry of sheer frustration.

  A section of the architecture of St Cedd’s College, Cambridge was bobbing unsteadily alongside them, a bright white glow streaming from it.

  A reverse angle on the same image appeared in the scanner of the pursuing TARDIS. Everything in the Professor’s rooms was rattling and humming like a neurotic tuning fork with the effort the poor old machine was being put to. This included Clare’s teeth. The very air seemed to vibrate and shimmer.

  The Doctor, peering through the keyhole of the door chuckled as the room came to rest with a bump. ‘Ha, got them! Locked tight! Well done Romana, well done Clare, well done me for thinking it up in the first place!’

  ‘We haven’t got to the hard bit yet,’ said Clare.

  Romana frowned as she read off a console display. ‘We might never get to it. The force field’s very unstable.’<
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  Clare stared at the image on the scanner. ‘That’s what we’re chasing? But it’s a police box!’

  ‘And we’re flying about in a bit of university,’ the Doctor grinned. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  Skagra read off a similar console display. ‘The force field is weakening already,’ he told the Kraag Commander. He consulted the mind of K-9. ‘I estimate the field will break in approximately fifty-eight seconds.’

  ‘Romana! Turn off the vortex-shield failsafe around the door!’ called the Doctor urgently, his hand grasping the doorknob.

  Clare stared at that hand, feeling sick to her stomach. Opening the door of a TARDIS onto the vortex was almost suicidally stupid. The time winds would surely burst in and suck them all out into nothingness.

  Romana punched out the failsafe cancel sequence on the console and called, ‘Good luck, Doctor!’

  The Doctor nodded to her, gave Clare a small smile and turned the doorknob. The door swung easily open and the Doctor strode casually out into the space-time vortex, as if he was off for nothing more momentous than a morning stroll.

  For just a second, Clare saw the bright glare of the force field beyond him, extending in a shimmering and frankly wobbly corridor through the screaming whirlpool of the vortex.

  Then the door slammed shut.

  Skagra watched the scanner screen incredulously as the Doctor started to run along the glowing tunnel of light connecting the two TARDISes.

  ‘A futile exercise, Doctor,’ he said. But he never took his eyes from the screen.

  Romana and Clare stared up at the scanner.

  The Doctor was racing for the police box doors of his own hijacked TARDIS as fast as the swaying, undulating force field would allow. Clare gasped as he seemed to stumble, but he found his footing and raced on. The Doctor extended his arm desperately, his hand groping for the solid, blue surface just out of his reach.

  And the force field around him flickered and crackled alarmingly.

  ‘We’ve got to give him more power!’ cried Romana.

  Clare gestured helplessly at the console read-outs. ‘There is no more power!’

  On the screen, the Doctor was being shaken violently as the tenuous protection of the force field began to succumb to the ferocious time winds. But he was almost there, one more second and he would make it –

  Suddenly there was a massive explosion from the brass control panel. Clare and Romana were thrown to the floor, sparks showering around them, heavy books thudding down from the higher shelves of the study.

  Clare lifted her head to the scanner. A dazzling flare of light filled the screen as the force field suddenly snapped out of existence.

  Skagra, and by proxy his mind-slaves, averted their eyes from the scanner as the force field flared.

  When he looked back, there was no sign of the Doctor. The Professor’s TARDIS was spinning wildly away, sent hurtling off by the violent severing of the link.

  The controls of the Doctor’s TARDIS began to respond once more under the ten ministering hands of the mind-slaves.

  Skagra smiled as the TARDIS settled back on to an even keel. The mind-slaves smiled back. K-9 wagged his tail happily.

  This time, Skagra, and by proxy the mind-slaves, thought contentedly, the Doctor was absolutely, definitely dead.

  Chapter 67

  THE DOCTOR LAUGHED and laughed and laughed.

  He lay in a woolly bundle on a reassuring solid surface. Even more reassuringly, the surface was white and it hummed. The Doctor leapt to his feet, tottered a moment, then patted the nearest wall, which was covered in the extraordinarily reassuring circular pattern of his own TARDIS. ‘Thank you, old girl,’ he said. ‘Thank you so very much. Sorry I had to barge in through the back door like that. But have you any idea what it’s like to travel through the space-time vortex?’ He paused a moment and patted the wall again. ‘Well of course you have, haven’t you, you do it all the time. But at least you’re built for it, eh?’

  He didn’t really expect a reply, so he was only mildly disappointed when he didn’t get one.

  ‘Right then,’ he said. ‘Let’s get to work!’

  He looked around and was surprised and delighted to find himself in the TARDIS’s cavernous storeroom, which was located (at least presently) a good ten minutes’ brisk walk from the control room.

  ‘And this is exactly where I wanted to be,’ he grinned, patting the wall a third time. ‘Oh you’re going to get such a treat when this is all over, you cunning old capsule, you.’

  The storeroom contained line after line of tall metal shelves stretching into the dimly lit distance. Every shelf heaved with dusty cardboard boxes, many of them undisturbed for centuries. Every box was jammed full of vital components, spares and handy bits of stuff the Doctor had picked up over the long years of his travels. Between the shelves were a bewildering variety of drawers, cabinets and cases. Everything was labelled precisely. But completely inaccurately.

  The Doctor started rummaging about. He had a plan to follow for once, after all. First off, he would need a neural vectometer…

  He found a neural vectometer almost straight away. In a box marked ‘LIGHT BULBS’.

  ‘Oh good!’ he cried.

  Next up – a synchro-relay. He rummaged about and found a synchro-relay. In a drawer marked ‘NAILS (ASSORTED)’.

  ‘Oh good!’ he cried.

  And, of course, a megapathic-interrupter was essential to the whole plan. He rummaged about and found a megapathic-interrupter. Underneath a string shopping bag full of faulty reacting vibrators, which was jammed in the back of a cabinet labelled ‘ADAPTORS (UK-US, US-EU, EU-MARS)’.

  ‘Oh good!’ he cried.

  The megapathic-interrupter fell to bits in his hand.

  ‘Oh bad!’ he cried.

  Chapter 68

  CLARE WATCHED AS Romana, her coolness and composure seemingly undented by being flung off through space and time, made her final repairs to the navigation panel of the Professor’s TARDIS and reset the coordinates.

  There was a moment’s silence in which Clare and Romana crossed their fingers at exactly the same moment, then a soft hum filled the room and the clock on the mantelpiece juddered back into life, rising and falling smoothly once more.

  ‘There,’ said Romana, inputting the final string of the complex sequence. ‘We’re on our way to Skagra, as planned.’

  Clare bit her lip. Romana seemed so capable and focused. Like a frighteningly competent and unflappable head girl at a particularly old and intimidating grammar school. She was a very reassuring person to have with you in a crisis, thought Clare. Reassuring in a terrifying kind of way. Clare wasn’t sure Romana would want to hear her next question, but it had to be asked.

  Clare took a deep breath. ‘Do you think the Doctor made it?’ She avoided looking at Romana as she said this, instead staring doubtfully through the curtains of the nearest window at the endless distorting maelstrom of the vortex.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Romana. ‘Speaking logically, statistically, and scientifically – not a chance.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘But then again, he’s the Doctor. We have to assume that he did make it, and go ahead according to plan.’ She read off a dial and glanced across at the clock on the mantelpiece, which was still moving smoothly up and down. ‘We arrive at the asteroid in five minutes, relative time.’

  Clare gave Romana a friendly pat on the shoulder. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, you’re a cool one. Without you here, I think I’d have gone to pieces worrying about Chris. And underneath, you must be just as worried about the Doctor.’

  ‘I’m almost always worried about the Doctor,’ Romana smiled.

  Clare gave a small, involuntary sob. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said. ‘I know this doesn’t help, but I’ve loved Chris for so long, but I never actually said it to him. Never did a damn thing.’

  Romana put an arm around Clare’s shoulder. Clare sniffed and looked up at her with a rueful smile. ‘Someone like you, I bet you just m
arched up and grabbed the Doctor straight away, no messing around. And who can blame you, he is an amazing man.’

  Romana’s eyes widened a little and she disentangled herself from Clare, fetching a box of tissues from the coffee table and offering her one.

  ‘I think you might have misunderstood the nature of my relationship with the Doctor.’

  Clare blew her nose. ‘Oh right, sorry. So you aren’t married or whatever you do on Gallifrey?’

  ‘We’re just friends. And one thing I’ve learnt from being the Doctor’s friend, Clare – the universe is full of wonderful things, amazing opportunities. And you have to grab them with both hands. And hope they never end.’

  There was a chime like a vesper bell.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ said Romana.

  Clare straightened up, crumpling the tissue into a tight ball. ‘And we go ahead as planned,’ she said.

  Chapter 69

  SKAGRA STRODE FROM the Doctor’s TARDIS, the Kraag Commander and the mind-slaves following him into the giant observation dome that looked out onto the infinite universe.

  Skagra surveyed the stars with new eyes. Five pairs of new eyes. ‘An infinite concert of the mind,’ he whispered to himself.

  He signalled towards K-9 and the five humanoid mind-slaves. The spheres attached to their heads instantly divided once again. Each small sphere then multiplied into hundreds of tiny, almost invisible spheres, aggregating in one large silvery swarm. Six tiny silver dots split off and flew back to re-attach themselves to the foreheads of the mind-slaves, now virtually invisible.

  Then the swarm broke up, section by section, patches of silver, like glistening fireflies, each of them knowing where they needed to be, each shining cloud moving swiftly through one of the many arched doorways that led from the giant dome.

  Skagra followed their journey using the part of his mind that controlled the sphere matrix. The microbial particles flowed down through the curving rock walls of the asteroid and into specially prepared hatches in the sides of the mighty spaceships ranged along the underbelly of the massive rock. Each of the ships contained a crew of Kraags, each of them burning with the ambition to serve their lord and master, Skagra, to spread the Universal Mind.