Doctor Who: Keeping Up with the Joneses
Page 7
‘Oh,’ she murmured. ‘That’s… brilliant!’ And she laughed.
*
The Doctor stood in the main street of Jonestown and watched it fold itself up and away, saw the houses unravel and whirl into motes of light, saw the people wave cheerfully and then vanish as if stepping through a door. Arwen Jones the fire chief smiled a dimpled smile and faded, and he thought she blew him a kiss as she went. The skyscrapers disappeared and the road itself shifted and shrugged and became the deck of the TARDIS, plain and clean, and he was in one of the starboard passenger compartments, the one he’d been using as a dry ski slope.
There were three people standing by the door.
‘Christina,’ he said. ‘Mr Heidt.’
Heidt nodded gravely. ‘I see you worked it out,’ he murmured.
‘What? Oh, that. Yes. Well, not so hard, in the end. You made it easy.’
‘I certainly tried.’
The Doctor paused. ‘I don’t think I know this gentleman, though.’
‘This is Simon,’ Christina said.
‘I thought…’
‘Yes, he was. But he always continued to exist as part of the town. While one of us exists, we all do. It’s a bit complicated.’
He grinned. ‘Always is.’
‘Mr Heidt is coming with us now, so you don’t have to worry about the mine going off or anything like that. You could come too, if you want.’
‘But then I can’t come back.’
‘Well, no. Probably not. But you probably wouldn’t want to, either. It’s going to be remarkable. It has to do with the trapdoor universe and the—’ She stopped. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
‘It’s been seven thousand years since we last spoke, Doctor. We’ve come rather a long way. And we fixed the TARDIS for you. She’s all shiny and healthy, good as new.’
‘Oh. Thank you.’
‘A universe where every atom is a universe unto itself. And that’s just the beginning. You only travel forwards and backwards through time – don’t you ever wonder about left and right? Up and down?’
He smiled. ‘Sounds great.’
‘It will be.’
‘But I’d miss the little things. Earth, and so on. And I don’t imagine I could take the TARDIS with me.’
‘She would have to be substantially changed. Upgraded.’
‘Not sure she’d like that.’
‘Sooner or later, everyone grows up.’
He grinned. ‘Not me.’
She swatted at him in exasperation, but they were already fading away, and a moment later they were gone.
He went up to the console room and peered at the readouts. Fair enough. Everything as it should be. Copacetic. Interesting thing about the word ‘copacetic’: no one knew where it came from. No etymology, no derivation. Just appeared in the 1960s, entered the language complete with a definition. Generally agreed, but utterly without predecessors in any human language.
Which was really, really interesting, now that he thought about it.
He wondered what he was missing out on, not going with Not-Christina. He wondered whether he’d regret it, when the time came and he had to regenerate.
A universe where every atom was a universe unto itself. That was quite a lot to turn down.
Mind you, what if there weren’t any dachshunds? What if wherever they were going wasn’t the sort of place where slime mould grew on soggy psychic notepaper and evolved into Welsh towns?
And then, too: copacetic. You couldn’t just leave something like that lying around and not have a look.
I mean, you couldn’t.
It was just rude.
Wouldn’t do to be rude.
He set the controls for Ojai, California, in 1963, because there was a man there who cooked the best French Toast in the history of the Earth.
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