Putta held out his hand, the way a guilty schoolboy might and revealed a golf ball he’d picked up, because it was just like the one he’d caught with his bare hand when he was feeling much more heroic. He’d been considering keeping it for luck. ‘It’s my lucky charm. It’s one of those bits of equipment for golf. You hit it at people and then shout and then they run…I’m getting the hang of the rules.’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘Beings make their own luck, I told her that only the other—’ And then he stopped short. ‘Let me see that.’
‘It’s just a golf ball.’ But Putta handed it over, all the same.
‘This…’ The Doctor fumbled in his pocket and brought out a complex-looking metal instrument, a little like a fat fountain pen with a touch of hairdryer thrown in. He aimed the device at the small white sphere while peering at it. ‘This is not a golf ball. This is smooth. Golf balls have dimples to make them more aerodynamic in this atmosphere…’ He turned the sphere round in his fingers, gingerly. ‘You, Putta, may just have found something very wonderful and very dangerous – the egg of a dormant Bah-Sokhar. I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep it in the TARDIS for the sake of safety – you may find that improves your luck immensely.’
‘Oh, would you like this one as well?’ Putta rummaged in both his baggy tweed pockets. (He’d decided to like tweed jackets and had picked one from the TARDIS wardrobe. Or perhaps been nudged towards one while he considered a very unwise multi-coloured corduroy tail coat.) ‘Here.’ He brought out two more spheres. Both were smooth and slightly warm and gave you the feeling that they weren’t exactly empty.
‘But this is—!’
Before the Doctor could finish exclaiming what this was, Bryony chipped in with, ‘Well, they’re nothing new. People have been complaining about them for ages. Players would pick them up instead of their own and they don’t have dimples – or there’d be some mixed in with the practice balls on the driving range or…oh…’
The Doctor eyed her patiently.
‘Oh, I see…Yes…They’d turn up when the boys would dredge up lost balls from the lake. They’re all over the place.’
The Doctor nodded and it was hard to tell if he was terrified or furious. ‘And they have no doubt sometimes gone home with visiting players and those players have no doubt come here from all over your golf-obsessed planet and so they have travelled to Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore…’
‘Germany…Belgium – we had some Spanish people in here yesterday and there was a couple from Barbados and…There are Bah-Sokhars all over the world waiting to wake up.’
The Doctor threw back his head and laughed and laughed.
The others watched.
‘Oh, well, nobody knew how many eggs there would be, I suppose. Or how many there have been…Turtles, pestiadores, fingalls – plenty of creatures produce far more eggs than will ever survive into adulthood…The Bah-Sokhar needs such a very special range of circumstances – water, an oxygen atmosphere, and fairly complex life forms with appropriate thought patterns and, among them, the right mind that absolutely fits…Ten thousand dormant Bah-Sokhar eggs travelling through space might not be enough to ensure the creature’s survival. But one landed here. And it only takes one…’ He laughed again. ‘And one amongst all these eggs isn’t just an egg, one is the whole adult pressed into a new form and waiting to be released and start again.’ He looked at them expectantly. ‘So…’
He looked at them again – Bryony and Putta, two excellent and resourceful beings.
Although they could be a bit slow on the uptake sometimes.
He huffed out a breath of impatient air. ‘So one of the spheres – probably not more than five or six miles from here – will be the Bah-Sokhar we met, the one that learned to deal gently with humans. The rest are either eggs from that Bah-Sokhar, which would know less than it does, or eggs from some previous Bah-Sokhar which fell to Earth here who knows when and from where. So…’
Putta flung both hands in the air and wagged them. ‘I know, I know! Only one sphere is safe – all the others would need to learn again, or be worse than this one, so—’
Bryony cut in – as she often would throughout their lives – and finished his sentence. ‘So we need to collect them.’
Putta grabbed her hand. ‘We do! I mean we! That’s us! That’s what we’ll do! We!’ He had a light in his eyes that was impressive, but reckless.
‘Yes!’ Bryony agreed. The space travel could wait – might even be part of the deal…Maybe they should collect all the things and then take them into space.
The Doctor extended his long, heavy arms and flopped one down across Bryony’s shoulders and one across Putta’s. ‘Excellent idea. You’re just the pair I’d send off on a mission like this.’ He could feel both of his friends tense mildly when he said the word mission – he’d known it would please them. He grinned and knocked his hat to a better angle with one hand, while stepping back and swiftly unlocking the TARDIS door. He reached inside and brought out a large bag that appeared to be made of canvas, but probably wasn’t.
‘Pop anything suspicious in here – it will damp down the psychon flow and it’s impervious to artron energy.’ He peered at Putta for a breath and then gave the bag to Bryony. Then he faced both of them like perhaps a driving instructor whose two best pupils are ready to take to the road. They both thought there was something softer and darker in his gaze, just for an instant.
And then he gave Putta a spare collecting bag and pointed them off to the stream. ‘On you go now. There will be more there. Gather them up. Don’t hold them for too long. I’ll be here when you need me. Go on. I haven’t got all afternoon.’
And Bryony Mailer strode away from the most remarkable man she would ever meet, beside her the second most remarkable man she would ever meet.
And Putta walked away from the most death-defying experience he had ever encountered and also – of course – began walking towards his next death-defying experiences.
Entirely by coincidence both of them then thought – This is fantastic. We have no idea what’s next and could die at any moment. Wonderful.
The Doctor watched them go.
That is, they’d thought he was watching them and would be there when they got back until they heard that wild, strange wheezing and groaning and dragging noise which meant that arguably the finest Type 40 TARDIS in existence was taking flight, leaping up into space and time and on towards whatever came next.
When Putta and Bryony ran back to the place where the ship had rested, all they found was a square of flattened grass and a push of breeze and a sense that a large, strange heart had glanced at them and liked what it saw.
‘Oh well, then.’ Putta’s shoulders slumped.
‘I sort of thought he’d do that.’ Bryony patted his arm.
‘Oh you sort of thought that he’d sort of be thinking that he’d do that did you – well, I sort of thought that you’d say that.’ Putta tried a smile and liked it. ‘I was going to…’ He huffed in a little more air and wished passingly for a monster of some kind to appear and supply a distraction. ‘I was going to, to…It’s space law or something that the captain of a ship can join beings legally…’ He waited while Bryony didn’t say anything and mainly stared at the grass where it was squashed. ‘I think you call it getting married on this planet…I didn’t look up much of that vocabulary…I mean…’ He stuttered to a halt and also stared at the grass.
And then he felt a kiss against his ear. Either that or very small perhaps flying monster was trying to climb into his brain…No…It was a kiss.
Bryony told him, ‘We can find some other captain to do that. Or ask him if he turns up again.’ She kissed him again. On the mouth.
A while later they started looking for the eggs of what was potentially one of the universe’s worst scourges.
While they did so, they were mainly thinking about the kiss and therefore had to come back the following day to check over all that ground again.
It was OK. They had lots of time now. All the time they’d need.
The Drosten's Curse Page 28