Francis had reached the Doctor’s side. One glance at the Doctor’s dejected expression answered all the questions.
‘Well, Francis,’ the Doctor said. ‘I gave it my best shot.’
‘Never mind, Doctor,’ was all that Francis could think to say.
The Doctor ducked his head and looked sideways, giving Francis a smile that Lacuna couldn’t see. ‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ he said quietly. ‘I do my best work when I’m being underestimated.’
A howl of rage made both Francis and the Doctor look up. Lacuna stood straight and trembling, like a statue shaken by an earth tremor.
‘You were four!’ she said eventually, her voice a clenched whisper. ‘Now there are only three of you. The woman has gone. The woman with knowledge of the blue box. She must –’
Lacuna stopped, her eyes closing like metal shutters. When she opened them again, a few seconds later, she was calm and smiling.
‘She cannot escape. Pool controls the very fabric of this station. We have not yet discovered much about you, Doctor, except that you are a fool. You can shield your mind, but Pool has already found much interesting information in the thoughts of the women called Ace and Bernice. The nature of your blue box is already partially understood, The limits of your mental ability are clear. You will prove useful in the experiment, Doctor – whether you like it or not.’
‘Bluff,’ the Doctor said to Francis. ‘I’m fairly sure I’ve been able to shield Ace and Benny against telepathic intrusion.’
Lacuna had overheard the remark. ‘We have learnt enough to know that your box will be of great interest, Doctor.’
The Doctor swung to face her. ‘And why do you assume that I won’t be willing to assist you?’ He jabbed his umbrella towards her. ‘I’m a scientist, you silly woman, among other things. Your colleague Pool is hiding his thoughts from me, just as I am hiding mine from him. So why don’t you tell me all about this experiment of yours? I can’t start drawing conclusions until I’m given some data.’
Lacuna stared at him. ‘Am I to believe this is a genuine offer? You are willing to exchange information?’
The Doctor sighed. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’
Part Six
MAD, BAD, OR MERELY DANGEROUS TO KNOW?
They were surrounded by a three-dimensional diagram made of coloured lines and shapes. It filled the chamber, except for a circular space around the bank of screens. Francis didn’t mind the screens: he had seen so many wonders in one day that the miniature moving pictures seemed almost ordinary.
To remain near the screens, he and Elaine had to stand close, to the strange woman called Lacuna, but even Lacuna seemed less threatening than the jungle of lines and forms that were still proliferating everywhere else in the room. He was able to watch the progress of the three space travellers too, and steal an occasional glance at Britta’s legs.
The Doctor, however, seemed not to be awed by the glowing tangle. He walked along its, edge, his lips pursed, stopping every few paces to study a particular knot of fibres or to read some of the tiny lines of symbols that moved ceaselessly in the spaces between the shapes.
Some of the lines and symbols appeared across the back of the Doctor’s jacket. He had stepped into the glowing forest! Francis couldn’t restrain a shout of alarm.
The Doctor turned, frowning. He smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s not real, Francis. It’s a hologram. A simplified representation of Pool’s computing resources. Very impressive.’
He continued to stroll among the bundles of spider’s-web filaments. Opaque polyhedrons split as he peered at them, revealing tiny mazes, each of which looked as complex as the larger network that filled the chamber.
Nodding thoughtfully, the Doctor, made his way back towards the small group gathered round the screens. He blinked as he emerged from the criss-crossing coloured loops into the gloomy clearing.
‘We’re in the middle of an organic computer,’ he said. ‘I’ve identified some sections that are clearly capable of block transfer calculations. And there are large areas devoted to predictive mathematics. Presumably Pool has been able to predict the end of the Dalek War – and therefore the probability of Earth Central taking an interest in what’s going on here?’
Lacuna smiled briefly. ‘Correct, Doctor. That is why we have to conclude the experiment now.’
‘But what’s it all for? That’s what I’d like to know.’
Lacuna’s eyes closed for a few seconds. When they opened again, she looked slightly annoyed. ‘Pool permits me to tell you. Pool intends nothing less than the creation of a universe. Only a small one, Doctor, don’t look so disapproving. A universe of pure thought, which Pool will inhabit. It will consist of energy.’
‘And Pool will be a configuration of electrical charges on zero-mass particles? There are several conversion routines in that area.’ The Doctor waved his umbrella. ‘They’re very elegant, if a bit cumbersome. Baroque computing. But that’s comparatively easy, compared to creating even a small universe, you know.’
‘Of course.’ Lacuna twitched angrily. ‘The estimated time for completion seems to extend each time Pool runs the predictor. That is why we have to terminate the experiment.’
‘Arcadia.’
‘Yes. This star system has served its purpose. Pool will use the outer planets to create the illusion of a nova. That should keep intruders away for long enough. The sun and the inner planets will fuel the creation of Pool’s new home, when the calculations are complete.’
‘You’ll need a black hole,’ the Doctor murmured.
‘Really?’ Lacuna was genuinely interested. ‘Yes, Pool suspected as much.’
‘And that being the case,’ the Doctor said, wandering again into the twining array of whorls, blocks and threads, ‘Pool hasn’t a snowflake’s chance in hell of pulling it off.’
Defries winced as she pulled herself to her feet. Wounded in action.
Unprofessional. Mustn’t let the others see the pain.
‘Ace. My blaster,’ she said, backing towards a wall and keeping her eyes on the widening gap between the doors.
Ace made to throw the weapon, but checked the movement and brought it to Defries. Daak was on the other side of the corridor, closer to the opening doors.
The three of them watched in breathless silence as the doors reached their maximum aperture. Defries could see nothing but darkness through the opening.
A figure jumped into the doorway, and jumped back into the darkness as a beam from Defries’s blaster burst against one of the doors.
‘Female,’ Daak called out.
‘Droid?’ Defries called back. ‘Unarmed, maybe?’
Defries heard a chuckle behind her. Ace, holstering her gun, brushed past her and loped towards the doorway.
‘Benny!’ Ace shouted. ‘Come on out. I’ll try to stop the Dalek Killer slicing you up, don’t worry.’ A woman’s face peered round one of the doors. A heart-shaped, quizzical face, framed in bobbed, dark hair.
It was followed by a slim body and long legs, clad in light blue denim with scuffs, tears and patches. No weapons visible. A slight smile now, and a walk that was both casual and wary; cat-like.
Defries mentally summed up the stranger: fit; scruffy; non-combatant.
‘Is this your friend with the blue box?’ Defries hissed to Ace. She was sure Ace had said that her friend was male.
‘No,’ Ace replied. ‘Friend of a friend.’
The woman was still strolling along the corridor, glancing at her surroundings and at Daak and Defries, but heading towards Ace.
Defries raised her blaster. ‘I’m External Operations Agent Defries, in charge of this squad,’ she said. ‘Identify yourself.’
The woman stopped, only a few metres away now, and exchanged a glance with Ace before turning slowly to face Defries.
‘Identify myself?’ She put a finger to her lips and widened her eyes in mock puzzlement. She looked down at her body. ‘Good Lord! Do you know, I think I must be Bernice Summe
rfield, Professor of Archeology. My friends call me Benny, but you can address me as Professor Summerfield. I take it you’re one of the narrow-minded military types that one usually bumps into in this sort of situation?’
‘Sometimes,’ Defries said, holstering the blaster and stepping forward with her hand extended, ‘but right now I’m too fragged to maintain the pretence. Do all of Ace’s friends have an attitude problem?’
The Professor gripped Defries’s gauntlet. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said, and looked intently at Defries’s face. ‘You’re hurt.’
‘Painkillers and the suit are controlling it,’ Defries said. ‘I’ll live. Assuming nothing else happens.’
The Professor turned to Ace. Defries watched closely. How could these two women know each other? The Professor was educated, obviously. A civilian. Casual. Ace was more than a frontier auxiliary, Defries had realized that on meeting her, but she was no academic, and certainly no civilian. What was the link?
They didn’t know each other very well, Defnes guessed. There was a hesitation, as if neither of them knew how to start talking to the other. They didn’t shake hands.
‘The Doctor says it’s been three years for you,’ the Professor said. ‘You look – older.’
Ace grinned. ‘Still a delinquent, just less juvenile. How is it, travelling with the Doc?’
The Professor thought for a moment. ‘Always interesting,’ she said. ‘And often too much so. And sometimes rather harrowing.’
‘Is he OK now? And the TARDIS?’
The Professor’s eyes narrowed. ‘You were expecting to see us, weren’t you? What’s going on?’
Ace looked away. ‘You should know the Doctor by now. I bet he hasn’t changed. You’ll be the last to know what he’s up to.’
Daak had joined the group and was standing behind Ace. The Professor had glanced at him only once, and seemed oblivious to his challenging glare. Defries decided it was time to break up the reunion.
‘The big guy is Abslom Daak. A Dalek Killer.’
The Professor looked him up and down, slowly, and turned to Defries. ‘He obviously does his exercises every day,’ she said. ‘A Dalek Killer and Ace. You must have been expecting trouble.’
‘And we found it. Lost a troopship, all the crew and all the auxiliaries except us. Now: what do you know about this place? What’s going on here?’
The comments and questions with which Ace and Daak interrupted the Professor’s story didn’t annoy Defries: she found that the breaks gave her the time she needed to stretch her credulity.
The Arcadia colony had been controlled from this space station since the first landing. The population were kept at a pre-technogical level of civilization, with android advisers to make their lives easy. The people died young, and their brains were transported by the androids here, to the station, where they were used to augment a living computer called Pool, The entire system was part of an experiment. Pool, the super-computer, was mad. The Doctor, the guy with the blue box, could normally be relied on to deal with problems of this magnitude, but on this occasion he had apparently failed to understand that Pool was made of human brains and was in any case crazy.
It wasn’t likely. It wasn’t believable. But none of it contradicted the evidence Defries had seen, and some of that had been equally unbelievable: Ace, Defries noted, accepted everything that the Professor said.
Defries was convinced.
She had never suspect that her opponent was a computer made of human brains, but the Field Agents of the OED were recruited for their adaptability. Her enemy was Pool. Her mission was to destroy Pool.
Not neutralize. Not negotiate with. Destroy. For several reasons: it was a simple objective, and one which would have the enthusiastic support of her squad; it was the only result which would avenge the deaths of Johannsen and the Raistrick crew; and it would cause the maximum damage to the Spinward Corporation.
The Professor had finished, and Ace and Daak were firing questions at her.
Defries interrupted. ‘Silence!’ she shouted. ‘Let’s get organized. We’re going to destroy this thing called Pool.’
As she’d anticipated, they didn’t question her decision.
‘Can you use a blaster?’ she said to the Professor.
Ace answered, unclipping a spare gun from her belt and handing it to the Professor. ‘Is a Dalek antisocial?’ she said.
Four, then, Defries thought. Four against a living space station. And the DK’s got more plastigraft than flesh. And I’m nursing at least one broken rib. The odds are still no better than hopeless.
‘Can you take us to where Pool is?’ she said to the Professor.
‘I think so.’
‘Then let’s go paddling, troops,’ she shouted. ‘Last one in’s a droid-bunking bastard.’
Britta, staring at the screens, watching the four figures trotting along the corridors, had said something. Francis was trying to divide his attention between the little moving pictures and the Doctor’s argument with the dreadful Lacuna woman, but he had seen the blond girl smile in a way that made her face look almost unattractive, and he had heard her whisper savagely.
‘Ace!’ Britta said. ‘Pool will kill you. Pool will crush you. Or you can kill Pool, if you like.’
And she looked at Lacuna with an intensity that Francis couldn’t interpret.
‘Yes, yes,’ the Doctor was saying, ‘of course you have enough processing capacity. The initial calculations were accurate, I’m not denying that. But the subsequent diversification has been – excessive, almost random.’
This time Lacuna didn’t scream an abusive reply. An expression of doubt appeared on her face. ‘The link has never failed. We have endured hardship in order to provide continuous feedback. Surely you can see that?’ Her voice was almost pleading.
‘Perhaps it wasn’t enough. One person’s sensory experience, for a mind as large and complex as this?’ He was calmer, too, and trying to be persuasive. He strode among the bundled fibres of colour. ‘Look at this sub-routine, for example. Look at all these loops and coils. What is this for, do you think? What use can it possibly have?’
Lacuna shook her head.
‘Well, ask Pool. Go on, ask him.’
Lacuna glared at the Doctor, and Francis prepared for another blast of ear-splitting invective. But Lacuna merely said, ‘Very well,’ and closed her eyes.
Colours swirled around the bank of screens. Francis stepped back, pulling Elaine with him. Shapes began to form as the colours settled into patterns, but the shapes were still indistinct when they started to move violently.
It was a fight. Two figures were battling furiously, exchanging blows as they materialized.
The larger figure was a monster: a composite creature, with the legs of a giant bird, the body of an enormous lizard, the wings of a bat, and the head and arms of a man. It moved sinuously, dancing round its adversary, thrusting with a slender spear and protecting itself gracefully with a brightly-polished shield. Francis, watching the duel from a curled-up position beneath the screens, felt no shame in his fear. And even in the midst of his terror, he realized that the monster’s face, crowned with golden curls, was the most arrogantly noble visage he had ever seen.
The creature’s opponent was a man, at least at first sight. But his body was twisted and covered with matted hair; his legs were short, his arms were long; his feet resembled cloven hooves and his fingers were claws. His face was a snarling snout, the face of a boar or a dog. He had no weapons apart from his hands and teeth, but he moved surprisingly quickly; dodging the monster’s spear-thrusts, and lashing out with his hands only to have his blows intercepted by the monster’s shield.
The duel was continuous and completely silent. Neither party paused for breath or parley. Neither retreated more than a few steps before attacking with renewed ferocity, driving the other back. Neither of them tired or suffered a wound. They were phantoms, Francis realized: moving statues of light, similar to the moving pictures on the screens. H
e became less scared and, even though the blows and parries were, as far as he could tell, ever changing, he became bored.
Only then did Francis notice the shadowy, shimmering figure between the two duellists. A splinter of translucent rock; held motionless against it by chains of bronze, the ephemeral shape of a young woman. It was Britta, her blond hair streaming in an unfelt wind. She was watching the battle with desperate, tear-bright eyes.
Francis looked towards the real Britta. She too was staring at the endless duel, but with considerably more excitement than her replica, She turned; her eyes met Francis’s; she smiled. Lust surged in Francis’s loins even as disquiet gripped his heart. He turned away.
The Doctor had watched the fight, without interest, for only a few minutes before setting off once again into the surrounding forest of knotted shapes. Lacuna appeared distracted, her face frozen in surprise as she gazed unseeingly at the ceaseless struggle.
The Doctor emerged from the tangle of lights and snapped his fingers in front of her face.
‘Lacuna. That’s enough.’ The shadowy figures began to fade, dispersing like smoke in a breeze. ‘Is that what you call efficient use of processing resources? Well, is it?’
The battling creatures had disappeared. Lacuna said nothing but shook her huge head slowly.
‘Let’s look at one more,’ the Doctor said. He strode into the jungle of branching lines and stopped next to a sphere which opened like a flower as he leant over. His body, overwritten with coloured filaments and moving equations, was almost invisible; his face was a mask, illuminated from below by the rainbow sprays of tiny linked shapes springing from the sphere. ‘Lacuna. Ask Pool to create a visual representation of this.’
A wall appeared in the chamber. It was a little higher than a man, and it ended; rough and unfinished, in the centre of the clearing around the bank of screens. Its other end...
Francis gaped. He couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. The chamber was wide, but no larger than the Halls of Crystal in the palace at Beaufort. And yet the wall extended further, even though it remained within the chamber. It was an illusion, he knew that, but it looked real and solid. And it ran on, beyond the perimeter of the chamber, on and on in a straight line for hundreds of metres, for kilometres, dwindling in the distance to a taut thread against darkness but still stretching away. He couldn’t see the other end.
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