‘I think that’s obvious, Doctor.’ Amy crouched down and put a hand on Andrew’s shoulder. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ she told him. ‘The Doctor will figure it out.’
‘No, but,’ the Doctor was emphatic, ‘he owes more than he can ever possibly pay back. They’ve lent him more than he could ever, ever pay back. That’s…’
‘It’s criminal, Doctor,’ said Amy, her eyes suddenly
wet with tears.
‘It’s interesting,’ said the Doctor. ‘Very interesting…
It almost suggests that—’
‘But I don’t understand,’ Andrew interrupted. ‘Surely there should be some warning system? Something to tell me when I’d…’ An angry look came over his face. ‘Look, how do I know you’re even telling the truth? I don’t know what you did to my watch, this could all be lies! I only borrowed a few days!’
‘ If you don’t believe me,’ said the Doctor nonchalantly, ‘just pay it back. They’ve loaned you more than you could ever, ever pay back that’s very—’
‘No!’ shouted Amy. She turned Andrew’s face to look at her. ‘I know it sounds bad, and I know it sounds crazy,’ she said, ‘but you can trust the Doctor, just not when he’s…’ she looked up at the Doctor who was muttering numbers under his breath, apparently doing mental arithmetic, ‘just not when he’s distracted, OK?
But you can trust him. We’ll figure this out.’
‘I don’t see why I should believe any of this,’ Andrew said again. ‘It sounds made up.’
‘Denial,’ said the Doctor. ‘Classic, my old friend Siggy Freud used to tell me that all the time. “Veil, Doctor,”
he’d say, “ven confronted vis ze unbelievable, ze human brain goes into shock!’”
Amy held Andrew Brown’s hand. ‘You have to believe us,’ she said. ‘We’re telling the truth.’
Andrew stood up shakily. ‘If you’re telling the truth,’
he said, ‘then if I instruct the watch to pay back one per cent of one per cent of what I owe, I should pay back, what, five years?’
‘Five and a half,’ said the Doctor.
‘Right then,’ said Andrew. He brought up a menu on the watch and clicked a button.
‘Make sure you get the decimal point in the right place,’ said the Doctor.
Andrew moved a dial fractionally, and pressed another button.
He sank to his knees with a groan.
A streak of grey appeared in his hair, and wrinkles deepened on his forehead.
He looked at himself in his car’s wing mirror.
Rory and Amy watched him, not daring to speak.
Even the Doctor was paying attention now.
‘My god,’ said Andrew. His voice was a croak. ‘I’m…
you’re right. But… everyone’s using the watches.’ He looked up in horror. ‘How can we stop this?’
‘That, Andrew, is where you come in,’ said the Doctor, helping him to his feet with an arm. ‘And don’t worry, you don’t have to call me God.’
Chapter
1 1
It’s a lot to take in, that’s all I’m saying.’ Andrew Brown was sitting in an armchair in his living room with his head in his hands. Amy nodded sympathetically.
‘So there are… aliens?’ asked Andrew.
‘What did you—’ began Rory. ‘I mean, sorry, but who did you think had given you a watch that lets you travel in time?’
Andrew shrugged. ‘I thought maybe some…
government programme? Military technology?
Something Russian? Maybe what they’re doing with the Large Hadron Collider.’
‘You’d need a very large collider indeed to even start to find the particles that can do what that watch can do,’
said the Doctor acidly.
Andrew looked up at the three people gathered around him. ‘And you’re all… aliens?’
Rory shook his head vigorously. ‘No, no, definitely not, only one of us is an alien and you see…’
Andrew pointed at Amy. ‘So you’re the alien!’
‘I know she can seem a bit strange at times Amy raised her eyebrows and gave the Doctor a very hard stare - ‘but no. Look. It doesn’t matter who’s an alien, who’s not an alien, who happens to have two hearts and who’d prefer that they were not revealed to the authorities…’ The Doctor knelt down in front of Andrew.
‘What matters is, we need your help. The Symingtons and Blenkinsops—’
‘The aliens,’ said Andrew.
‘Yes, the aliens. The other aliens. The Symington and Blenkinsop aliens are doing something with all the time they’re siphoning off people. I’ve done all the checking I can without access to my TAR-without my proper equipment, and I don’t think they’re taking it off-planet.
Which would make sense. Very volatile substance, time.
Hard to transport. So they must be storing it somewhere on Earth. Probably very nearby. Probably, we think, somewhere in the Bank!’
‘So we think you can help us.’ Amy flared her nostrils and gave Andrew a look somewhere between seduction and interrogation.
‘We need you to look around the Bank,’ continued the Doctor, ‘for a storage system. It’d be pretty large, probably central, and…’
‘No,’ said Andrew.
‘No?’ said the Doctor, ‘I don’t think that you quite understand the gravity of the situation. This isn’t some kind of worldwide banking crisis, you know, there’s not going to be any bailout this time.’
‘I mean, no, it’s not in the Bank,’ said Andrew. ‘I think I know where it is.’
The Symingtons and Blenkinsops were on the move in Lexington Bank’s basement. They’d tried prising the door open in the usual ways, and with some unusual devices Nadia had never seen before. Now they were muttering about ‘talking to the head’.
It was strange to walk among them and not be seen. She’d realised maybe a month earlier that they sometimes couldn’t see her. One of the Symingtons had tripped over her, grazed his forehead - she’d seen a similar graze on the heads of several others for a couple of days afterwards - and looked round, unable to see what he’d fallen over. The effect only lasted for a few seconds, then the watch did something and he saw her again, snarled, walked on. It had been lasting longer and longer, recently.
But this feeling was new - seeking them out. And observing them, trying to get to know them. They didn’t talk much, that was peculiar. When they did, it was almost interchangeable which of them spoke. It wasn’t just that they finished each other’s sentences; sometimes they took only a few words each in an emerging thought, or seemed to be having half the conversation almost telepathically.
‘We should,’ said one.
‘Yes, possibly,’ said another.
‘Bring it, then,’ said a third, ‘and we’ll…’
‘Be able to break into the machine,’ finished a fourth.
Nadia, in the centre, unseen, listened and waited.
Andrew flipped through another folder. There were nine or ten of them stacked up around him: large lever-arch document folders, filled with paper printouts.
‘You see, I’ve been using all my extra time wisely,’
said Andrew.
‘Yeah,’ said Rory, ‘all 55,000 years of it. That was a wise choice. Didn’t you want to do anything else with your life but work, mate?’
Andrew looked at Rory. He had had dreams once, he was sure of it. Not just things that let him relax after a day’s work, but interests, hobbies, passions. Bands he wanted to see play so much it ached. Music he wanted to make himself. There was a guitar in the loft, and he’d always thought… well, he wasn’t much of a musician himself, but he’d enjoyed teaching other people to play and… it was a really long time ago now.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
Amy tried to look interested in the folders. ‘I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, didn’t it, Andrew?’
‘I shouldn’t really have done it, but I’ve taken a loo
k through the earning and spending reports - I was going to suggest where we could tighten up our budget, you see.’
‘Oh yes, that is a good use of 55,000 years,’ said Rory.
‘Ah! Here it is!’
Andrew triumphantly tore a sheet out of his folder.
It was an invoice from a company called Little Green Storage for £454,909.
‘There’s one of those every month,’ said Andrew.
‘They’re paid out of an anonymous account run by a non-existent department. I was going to look into it when I had more…’
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, ‘I think you’ve had quite
enough time for now, Andrew. But this is very good news, looks very likely this is our place.’
Amy took the piece of paper out of Andrew’s hands and read it. ‘But that address can’t be right, Doctor.’
‘And why’s that?’
‘Because,’ said Amy, ‘there is no self-storage at the Millennium Dome.’
‘Shows what you know!’
They’d taken a cab over the Thames to the Millennium Dome. It was evening - Amy thought she must only have lived through this night once before, maybe twice, it was so hard to remember. They’d walked past the main entrance to the Dome, past the flashing lights and the huge awnings advertising the next big artists due to play gigs at the venue, round along a path that led them out by the river. It was quiet here, and the lights of the financial district skyscrapers were beautiful for being so distant and abstract. Each lit office was just an illuminated brick in the vast walls. Amy wondered what someone from another planet would make of a view like this - even she found it alien.
‘What’s that, Doctor?’
The Doctor pointed triumphantly to a small door half-concealed behind one of the many struts and sails of the Dome’s structure. ‘No self-storage at the Dome!
What do you know?’
The door was very small. It wasn’t even as tall as Andrew Brown, and he was the shortest of them. It looked like a piece of chipboard, badly painted with some khaki-green paint. There was no handle, just a cheap-looking brass lock. Next to the door was a buzzer,
and above the buzzer was taped a piece of cardboard with the words ‘Little Green Storage’ written on it in black biro.
‘I don’t think this can be right, Doctor,’ said Rory.
‘It doesn’t look like a half-a-million-pounds-a-month storage centre,’ said Andrew.
The Doctor looked at them both and rolled his eyes.
He rang the buzzer.
They waited.
On the Thames, a couple of passenger boats cruised past. The river plashed softly. A car honked its horn somewhere back near the car parks.
Rory, Amy and Andrew looked at each other.
The Doctor looked at them. ‘Well, I, er…’
The door opened, just a fraction. Inside was pitch-dark, it was impossible to see anything beyond the doorframe.
‘Yes?’ said a low voice like the creaking of an old hinge.
‘Ah, hello,’ said the Doctor, pulling out his psychic paper. ‘I’m the Doctor, and these are my friends Rory, Amy and Andrew, and I was wondering if I could…’
‘Ah yes,’ croaked the voice, quietly. ‘Doctor. How wonderful to see you again, and you’re wearing a different body, I notice. How you do keep up with fashion. It suits you very well.’
‘I, um, yeeees,’ said the Doctor.
‘Do come in. I imagine you’ll be wanting to visit your storage locker. The contents are quite safe, I assure you.’
The door swung more widely open. The space beyond was still impenetrably black.
‘Doctor…?’ said Amy, in a warning tone.
‘It’s perfectly safe,’ said the Doctor, ducking his head to go through the door, ‘probably.’
Andrew glanced at the watch on his wrist, shrugged and followed him. Rory and Amy looked at each other.
‘After you,’ said Amy.
Rory glared at her.
‘I’m sure there’s nothing to be frightened of,’ said Amy.
‘Then why don’t you go… Oh, never mind. I don’t see how they can store anything in there anyway, it can only be some backstage cupboards but…’
Rory stepped through the door.
Amy heard his voice as if it was coming from a great distance away saying, very faintly: ‘Wow.’
She bent down and walked through the door. And on the other side was the world.
In Lexington Bank, a Symington had brought something into the storeroom where the TARDIS was parked. It was a glimmering thing, half concealed in the palm of his hand. Nadia couldn’t quite see what it was until he placed it with surprising gentle grace on the TARDIS
door.
It looked like a small glass half-sphere - about the size of a watch face, but bulging out in the middle. In the centre of it there was a tiny flickering motion, like a beating heart. And the beating was speeding up, faster and faster.
‘I very much doubt any door can withstand the blast,’
said a Symington.
‘That amount of time concentrated in one place?’
chuckled a Blenkinsop.
And Nadia knew exactly what the glass half-sphere was. A time bomb.
As Amy got her bearings back, she stopped feeling quite so dizzy. She managed to open her eyes for more than a fraction of a second and had to admit that it wasn’t quite a whole world. But it was still pretty vast.
She was standing on a gantry, holding very tightly to the cold metal rail in front of her. The gantry led back to a small door, but it looked like the door was about half a mile away, and she didn’t see how she could have got here from there in one step. But the more important problem, the thing she just couldn’t get her mind away from was that the gantry was made of a metal grille, through which she could see straight down. And the drop went down for about two hundred floors.
Amy -held on to the rail as if it was the only friend she’d ever had. She tried to breathe deeply. Her knees felt like water. She didn’t understand. She wasn’t usually afraid of heights.
A quiet croaking voice from behind her said: ‘Ah yes, Doctor, I’m afraid the spatial shift does take some humans that way. You should have warned me that your companions were, ahem, delicate.’
‘I’m. Not. Delicate,’ muttered Amy through gritted teeth. ‘I just don’t want to look down, that’s all.’
She felt Rory’s warm hand close around her cold white knuckles.
‘You can do it,’ he whispered.
And she found that this infuriated her more than anything else. She shifted her hand away from Rory’s,
set her jaw, made sure her other hand was holding the rail extra tightly, and forced herself to open her eyes and look around properly.
‘Wow,’ she said.
Her head was still swimming, her knees were still more fluid than she usually liked them, she still thought she might buckle to the floor at any moment, but if she kept concentrating on how very solid the rail was under her hand she could look at the view.
They were suspended on the gantry in the middle of a vast circular bowl dug into the ground. It was the same shape as the Millennium Dome, like the exact mirror reflection of the Dome, dug into the ground. But bigger - much, much bigger. It looked like this space was about a hundred times larger than the volume of the Dome.
And down as far as she could see the bowl was lined with lit walkways and numbered compartments.
‘As you can see,’ creaked the voice close to her left ear now, ‘our facility is quite extensive. Well, ahem, it is extensive and we are quite reduced.’
She risked turning her head to look at the creature producing the voice. She didn’t know what she’d expected. Some kind of toad maybe, from the croaking voice, or a sixty-a-day smoker. Instead, it was a small floating humanoid figure, about half a metre tall, wearing a black cowled robe and boots. It had a face a bit like a child’s - big eyes and a button nose - but very white skin, almost pale blue. It was
absolutely genderless - Amy had no way of working out whether it was male or female, and given the number of species she’d met which had only one gender, or three or, in one very complicated case, seventy-two separate genders, there was no reason
she expected to tell. And it was carrying a cane with a blue ball on the end, although what it needed a cane for when it could clearly fly wasn’t immediately clear.
‘Welcome to Little Green Storage - the name is just our joke, you see - your repository for all your unnecessary accoutrements during your holiday on Planet Earth, the most frequently attacked, colonised, exploited and enslaved planet in the five galaxies! Better watch out!’
‘The, ah, the Yomalet-Ram, did I pronounce that right, terrible with names,’ began the Doctor - the Yomalet-Ram nodded politely - ‘was just telling us how this facility works. Fascinating. See that up there?’
He pointed up to the ceiling, an interlocking web of fine threads which looked like the bottom of a huge trampoline slung across the space. ‘Up there is the Millennium Dome, suspended using several million superconducting filaments. Clever, eh?’
‘That’s the Millennium Dome?’ said Amy. ‘But the Dome’s not that big, that must be five miles across!
More!’ She started to feel dizzy and sick - she’d thought looking down was bad but looking up was somehow even worse.
‘Ah, well, you see, ah. That’s the clever part, that’s the part the Yomalet-Ram was alluding to, weren’t you, Yomalet-Ram, when you said that we were quite reduced. We’re under the Millennium Dome, but when we came through that door -‘ he pointed way back along the gantry to the door at the far end - ‘we were shrunk!
Down to about, what did you say?’
‘Seven point five per cent of your original size,’ said the Yomalet-Ram, pleasantly. ‘We’ve found, over various planets and life forms, that any more compression can
lead to permanent tissue damage.’
‘Clever, very clever. That’s why you’ve got a touch of vertigo, Amy - your brain’s having to calibrate a whole new set of spatial parameters. And it’s only 7.5 per cent of its original size! Isn’t that amazing!’
Dr. Who - BBC New Series 48 Page 10