At last the transmat booth in the corner of the sanctum lit up and a figure appeared and stepped out. A slight, grey-haired Gallifreyan in grey robes, he looked like the most faceless of bureaucrats, but when he spoke, his voice exuded utter confidence and power. This was the voice of the Agency.
'We have been discussing your report. Opinion was divided and it was impossible to obtain a clear mandate for action. The Agency has to be more cautious these days. We will not, therefore, move officially against the Doctor.'
Ryoth felt a dull surge of disappointment.
'However,' the grey figure went on, 'A substantial minority of us felt that your case deserved consideration. Some time ago, during the Borusa interregum, the Doctor did the Agency great harm. We have still not entirely recovered from the damage he caused us.'
The hatred in his voice reflected an animosity towards the Doctor as great as Ryoth's own.
'Go on,' said Ryoth eagerly.
'It is obvious that you feel very strongly on this matter.
Are you prepared to act against the Doctor yourself?'
'Willingly, but how can I? If I move openly, that bitch Flavia will have me arrested.'
'It is not the custom of the Agency to move openly,' the grey figure said thoughtfully, 'It seems that you have the will to act, but not the means. The Agency, however, has the means, but not, at present, the will.'
'Give me the means to destroy the Doctor and I assure you I will use them.'
'Whatever they are?'
'Whatever they are.'
The grey figure studied Ryoth's face, assessing his sincerity.
'Very well. Come with me.'
They both stepped into the transmat booth. It lit up and they disappeared.
Stepping out at the other end of the journey, Ryoth found himself in darkness. Wherever he was, the place was dank and cold. It smelled like a dungeon.
'Where am I?'
'In a secret vault, far beneath the Capitol.'
Ryoth's companion touched a wall control and dim lights illuminated the stone chamber. In a corner under a spotlight stood a complex machine which managed to look both high-tech and antiquated at the same time.
It was decorated with ornate metal scrollwork and Ryoth shivered, recognising the style of the Dark Time.
'What is it?'
'It is called the Timescoop.'
'But the use of the Timescoop is forbidden. It was destroyed - '
'It was ordered to be destroyed, after the disappearance of President Borusa. We intercepted it. The Agency felt that it was too useful a device to waste.'
Ryoth felt sick. The squat, ornate device exuded evil.
'Why have you brought me here?
What am I supposed to do with that thing?'
'If you wish, you can use it to kill the Doctor.'
Chapter 14
Harmony
Far away in time and space the Doctor was leaning back in an armchair, sipping fruit juice and chatting idly to his two companions, a young man and a girl.
This wasn't the Doctor whose temporal wanderings were causing Flavia so much concern. This was the Doctor in his fifth incarnation, a slender, fair-haired young man with a deceptively mild and ingenuous air about him.
People tended to underestimate this Doctor - until it was too late.
His clothes were those of a gentleman cricketer from Earth's Edwardian era: striped trousers, fawn blazer with red piping, white sweater and an open-necked shirt.
His companions were an odd pair. The girl's dress, brightly patterned in multicoloured squares, was set off with a white sash about her waist. She had a thin, eager face and aggressively cropped reddish-brown hair. Her name was Tegan Jovanka.
The young man wore the standard blazer-and-flannels outfit of a sixth-form pupil in an English public school.
His shirt-collar was open and the striped school tie around his neck had been reduced to a strip of twisted cloth.He was thin-faced and sandy-haired, good-looking in a slightly shifty way. Formerly under the control of an evil entity known as the Black Guardian, Vislor Turlough had made several attempts to kill the Doctor. Now, however, the control was lifted and the Doctor was sure of Turlough's loyalty. Well, fairly sure. There was still something about Turlough that made him mildly uneasy.
Despite her exotic name, Tegan had been born and raised in Australia and her voice had an Australian edge toil.
'Wasn't it kind of spooky, Doctor, meeting your earlier selves?'
The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough had just survived the most extraordinary adventure of the Doctor's lives.
The mind of Borusa, the Doctor's much-loved old teacher and the most distinguished of the Lord Presidents of Gallifrey had silently broken under the strain of his responsibilities. With crazed logic, he had decided that what was best for Gallifrey was that he alone should rule it forever. To achieve this he needed more than the twelve regenerations granted to every Time Lord. He needed true immortality.
According to Time Lord legend, immortality lay in the gift of Rassilon, the greatly revered founder of the
Time Lords. Rassilon slept in his tomb in the Dark Tower at the heart of the Death Zone, a remote and forbidden area of Gallifrey.
It was said that anyone who could survive the dangers of the Death Zone, take the Ring of Immortality from Rassilon's finger and place it on his own would become immortal.
Legend also had it that in the Dark Time, many years before, the Time Lords had used something called the Timescoop to kidnap aggressive alien lifeforms from other worlds to have them fight to the death for the amusement of their captors.
This abominable practice had long been discontinued.
The Death Zone, scene of these bloody combats had been sealed off, and the use of the Timescoop forbidden. Borusa however had discovered the long-unused
Timescoop control room in a hidden chamber beneath the Capitol and had used it to attempt to bring the five
Doctors to the Death Zone. He had succeeded with only four of them, as the Timescoop had malfunctioned, and the Fourth Doctor had become trapped in a time loop.
In a crazed attempt to conceal his true purpose, Borusa had brought a number of their old enemies as well.
His mad scheme had been surprisingly successful.
All four Doctors had survived to reach the tomb, and Borusa had succeeded in placing the Ring of Immortality on his finger. But too late he had learned that the legend was a trap, designed by Rassilon to weed out megalomaniac Time Lords, a possible danger to their own race, who sought immortality.
Borusa had been given the immortality he craved. It took the form of living death. With others of his kind, he was now a living statue, built into the plinth of Rassilon's tomb.
And so the words of the old and obscure Time Lord saying had come to pass:
'This is the Game of Rassilon - to lose is to win, and he who wins shall lose.'
Borusa had played and won - and lost.
Lord Rassilon, still very much alive, at least in spirit, had freed the trapped Fourth Doctor, and sent the First, Second and Third Doctors and their companions home. The Fifth Doctor, fleeing determinedly from the offered post of Lord President, was now free to roam the universe once more.
'Spooky?' said the Doctor, considering
Tegan's question. 'More for them than for me, I imagine. I found it all very interesting and enjoyable.'
'Why should it be more spooky for them?' asked furlough.
'I knew them all already, don't forget. After all, I'd been them. But to them I must have come as a complete surprise.'
'Hang on a minute,' saidTegan. The complex paradoxes of time travel frequently made her head spin. 'You knew them, because they were all in your past. But they didn't know you, because you were still in their future!'
'Precisely, Tegan.'
Just as she thought she'd got it right at last, the Doctor confused things further.
'Of course, their surprise only lasted for a few seconds. They knew me once
we'd met.'
'How?'
'Our minds linked. Then they knew they were me and I was them!'
Tegan groaned and gave up,
'Doctor,' asked Turlough, 'if you've got past selves, does that mean you've got future selves as well?'
'I suppose so - theoretically...'
'Do you think you might meet one of them some day?'
'Oh, I doubt it. That sort of thing doesn't happen very often.'
'Well, I still think it's weird, having other selves at all,' saidTegan.
'Why?' asked the Doctor. 'You've both got them.'
'We have?'
'Not very many of course, because you're both still so young, bless you.'
'No need to be patronising, Doctor,' said Tegan sharply. 'We can't all be 900 years old, or whatever you are!'
The Doctor grinned. "Think of yourselves as babies, or as toddlers.
Think of yourselves at eleven or twelve. If you could go back and meet yourself - which you must never ever do by the way - you'd find a very different person.'
Tegan thought of herself as a skinny twelve-year old, playing in the red dust with the Aboriginal kids in the baking heat of her uncle's farm in the Outback.
Turlough contrasted the trembling, terrified kid who'd first arrived at Brendon School with his present mature, suave and sophisticated self. He made a vain attempt to adjust his tie before saying, 'I see what you mean, Doctor.'
Tegan still wasn't satisfied.
'If you can meet your earlier selves, why can't we?'
The Doctor sighed. Sometimes
Tegan's insistence on strict fairness for all could get a little wearing.
'All time travel creates a disturbance in the space-time continuum, Tegan.
With proper supervision and regulation, the disturbances can be kept to a minimum. That's why the Time Lords insist on trying to keep all time travel in their own hands.'
Turlough sniffed. 'That and the fact that keeping a grip on it makes them about a million times more powerful than anyone else.'
'That too,' agreed the Doctor.
'Anyway, temporal paradoxes, like meeting yourself - or selves - create the biggest disturbances of all. They can only be allowed in the direst emergencies.'
'So what was the emergency here?' asked Tegan.
'The emergency was poor old Borusa going mad and using forbidden time travel knowledge and equipment from the Dark Time. Now it's all been sorted out, they'll be busy in Temporal
Control, trying to assess and repair the damage. When this sort of thing happens it takes a tremendous amount of temporal energy to repair it -
which means a huge drain on Gallifrey's resources.'
'Exactly who is this Rassilon?' asked Tegan.
'And what was the Dark Time?' asked Turlough.
The Doctor had no wish to discuss the sleazy side of Time Lord history with his companions. Like most Time Lords, he was deeply ashamed of some of the dark secrets in his people's past. He knew that their morally superior image was largely a front, but there was no need to spread scandal around the cosmos.
He rose, wandered over to the TARDIS console and began idly punching in coordinates. As he'd hoped, the distraction worked.
'What are you doing?' demanded
Tegan. 'You treat that thing like a fruit machine. We could end up anywhere!'
'"Ending up" being the operative words,' muttered Turlough.
The recent adventure hadn't been much fun for him. He still resented being trapped in the TARDIS with Susan while methodically murderous Cybermen planted an enormous bomb outside.
'As a matter of fact,' said the Doctor airily, 'our next destination is the same as the last one.'
Tegan looked at him in horror. 'Are you mad, Doctor? You mean we're going back to the Death Zone?'
'The Death Zone was never really our destination, Tegan,' said the Doctor pedantically. 'We were hijacked there. And when that happened we were enjoying a little rest at the Eye of Orion. I intend to resume our interrupted holiday.' 'Won't they look for us there?' asked Turlough. 'I doubt if they'll be looking for us anywhere, not seriously. They've got too much to do at the moment. Besides... '
Tegan looked suspiciously at him.
'Besides what?' 'As long as I'm still missing Flavia will be Acting-President.'
'So?'
'If she looks for me so hard that she actually finds me, she won't be President any more, will she?'
***
'I thought the Timescoop had been destroyed - long ago during Flavia's first Presidency,' said Ryoth.
The grey figure beside him actually smiled.
'She gave the task to the Agency - she was a trusting soul in those days.'
'And you decided to keep it instead?'
'It was felt that the device had - potential. Let me show you how it works.'
It didn't take Ryoth very long to master the Timescoop. He had a background in temporal engineering and the basic principles were simple enough.
When he was satisfied that Ryoth had mastered the controls, the grey man from the Agency produced an ornately carved box containing a set of ancient scrolls. He unrolled the first.
'Here are the coordinates of the Death Zone. It was sealed off long ago, after the Borusa Affair, but a few savage creatures may have survived.'
'And the other scrolls?'
"They contain spatio-temporal coordinates of the home worlds of a number of the Doctor's enemies.'
Suddenly Ryoth saw the flaw in the entire plan. "The Doctor could be anywhere. How can I attack him if I can't find him?'
His companion touched a control and two monitor screens lit up. One held a complex and ever-changing set of equations. The other showed seven blue lines of varying lengths, with the shortest line, a red one, edging towards the fifth blue one.
'A tracer was placed on the Doctor's TARDIS some time ago. It has now been activated. The screen on the left contains the space-time coordinates of the Fifth Doctor. The one on the right shows the current Doctor's tempograph, relayed from Temporal Control.'
'Why the Fifth Doctor?'
The grey man sighed. 'By your own account, the Doctor is almost certainly on the way to meet his fifth incarnation. When you have chosen the enemy you wish to use, you can dispatch it to the Fifth Doctor - ready to ambush the Doctor when he arrives.'
'Suppose it kills the Fifth Doctor first?'
'That is unlikely because of the temporal paradox factor. But even if it did, your purpose would be achieved. If the Fifth Doctor dies - truly dies - the Eighth will never have existed.'
'What is the point of the tempograph?'
'When the red line disappears you will know that the Doctor is dead.'
Ryoth looked curiously at him. 'You're very well prepared.' Then the answer struck him. 'Of course! You were planning to kill the Doctor yourselves!'
'Terminating the Doctor has long been a possible option. But it has not yet been formally sanctioned. So remember this. If something goes wrong, if you fall into Spandrel!'s hands alive, the plan was yours. You discovered the Timescoop, you set everything up.'
'Nothing must sully the reputation of the Agency, is that it?'
'Nothing must endanger me. This is a rogue operation. If you are caught and keep silent, you may escape with exile. Mention me or the Agency and you will certainly die.'
'How can I mention you? I don't even know your name.'
'Exactly.'
The grey figure stepped into the transmat and disappeared.
Left alone, Ryoth considered for a moment. He knew that what he was doing was incredibly dangerous. It was risky to meddle with the Agency at all.
To become involved in an operation set up by one faction of the Agency without official sanction was even more hazardous. But to destroy the Doctor! That was worth any risk.
He set the vision screen of the Timescoop and began scanning the desolate wastes of the Death Zone. It was the simpler of his two options.
Since the Death
Zone was on Gallifrey it could more easily be reached.
Timescooping some alien enemy from its own planet, although possible, was a more complex and time consuming operation, with a greater possibility of error.
He saw something on the screen and adjusted controls to bring it into close-up. It was the twisted, dismembered body of a Cyberman.
Ryoth scowled. Perhaps he might still find a living specimen. Or perhaps he could find something even better.
Doctor Who: The Eight Doctors Page 15