‘Come in!’ called a distant, scratchy voice. He recognised it immediately as Chronotis, even though they had met only once before, and very briefly.
So Chris came in, navigated a cluttered little vestibule bulging with hats and coats and boots, and pushed open an oddly sturdy wooden inner door. He found himself in a large, oak-panelled room dotted about with ancient furniture, though for a moment it was hard to make out the panels or the furniture as every available surface, and several that weren’t available at all, was covered with books. Every wall was lined with bookshelves, books jammed in two-deep and other books thrust on top, filling each shelf to bursting. Books covered the sofa, the chairs, the tables. They tottered in ungainly piles on the carpet, some at waist height. Hardbacks, paperbacks, folios, pop-up books, all creased and dog-eared and teacup-stained, some of them with spines folded back at a particular place, many annotated with torn pieces of paper, and none of them seeming to relate to its neighbour in subject, size, age or author. The Very Hungry Caterpillar lay next to a dusty Georgian treatise on phrenology.
Chris boggled. How the heck could anyone get through this amount of books? It would surely take you several lifetimes.
But extreme as this case might be, Chris was used to the eccentricities of the older Cambridge dons. He even tried not to react to the other, really much more peculiar thing that stood on the other side of the room.
It was a police box.
Chris hadn’t seen one in years, and had certainly never expected to see one here. They had been a familiar sight on the street corners of London during his childhood trips to the capital. Like all of its kind this one was tall, blue, battered and wooden, with a light on top and a sign on the door, behind which there was a phone. The really peculiar thing about this one, on top of it just being there at all, was that around its base were the edges of several flattened books, as if it had somehow been dropped into the room from a great height. Chris even looked up at the low rafters of the ceiling to check that this hadn’t in fact happened. And there was no way it could have been squeezed through the front door.
The voice of Professor Chronotis carried through from a door that presumably led to a kitchen.
‘Excuse the muddle. Creative disarray, you know!’
‘Er, right, yes,’ said Chris. He carefully ventured further into the room, skirting the piles of books that looked the most dangerous. How was he going to find what he wanted in this lot?
He waited for the Professor to emerge from his kitchen. He didn’t.
‘Er, Professor Chronotis?’ he called.
‘Tea?’ came the reply.
‘Oh, yes, thanks,’ said Chris automatically, though in fact he wanted to get away from all this strangeness and back to thinking about his own more important issues as soon as possible.
‘Good, because I’ve just put the kettle on,’ said Chronotis as he emerged from the kitchen and into the room, navigating the dangers unthinkingly.
After their one brief meeting a couple of weeks ago, Chris had mentally filed the Professor away as just another Cambridge eccentric, indulged and isolated by decades of academia. He had forgotten how memorable a person Chronotis was. And that was another irritating strangeness, Chris thought, because you can’t forget memorable people. Chris decided he must have been really, incredibly wrapped up in himself to forget Chronotis.
He was a little man, somewhere in his eighties, in a dishevelled tweed suit and tie, with a heavily lined face, a shock of white hair, scruffy beard and half-moon spectacles over which peered kindly, penetrating black eyes.
Kindly and penetrating, thought Chris. You can’t have eyes that are kindly and penetrating.
‘Er, Professor Chronotis,’ he said, determined to get things back to normal, ‘I don’t know if you remember, we met at a faculty party a couple of weeks ago.’ He extended his hand. ‘Chris Parsons.’
‘Oh yes, yes!’ said the Professor, pumping his hand enthusiastically, though it was abundantly clear that he didn’t remember at all. He squinted up at Chris a little suspiciously. ‘Enjoy these faculty shindigs, do you?’
Chris shrugged. ‘Well, you know. I don’t think you’re actually supposed to enjoy them—’
‘A lot of boring old dons, talking away at each other,’ huffed the Professor.
‘Yes, I suppose you could—’
‘Never listen to a word anybody else says!’
‘Yes, well, that night you said that—’
‘Talk talk talk, never listen!’
‘No, indeed,’ said Chris. ‘Well…’
‘Well what?’ said the Professor, staring at him with a look that was more penetrating than kindly.
Chris decided to humour him. ‘I do hope I’m not taking up any of your valuable time.’
‘Time?’ the Professor laughed. ‘Time! Don’t talk to me about time. No no no. When you get to my age, you’ll find that time doesn’t really matter very much at all.’ He looked Chris up and down and added, a little sadly, ‘Not that I expect you will get to my age.’
Chris wasn’t at all sure how to take that remark. ‘Oh really?’
‘Yes,’ said the Professor, looking into the distance. ‘I remember saying to the last Master of College but one, young Professor Frencham—’ He stopped himself. ‘Though hang on a minute, was it the last Master of College but two? It may even have been three…’
Chris frowned. The term of a Master of College seemed to last on average about fifty years. ‘Three?’
‘Yes, nice young chap,’ said the Professor. ‘Died rather tragically at the age of ninety. What a waste.’
‘Ninety?’ queried Chris.
Chronotis nodded. ‘Run over by a coach and pair.’
‘What was it you said to him?’ asked Chris.
Chronotis blinked. ‘How am I supposed to know? It was a very long time ago!’
Chris decided to put this aside. He wanted to get out of this strange humming room, far away from all its peculiarities and the peculiarities of its owner. ‘Right, yeah. Professor, when we met you were kind enough to say that if I dropped round you would lend me some of your books on carbon dating.’
‘Oh yes, happy to,’ nodded the Professor.
Suddenly a high-pitched whistle emanated from the kitchen. The Professor jumped and clutched at his heart, then clutched at the other side of his chest. ‘Ah,’ he said, relaxing, ‘that’ll be the kettle.’ He bustled round the piles of books towards the kitchen, calling back to Chris, ‘You’ll find the books you want at the far right of the big bookcase. Third shelf down.’
Chris sidled past the police box, trying not to think about it too much, and scanned the shelf the Professor had indicated. He pulled out a book, a slim leather-bound volume with an ornate scroll design, sort of Celtic but not really, picked out in gold on the front. He flicked it open and saw row after row of symbols, hieroglyphs or mathematical formulae.
And suddenly, for no reason that he could fathom, Chris was overwhelmed by a sensory rush of memory. He was seven years old, sat on his grandfather’s lap in the back garden at Congresbury, listening to cricket on the radio, the voice of Trevor Bailey, bees buzzing in the garden, the tock of willow on leather, jam sandwiches and orange squash. So long ago…
The Professor’s voice, echoing from the kitchen, called him abruptly back to the present. ‘Or is it the second shelf down? Yes, second, I think. Anyhow, take whatever you like.’
Chris examined the second shelf and saw the titles Carbon Dating at the Molecular Level by S.J. Lefee and Disintegrations of Carbon 14 by Libby. Yes, these were the ones. This was the stuff that would impress Clare, give him that excuse for one more conversation.
‘Milk?’ called Chronotis from the kitchen.
‘Er – yes please,’ Chris called back, distractedly hunting the shelf for more Clare-impressing material.
‘One lump or two?’
‘Two please,’ said Chris absently, grabbing another couple of books from the shelf and stuffing them into h
is satchel.
‘Sugar?’ called Chronotis.
Chris blinked. ‘What?’
The Professor emerged from the kitchen, carrying two cups of tea. ‘Here you are.’
Chris, his mission accomplished, realised he didn’t have to tolerate any of this strangeness any longer. ‘Oh, actually, Professor, I’ve just realised I’m going to be late for a seminar,’ he lied, checking his watch. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’ He indicated his satchel, now bulging with books. ‘I’ll bring these back next week, if that’s all right?’
‘Oh yes, yes, whenever, take as long as you like,’ said the Professor. He took a noisy slurp of tea from each cup. ‘Goodbye, then.’
Chris nodded. ‘Goodbye.’ He made for the door – but found that he couldn’t go without asking one question, to try and clear up the strangeness in at least one of its respects. ‘Er, actually, Professor, can I just ask you, where did you get that?’
He nodded towards the battered old police box.
The Professor peered over his half-moon spectacles at it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I rather think that someone must have left it there when I popped out this morning.’
Chris didn’t know what to say to that. He muttered ‘Right’ and let himself out, glad to be away from the strangeness of that room.
Nothing in his twenty-seven years had prepared him for the last five minutes. If anything, there’d been too much time in that room. It was oozing with time, covered in big dollops of time. And police boxes, and humming, and kindly and penetrating eyes and last Masters of College but three, and there was altogether too much of it all.
He was glad to be back in the real world. Back to the real, important business of Clare and impressing her. He selected a sturdy-looking bike from the available selection, climbed onto it and slung his satchel over his shoulder.
Chris had no idea that inside his satchel was the strangest, most important and most dangerous book in the entire universe.
Chapter 3
IT MAY – THOUGH it almost certainly will not – come as a surprise to discover that the police box that Chris Parsons saw in Professor Chronotis’s rooms was not a police box at all. It was in fact a TARDIS, a machine that could travel anywhere in space and time, and its humble battered wooden blue shell housed a vast, futuristic interior. Chris was also very wrong to think back to his childhood trips to London because this TARDIS was not a product of Metropolitan Police technology. It may – though it almost certainly will not – come as a terrible shock that this TARDIS was not from Earth at all but in fact originated on the distant planet Gallifrey, home of the awesomely powerful society of the Time Lords. And it could – though this would really be pushing it – elicit gasps of awe to learn that this TARDIS was the current occupancy, if not exactly the property, of that mysterious traveller in time and space the Doctor, a renegade Time Lord who had shunned the static and futile life on Gallifrey and set off many hundreds of years ago to explore the infinite universe.
The Doctor’s ‘mission’, if it could be called that, and it was something he would never have called it, had been simply to explore, to live a long life packed with wonder and excitement. Along the way, however, he had found himself dragged into the righting of wrongs, not for any grand and crusading reason but simply because he happened to be there and because it seemed the decent thing to do. Generally these adventures had taken place in the company of people from Earth, but relatively recently the Doctor had been joined by – or more accurately had foisted upon him – a member of his own people, the very same race he had spent so many centuries running from.
Her name was Romanadvoratrelundar – Romana for short, thankfully – and she was, at 125 years old, a recent graduate of the Academy of Time Lords. She had been selected by the White Guardian, a mysterious being even more awesomely powerful than the Time Lords, to assist the Doctor in a mission – and this really was a mission, much to the Doctor’s irritation – to recover the six segments of the Key to Time, an extraordinarily awesomely powerful object needed to restore the harmony of the cosmos. Mission more-or-less accomplished, the Doctor had intended to return Romana to Gallifrey and continue his travels alone but for the company of K-9, a mobile computer in the shape of a dog whose powers, if not exactly awesome, were pretty handy, battery life permitting. K-9 also had the advantage over Romana, from the Doctor’s point of view, in that he obeyed orders, came when whistled for, and was equipped with an off switch.
However, the Doctor’s success in the quest for the Key to Time had incurred the wrath of the vengeful Black Guardian, who was as equally awesomely powerful as the White Guardian, although his desire was to plunge the cosmos into eternal chaos. He had sworn in a very dramatic way to hunt the Doctor down and destroy him. To avoid detection, the Doctor had attached a device called a Randomiser to his TARDIS, his plan being to outfox the Black Guardian by popping up randomly all over the place. Neither Romana nor K-9 had the heart to tell the Doctor that that was pretty much what he did anyway.
Whatever the case, the addition of the Randomiser meant the Doctor certainly could not return Romana to Gallifrey. And this suited them both, because the Doctor liked good company on his travels and Romana had learnt to appreciate the full variety of what life had to offer beyond the narrow confines of Gallifrey. Neither of them had ever discussed these feelings with the other, of course. This was not because they were members of an awesomely powerful race with a completely different set of emotional responses – although they were – but because they were not (currently at least) the kind of people who did that sort of thing.
One of Romana’s particularly important discoveries during this period had been the extent of the Doctor’s fascination for a planet in the Mutter’s Spiral galaxy – Sol 3, known to its inhabitants as Earth. He had a great affinity for the people of this apparently distant and insignificant planet, and seemed to regard saving it from destruction as his special hobby. The Doctor had spent so much time there, and so much time in the company of its people, that it was hard to interact with him on any meaningful level without at the very least a working knowledge of the planet’s history, social structure and idioms.
And so one afternoon she plucked a computer tablet from the TARDIS library and read up on it all, history and culture, from the birth of the planet from drifting clouds of cosmic dust, through the Stone Age, the Trojan War, Homer, Shakespeare, the Great Break-Out into Space, right up to its eventual immolation in the 57th segment of time. (‘Been there, seen it, done it, wrote most of that, caused that,’ the Doctor kept saying over her shoulder, irritatingly.) It had been a very interesting 45 minutes, and now Romana was able to keep pace with the Doctor and his favourite planet.
And now they were back on Earth again, taking part in what the Doctor had assured her was an idyllically bucolic and very relaxing activity. As usual, Romana had her doubts.
They’d arrived in the Professor’s rooms a couple of hours earlier, but found them empty. Romana was concerned his absence might have something to do with the urgent message he had sent them. But the Doctor seemed almost glad of the chance to rush off through the back of the college to the river’s edge, where he threw a handful of large-denomination notes at a surprised young student, threw off his hat, coat and scarf and virtually bundled Romana into a tiny, wobbly wooden boat.
She couldn’t see the point in this at all at first. There was a perfectly serviceable path right next to the river, which they could have walked along and enjoyed exactly the same view without the possibility of capsizing. But the Doctor had seemed so delighted, marvelling at the wooden pole before thrusting it into the dirty water and using the full heft of his tall powerful frame to push off down the river like it was the Amazon, that Romana decided literally to go with the flow.
Now she reclined in the punt, the Doctor’s ancient Baedeker guide in one hand, the other trailing over the edge through the clear water, enlivened by the sunshine and the pleasing architecture of the college buildings along the banks.
Unlike the Academy on Gallifrey, this was a fresh, vibrant place of learning, the most ancient of the colleges a mere eight hundred years old.
The Doctor stood at the other end of the punt, punctuating each stroke of the pole with the name of one of the great Cambridge alumni.
‘Wordsworth! Rutherford! Christopher Smart! Andrew Marvell! Judge Jeffreys! Owen Chadwick!’
Romana frowned. That name hadn’t been on her tablet. ‘Who?’
‘Owen Chadwick!’ the Doctor repeated emphatically. ‘Some of the greatest thinkers in Earth’s history have laboured here.’ He went on. ‘Newton!’
Romana nodded. She knew Newton. ‘“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,”’ she quoted.
The Doctor gave the pole a particularly hard shove through a muddy patch and the punt shot forward, as if to illustrate the truth of those words.
‘So Newton invented punting?’ asked Romana.
‘Do you know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had?’ said the Doctor airily. ‘Like all great thinkers, he encapsulated the simplest things. There was no limit to old Isaac’s genius.’
Romana smiled as the little boat passed under a bridge, the shadows of the willows on the bank casting criss-crossed patterns on the stone. ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ she mused, ‘that something so primitive can be so…’ She searched for the right word.
‘Restful?’ the Doctor suggested, shoving down again and causing the punt to wobble alarmingly.
Romana found the word. ‘Simple. You just push in one direction and the boat moves in the other.’
They emerged from under the bridge and Romana gazed at another grand college building beyond the trees that lined the riverbank. ‘I love the spring,’ she said. ‘All the leaves, the colours…’
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