by Adam Roberts
I heard a single click.
I opened my eyes again just in time to see the Dr disappear into the Garlek. He had - somehow - pulled open the front of the casing of the device, and was now stepping literally inside it. He vanished.
‘Hey!’ Stavros was shouting. ‘Hey! What’s a-going on!’ He was jabbing at his control panel with a leathery hand, trying to get the Garlek to respond. But nothing was happening.
Almost at once the Dr appeared again, stepping briskly out of the Garlek casing. In his hand was a pen-sized silver stalk: a Moronic Screwdriver.
‘Your soldiers shot my last one of these to pieces,’ he was saying. ‘But luckily I always keep a spare in the drawer in there.’
‘That’s—that’s—the TARDY?’ Linn gasped.
‘Of course. Don’t you remember - Stavros here ordered his men to bring it down to the lab? He was going to experiment upon it.’
‘But it was in the shape of a giant horn.’
‘Well, it was. But up in the bunker, there, Stavvy issued an order turning over all army and police duties to his Garleks. We all heard him. And since he’s dictator his words have the force of law. The metamorphosing software inside the TARDY responded by changing its outward appearance to conform with the new policing regime. I wasn’t sure at first, but the more I looked the more convinced I became that this wasn’t a real Garlek at all. My own ship! Ha! You weren’t expecting that, were you, Stavros?’
It was evident that Stavros was infuriated. ‘Tzatziki!’ he swore. ‘Spanakopita! I’ll get you for this, Doctor, innit!’
‘We’ll see about that,’ said the Dr, aiming the Moronic Screwdriver at the head of the evil dictator. ‘A few minutes of this and he’ll be too moronic to do anything evil at all. He’ll be too busy working out how much drool to dribble to be concerned with grandiose plans for taking over the galaxy.’
‘Why not just kill me?’ Stavros demanded.
‘Nonsense,’ said the Dr. ‘I don’t kill people. That’s not my style.’
‘And yet you would put an end to the whole race of the Garleks,’ said Stavros. ‘Is that not murder?’
‘Don’t quibble ethics with me,’ said the Dr, aiming the Moronic Screwdriver at the dictator’s nutbrown forehead. ‘No ethiquibbling from you, thank you very much.’
‘My body is already ruined,’ cried Stavros, flapping a leathery hand over his control panel. ‘If you destroy my mind it will be tantamount to killing me! You might as well go the whole hog!’
‘When I think of all the evil you have performed in your time . . .’ said the Dr.
‘Doctor,’ said Linn, with a tone of unease in her voice.
‘ . . .and all the evil you are planning to perform . . .’
‘Doctor, stop a mo,’ Linn said.
I, too, could sense that something was wrong.
‘Don’t interrupt me, Linn,’ said the Dr. ‘I’m just getting to the bit where I harangue him for his evil.’
‘Something’s wrong, Doctor,’ said Linn, looking around.
‘She’s right. Something’s not right,’ I agreed. ‘I mean. She’s not wrong, something’s wrong. Here. What I’m trying to say, by way of agreeing with Linn, is that she is right to suggest that something is wrong.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Stavros seems to have lost his Greek accent,’ I observed.
‘Has he?’
I felt an unpleasant tingling in my solar plexus, the sort you get when you have the sense that something very bad is about to happen. The thing was I recognised that voice - the new voice that Stavros appeared to be using.
‘Accent schmaccent,’ said Stavros, with a distinctly home counties twang. ‘I could never remember my Greek accents anyway.’
‘Hang on a second,’ said the Dr. ‘Your voice has changed. Why are you talking like that?’
‘I shall talk as I please. Indeed,’ Stavros added, leaning back in his motorised chair, ‘I shall talk like what I please.’
Linn, standing beside me, sucked in a deep breath.
‘Deliberate grammatical solecism, eh?’ said the Dr. ‘You don’t scare me with your heavy-handed mangling of the proper rules of communication.’
‘Don’t I?’
‘Quick, Doctor,’ said Linn, grabbing his coat. ‘Let’s make a run for it. Into the TARDY! Let’s get away whilst we still can.’
‘I’ve got to put an end to the beginning of the Garleks first,’ said the Dr, looking confusedly about him. ‘Let me just—’
He pressed his thumb against the on-switch of the Moronic Screwdriver. A beam of concentrated moronification shot out. The molecules of air between the Dr and Stavros became too moronic to continue their Brownian motion and started to freeze out as crystals of ice.
‘Too late for that, Doctor, I’m afraid,’ declared Stavros. ‘Your screwdriver won’t avail you.’
There was a loud cracking noise, like a large plank of wood being snapped in half. The Moronic Screwdriver flew from the Dr’s hands.
‘This is not the end of the Garleks,’ declared Stavros. ‘It is not the beginning of the end of the Garleks. It is not even the end of the beginning of the Garleks. It is, however, the end of you Doctor—’
‘What?’ asked the Dr, slightly non-specifically, considering the circumstances. ‘Who . . . do what? What?’
Stavros seemed to freeze. There was an atmosphere of indelible menace in the air. Which, of course, is where you’d expect to find atmosphere.
For a moment we all held our breaths.
‘He’s gone quiet,’ the Dr observed, cautiously. ‘And motionless.’
‘Didn’t it strike you as odd that he didn’t immediately call for Garlek guards to come defend him?’ Linn said, urgently. ‘He could have done that with a single finger on his control panel. And yet he did not. I’ll tell you what I think: he’s not what he seems . . .’
‘This is rather peculiar,’ agreed the Dr. ‘Extremely. Odd, very.’
And just as he said that, things got a whole lot odder.
Yes. I know that the comma is out of place in that last sentence.
Allow me to explain.
Chapter Eleven
‘MEET ME— ET!
A crack appeared in the frontal carapace of Stavros’s chair. It opened just a hemi-demi-inch, and ran all the way up the front of Stavros’s body. Light spilled from the crevice. And then it widened, and two halves swung apart from one another on some unobvious hinge.
‘What is going,’ started the Dr, and put his mouth into a circle to conclude his sentence on? when he was interrupted with a loud bang! A metallic stair unfolded from inside Stavros’s torso and clanged onto the ground.
‘It’s a TARDY!’ I exclaimed.
‘You don’t say,’ said Linn, with, I feel, uncalled-for sarcasm. ‘Did you just figure that out?’
‘Oh don’t be like that,’ I said. ‘I’m a simple Prose Taylor from Earth. I’m not a fancy Time Gentleman apprentice, like . . .’
‘Shh,’ said the Dr. ‘Somebody’s coming out.’
There was the sound of footsteps coming down what appeared to be an immense stretch of staircase. They came closer and closer, clattering of boots on metal steps. The approach took a whole minute; two. Finally, with a little sigh as of exhaustion, a small green figure stepped briskly down to the last few steps and stood on the ground before us all. He, she or it was no more than a metre high. It (let’s say) had the face of a rapturous tortoise; but was dressed in a pale green onepiece of faintly military appearance and was wearing big clumpy boots on its small stumpy legs, giving its lower regions a pronounced stumpyclumpy appearance.
‘Hiya,’ it said. Its voice was squeaky, like a squeegee being wiped across a clean window, or a creaky door being opened slowly. Or like Richard Leaky, whom (if you’ve ever heard him you’ll know) was possessed of a high pitched voice.
‘And who in the name of J Jurms and his Po,’ asked the Dr, ‘are you?’
‘I’m the ET.’ Th
e creature standing before us did a little bow. With a fluid motion its small arm flipped to its side and came back up again holding a boomerang-shaped weapon.
The Dr blanched. Blancmanged. Blancversed. I mean he went white. In the face. And maybe elsewhere about his body too. But I could only see his face.
‘That’s,’ he said, pointing. ‘That’s—a—’
‘It’s no blinking Moronic Screwdriver,’ said the newcomer, happily.
‘It’s a TGV!’
‘So it is.’
‘But those weapons are outlawed by the convention of linearity!’
‘They are outlawed,’ agreed the ET. ‘Despised and condemned by all civilised people in the Galaxy. And why? Because they are deadly to Time Gentlemen! The only weapon that bypasses your infuriating ability to re-un-degenerate yourselves at the moment of death!’
‘Would you please explain what’s going on,’ said the Dr, gathering himself and trying for dignity.
‘It’s perfectly simple,’ said the ET. ‘I am your nemesis. Your arch enemy.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said the Dr. ‘My arch enemy is called the Master.’
‘Tall feller?’ said the ET. ‘Little triangular-shaped beard? Booming voice? That was me.’
‘You?’
‘Well, it was my TARDY. You don’t need to look so surprised. If your TARDY can take the shape of a Garlek, why mightn’t mine take the shape of a tall bearded man with a booming voice?’
‘But if you own a TARDY that must mean,’ said Linn, ‘that you’re a . . . Time Gentleman?’
‘Naturally,’ said the ET. ‘I’m on my seventieth re-un-degeneration. I seem to have been getting smaller with each of them in turn, actually, for the last dozen or so. Smaller and greener.’ He shrugged. ‘But what can you do!’
‘Seventy?’ objected Linn. ‘Impossible! Time Gentlemen only re-un-degenerate thirteen times!’
‘Usually that is true,’ said the ET. ‘But I found a way to bypass that little difficulty. It’s a long story, and one I’m not inclined to go into right now. I haven’t got time anyway. I’m most dreadfully sorry, my dear Doctor, but I’m going to have to kill you.’
‘I beg your pardon . . .’ said the Dr. ‘Did you say kill me?’
‘That’s about the long and short of it.’
‘But why?’
‘You’re surprised?’ said the ET, perhaps disingenuously. ‘And yet you were readying yourself to moronify poor old Stavros - when you thought it really was Stavros. I might ask the same thing there. Why?’
‘To prevent a worse evil,’ said the Dr. ‘Incidentally, where is Stavros? The real Stavros?’
‘Somewhere hereabouts,’ said the ET, gesturing with his weapon vaguely. ‘I don’t know. All I know is that my TARDY is set to “most evil person on planet” mode.’
‘You were about to explain,’ said Linn, ‘why you feel obliged to murder the Doctor here?’
‘To prevent a worse evil,’ said the ET, suavely. ‘What other justification for murder carries any weight? It’s Linn, isn’t it?’
‘You know me?’
‘Of course I do! You’re training to become a Time Lady, I believe. And you,’ turning to me, ‘must be Prose? The assistant?’
I gulped by way of answer.
‘Ms Trout,’ said the ET. ‘How would you feel if you were to learn that the whole rationale of the Time Gentlemen - everything they stand for - is profoundly wrong? That tidying up the time lines will lead inevitably to the end of the universe?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said at once. ‘That’s entirely backwards. Without the Time Gentlemen patrolling the timeways, anarchy would ensue. Chaos! That would lead to the end of the universe—’
‘I’m afraid it’s so,’ said the ET, gaily. ‘I must murder the Doctor to save the universe.’
‘You’re a liar!’ I exclaimed. Perhaps unwisely.
‘Do you say so, Prose Tailor?’ he said, smiling wide enough to display a line of top teeth like the perforated edge of a stamp. ‘But I’m not the one with lying and betrayal on my conscience.’
‘Oh,’ I said, as everything fell into place. ‘You tricked me! You wheedled the information out of me - that the Doctor would be sent here, to the time just before the Garleks were sent out into the cosmos; and you arranged to be here to meet him! You got here first and lay in ambush for him, disguised as Stavros!’
‘Something like that,’ said the ET, airily. ‘But I’ve an important question for you, young Prose. Do you know how the cosmos used to be?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘What you need to understand about the Time Gentlemen, ’ said the little green figure, fluently, ‘is that their notion of temporary neatness, of the grammar of time - involves a linear mindset. They are comfortable with Monday being followed by Tuesday being followed by Wednesday. They are not comfortable with Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday all happening at once.’
‘But of course!’ cried the Dr. ‘How else could it be?’
‘I even used to think like that myself,’ said the ET. ‘When I was a working Time Gentleman I spent decades of my life zipping up and down through time sorting things out, neatening events, eliminating superfluous temporal apostrophes and adding necessary temporal semicolons. Until I saw the error of my ways.’
‘There’s no error,’ said the Dr.
‘But there is. Because it’s the natural order of the cosmos for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday all to happen at once. Just as it is the natural order for a garden to become overgrown with all manner of weeds - weeds and flowers. Or, perhaps a better example might be: just as it is the natural order for language to sprawl beyond rules and grammars, despite the work of all the pedants in pedagogy. To sprawl beyond all rules and grammars and still be effective at communication!’
‘I happen,’ said the Dr, a little stiffly, ‘to like a well-weeded garden. And I happen to think that a grammatically and syntactically correct sentence is aesthetically pleasing.’
‘Neater,’ said the ET, nodding. ‘But neatness isn’t the only aesthetic. Prose, let me tell you something. On your homeworld there was a thing called the Fermi paradox. Heard of it?’
‘Ah!’ I said. ‘The Fermi paradox! The Fermi paradox! No, never heard of that.’
‘Well,’ said the ET. ‘It’s about the lack of extraterrestrial civilisation. Given the size of the universe there ought to be billions of kinds of alien life co-existing; and yet there’s no evidence of any. Well, you’ve had experiences few of your fellows have had. You’ve seen some aliens.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Some. Yet there should be billions.’
‘I don’t understand where you’re going with this,’ I confessed.
‘Only to explain the Fermi paradox. It’s the Time Gentlemen, you see. They’re the answer. They can’t abide a teeming multitude of simultaneous galactic civilisations. They’ve weeded most of them out. They’ve all the time in the cosmos, after all. All the time they need to institute hundreds of thousands of varieties of this plan here. This plan - to eliminate the Garleks. That’ll be one less alien group cluttering up the place.’
‘But the Garleks are the most evil beings in the galaxy!’ the Dr objected.
‘Nonsense. They make war, it’s true. They’re cruel. But do you know how many alien races would be left if you eliminated all those that made war, or all those who were sometimes cruel? None, that’s how many. And that’s where the Time Gentlemen plan is heading.’
‘That’s a grotesque pastiche,’ said an infuriated Linn, ‘a distorting parody of the philosophy of . . .’
‘And you’ve no time for parody,’ interrupted the ET, scornfully. ‘I know. Let me put it this way, young Prose. When you were growing up on Earth, my young tike, did you have any knowledge of the Cydermen?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not when I was growing up. I met them later, with the Doctor.’
‘That’s right. You did. You met them because you were i
n the extratemporal bubble of the Doctor’s TARDY. But you’d never heard of them before, when you were growing up on Earth in the twenty-third century?’
‘No.’
‘Despite the fact that the Cydermen invaded earth in twenty-ten?’
‘Did they?’ I said. ‘I don’t remember learning that in history.’
‘It’s been edited out of history. Too messy. The whole Cydermen race - gone. They exist now only as a faint echo in the species subconscious, echoing vaguely in the bizarre fictions of writers and filmmakers. There are whole groups of alien races - gone the same way. For instance: did you know that Octopoid Martians invaded Earth in eighteen-eighty-nine, until a zealous Time Gentleman went back to a much earlier Mars and left a fridge door open, depriving the Martian national grid of electricity and causing (domino clacking onto domino) the downfall and death of the whole civilisation. Time Gentlemen? That’s—what—they—do.’
‘By our actions Earth was spared a violent invasion . . .’ pointed out the Dr.
‘And the Martians were spared the bother of living in the first place. Just to make the cosmos neater.’ He scowled. ‘Do you know where it’ll lead? To the weeding out of all co-existing races. Eventually the Time Gentlemen will permit to exist only a succession of linearly consequent civilisations - one after the other - like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.’
There was an awkward silence.
‘Is this true?’ I asked the Dr and Linn.
‘True? To be sure it is,’ said the ET. ‘How many alien civilisations were known to your homeworld when you were growing up, Prose?’
‘Well, the three of course.’
‘So. Imagine this: one day, if the Time Gs have their way, a boy or a girl will be born on Earth and look up at the sky - and it’ll be wholly bare of life! All the teeming multitudes cross-pollinating one another’s civilisations in messy profusion - gone! Nothing at all, except humans pondering an unsolvable Fermi paradox.’
‘There are good reasons,’ said the Dr, slowly, ‘why the proper order and sequence of the life-forms of the . . .’
‘But there’s more,’ interrupted the ET. ‘If it were only that, I’d have qualms about committing - as Ms Trout so accurately says - murder. But there’s more than that.’