City of Death

by Douglas Adams

  Talking of which, he crossed over to an actual incubator and tenderly took from it a fertilised egg. He wandered over to a tarpaulin, whisked it aside like a shambolic conjuror, and stood back, taking a moment to admire his work.

  He had built this. To a detached observer (of which there were three) it looked like a giant, three-legged metal spider lying on its back. A dome rested on the floor. Three crooked legs rose two metres up from it, ending in sharp blue points, all aimed squarely at a small platform on top of the dome.

  Had you ever seen a Jagaroth spaceship before, you would have thought, ‘Well, that looks familiar. If a trifle upside-down.’

  If you hadn’t seen a Jagaroth spaceship before, you would have thought that putting a chicken’s egg into the heart of such a magnificently formidable contraption seemed utterly pointless.

  The Doctor, who was watching from behind a desk, thought it looked vaguely familiar. But then his entire life was spent thinking things looked vaguely familiar. Normally it was just crazy robots. One day, he rather feared, it would be wives.

  Romana, peeping through a wine rack, congratulated herself on her earlier, rather facetious theory about what the bank of computer processors were calculating. She was right. Eggs were involved.

  Duggan, lurking behind the storeroom door, was simply nodding happily to himself. A weak little man. Finally, someone to hit.

  Still unaware that he wasn’t imagining things, and that he definitely was being watched with three quite separate kinds of furious intensity, Kerensky placed the egg on the platform. Then he opened a small flap inside the machine’s spherical base, flicked a switch and stood well back.

  Waves of very expensive blue energy surged from the tripod, and a bubble slowly formed above the sphere, completely enveloping the egg. Behind Kerensky the world’s most advanced computer got to work on the egg, and a few miles away, at an electrical generating substation in the suburbs, the lights dimmed as the digits on a metre began to blur.

  * * *

  In his garret, the artist Bourget was desperately trying not to draw a clock on the face of his latest portrait. He failed, snapping the stick of charcoal in disgust and throwing the pieces into a corner.

  * * *

  Inside the bubble, the egg cracked. Slowly, gently, a newly hatched life pecked its way out with its beak and staggered to its feet for the very first time. Had the chick’s eyes been working properly, their first sight would have been of a small shrivelled man clapping delightedly.

  Kerensky stared at the chick with joy. The Kerensky Process had successfully accelerated the time period of the hatching process by a factor of 17 Kerenskys. It was quite an achievement.

  Kerensky was utterly absorbed in the hesitant footsteps of the hatchling. So absorbed, he failed to notice the large man in a tatty trench coat advancing on him, a fist joyously pounding his hand. He failed to notice the remarkably pretty woman in a schoolgirl’s uniform frantically waving at the bovine man to stop. He also didn’t notice the eccentric figure who was standing behind him, idly polishing a beaker with the end of his scarf.

  Well, not until the man coughed politely and tapped him on his shoulder.

  Professor Kerensky stared at the baffling sight of a complete stranger standing behind him. Who was this? What was he doing here? Was this a lost party guest? An artist, perhaps? There was intelligence behind those pale blue eyes. He was also flashing a broad, happy grin. Kerensky suddenly realised it had been a long time since he had seen a genuine smile. The grin broadened into an actual beam of joy at the world.

  ‘Which came first,’ the man declaimed in a rich voice, ‘the chicken or the egg?’

  ‘Who are you?’ Kerensky thought that was a safe question to ask.

  ‘Me?’ The man pointed to himself as though he’d never been asked that question before in his life and that, actually, even if he had, it really didn’t matter.

  ‘Yes, who are you and what are you doing here?’ Kerensky felt a stab of suspicion.

  ‘Me? I’m the Doctor.’ As though that answered everything.

  The Doctor pointed at the vaguely absurd sight of the most expensive piece of equipment the world had ever seen throwing all its power at a tiny, slightly baffled chicken.

  ‘Very interesting what you’re doing here,’ he told the Professor. ‘But you’ve got it all wrong.’

  * * *

  The Château ballroom had been neglected for nearly a century. The silver mirrors had long ago mottled and dulled. The plaster angels had fallen from grace. The exquisite trompe l’oeil ceiling depicting an idyllic forest now flourished with moss. Dust sheet ghosts wrapped around the skeletons of furniture. Sad decay lingered in the air like the last notes of a long-stilled quartet.

  Count Scarlioni had come here to put on a show. In almost every sense of the word. Hermann was carefully rolling up the remnants of an Ottoman rug. The Countess was sat on a chaise, one leg tucked under the other, watching her husband closely. She’d already asked him twice if he was all right.

  She thinks I’m cracking up, thought Count Scarlioni. If only she knew. If only I knew.

  No one ever asked Count Scarlioni how he was feeling. His ever-present smile told the whole world that the Count was having a very good time, usually at their expense. There was no man more confident, more certain of himself.

  And yet, right now, on the most important night of his life, Count Scarlioni was feeling suddenly less than certain of himself. Who was he? The Count had always dismissed people who used words like ‘literally’ and ‘actually’, but who, literally, actually was he? Most rational people, if they suddenly discovered that underneath their face was another face entirely, would have gone insane. Especially when discovering that the face was so absolutely appallingly horrible, belonging only to an ancient nightmare. And yet, the Count had stared at that tangle of green twitching flesh and thought, Oh, that seems about right.

  Which had surprised even him. The new information struck him as positively delightful and explained so much. The reason why he regarded life as such a joke. The sense of knowing exactly what he was put on this Earth to do. Why, no matter how hard he thought about it, he couldn’t remember his childhood. Count Scarlioni was coming to terms with not being real. And yet, he’d never felt more alive.

  Suddenly the flute of champagne tasted even more amazing, the pâté even richer, and the cigar smelled even more intense. Life felt glorious.

  He’d briefly considered confiding in the Countess. ‘My darling, I’ve discovered the most amazing thing. Look. My face falls off. I know! Extraordinary, isn’t it? Shall we have a tug at yours and see if it does the same?’

  But no. He knew right now that he was utterly alone in the world, the universe. The only one of his kind. And yet, somehow, not. He’d spent his entire life (he wondered how long that was) knowing that he was carrying out a higher purpose. Sometimes subconsciously, sometimes very consciously. His only regret a feeling that he wasn’t entirely complete. That more still had to be revealed to him. But that it was getting so close.

  He also knew that confiding his remarkable discovery to the Countess would be a disaster. He knew why she loved him. He was under no illusions about that. He did not particularly wish to complicate things. Not tonight. There was still so much to be done.

  But at least he knew now what it was all for. Why he was letting Kerensky fiddle with chickens in the cellar. And why he was really stealing the Mona Lisa.

  His footsteps echoing across the sprung wooden floor of the ballroom, Hermann finished his preparations. With the tiniest of flourishes, he swung open the double doors, and admitted the cat burglars. Hermann had recruited them personally. Both were highly skilled and well-paid, and their bodies would never be found. They stared around the ballroom with a mixture of intrigue and alarm.

  The Count made his smile twenty-three per cent more welcoming, and handed them drinks pers
onally. They took them gratefully and made a terrible attempt at looking at ease in the room. Nervously, they drank in thirsty gulps. It was clearly a waste of good champagne. But then, very soon, everything would seem such a terrible waste, wouldn’t it?

  The Count sipped his own glass a little regretfully. He tasted the magnificent bubbles bursting against his tongue and wondered for a second, How does the mask do that? And yet it did. It had fitted itself back together, clinging around his head. For a moment it had felt stifling. How do the eyes work? Why tonight, of all nights? How does it not itch? Actually, I’m sure it is itching. It is. I shall never stop feeling it again. And then the sensation suddenly stopped and the Count got on with enjoying life.

  He raised his glass in a toast, not only to the two thieves, but also to Hermann, to the Countess and to the small black metal cube. It was nestling innocuously between an ashtray and a copy of Paris Match on a card table which had come from the palace at Versailles.

  ‘The box is a truly remarkable piece of equipment, I think you will all agree,’ the Count declaimed as though he was giving a toast. He tapped the metal cube, which purred unctuously. ‘This device makes the impossible possible. Perhaps the Professor should see it.’ A little extra familiarity crept into the smile for Hermann and the Countess. ‘I should like him to know that, whilst he is without doubt a genius, the man . . .’ He stumbled here. The Countess frowned slightly. ‘The man he works for is someone altogether more clever.’

  Hermann bowed. ‘Shall I go and fetch the Professor, your Excellency?’

  ‘Yes!’ smiled the Count, condemning the Doctor, Romana and Duggan to instant death.

  Hermann went to the door.

  ‘No, actually, no! I would not interrupt him. Besides which, I think our Professor would not approve.’ He laughed. It was the laugh of a man who knows exactly what is coming next.

  The Countess laughed automatically too.

  ‘Is the machine ready?’ the Count asked.

  ‘Yes, your Excellency,’ confirmed Hermann. Of course it was.

  The Count placed the bracelet onto the top of the cube. The metal glowed with a light that spilled out, casting shadows which danced around the ballroom.

  ‘Then let us begin.’

  * * *

  Unaware they’d just been condemned and reprieved, Romana and Duggan were watching the Doctor from the shadows of the cellars. Romana had seen the Doctor charm a fair number of scientists. It normally started out well and then ended badly.

  Ask any scientist and they will tell you that they love being challenged. Only thus is true progress made. But they will be gritting their teeth just slightly.

  ‘Wrong?’ Kerensky was yelling and gesticulating. ‘Wrong? What are you talking about?’

  The Doctor pointed quite casually to the Kerensky Bubble, as though it wasn’t the most remarkable achievement mankind had ever made. ‘Well, you’re tinkering with time, and that’s always a bad idea unless you know what you’re doing.’

  Spare me from the idle curiosity of fools who have read half a magazine article and declared themselves an instant expert. ‘I know what I’m doing! I, Professor Nikolai Kerensky, am the foremost authority on temporal theory in the whole world.’

  ‘The whole world?’ The Doctor emitted a tiny puff of air. ‘That’s a very small place. When you consider the size of the universe.’ Kerensky? He’d heard of a Professor Kerensky who’d done work on quantum bubbles. But surely this must be his older, thinner brother?

  Inside the bubble, the now adult chicken observed them both with the quiet patience and wisdom of a chicken.

  ‘Ah, but who can consider all creation?’ Kerensky humoured him. At any moment Hermann would turn up and escort this man back to whatever party he’d wandered in from. Clearly one of the Count’s artist friends used to hearing the sound of his own voice in salons. ‘Who can really consider the size of the universe?’

  ‘Some can. And if you can’t, then you shouldn’t be tinkering with time.’

  Outrageous! ‘But you saw it work! The greatest achievement of the human race. A cellular accelerator. You saw it!’ Kerensky wondered if he was sounding perhaps a little petulant. The Doctor clucked consolingly as he continued. ‘An egg developed into a chicken in thirty seconds. With a larger machine I can turn a calf into a cow in even less time. It will be the end of famine in the world!’

  Surely the fool could see that?

  ‘It’ll be the end of you.’ The Doctor’s tone was grim. ‘Not to mention the poor cow. Look.’

  Kerensky had got so hot under the collar that he had quite neglected his chicken. He turned to look back at the bubble. Inside it the chicken was tottering feebly, its feathers scattering as its skin shrivelled. It tapped its beak feebly against the surface of the bubble and then sank to the surface of the device, at first a heap of bones and then dust.

  Kerensky regarded the end result sadly. ‘Hmmm. There are a few technical problems,’ he conceded philosophically.

  ‘Technical problems!’ the Doctor ranted.

  Here comes the steamroller, thought Romana. She retreated quietly to the recesses of the storeroom, leaving Duggan to watch the confrontation.

  ‘The whole principle you’re working on is wrong,’ thundered the Doctor. ‘You can stretch time backwards or forwards within that bubble but you can’t break into it or out of it. You’ve set up a different time continuum, but it’s totally incompatible with ours.’

  Was this shouting man really an artist, marvelled Kerensky? He seemed to have a rather chilling grip on the problems the Kerensky Process was facing. The Professor knew that, true, right now, it was a challenge to reach into the bubble and get the chicken out. But surely not an impossible one. With work, and time and money, he was confident he could breach the fabric of Kerensky Space. Just a little more time. He would find a way. He had to.

  ‘Anyway,’ said the Doctor, striding over to the machine as though it was an underused washing machine, ‘have you tried this?’ He casually flicked a couple of settings with a fingernail.

  The pile of dust twitched, sprouting bones and feathers which pulled themselves up and together, tottering to flapping skeletal life. A chicken carcase strutted around inside the bubble, flesh wrapping itself together, shed feathers flying back up into place, eyes and tendons filling themselves out. The chicken appeared to be walking backwards, becoming healthier and more alive and then smaller and younger and fluffier and finally crawling back into an egg and shutting up shop.

  The egg lay there silently.

  ‘Now, that!’ declared the Doctor, ‘That’s rather more of an interesting effect, don’t you think? Did you know you could build something that could do that as well?’

  ‘Well, no,’ admitted Kerensky, suddenly quite fancying a sit-down. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘What did you think I did?’ Hoping that Romana wasn’t watching, the Doctor risked rolling his eyes. She had told him not to. ‘I simply reversed the polarity.’ He uttered that as though it answered everything. He patted the Kerensky Accelerator almost fondly. ‘This is all very expensive equipment, isn’t it?’

  Why was the man asking him this? Was he a journalist? What? Kerensky narrowed his eyes suspiciously and, oddly, when he spoke the plain truth, it sounded coy and evasive. ‘The Count is very generous. A true philanthropist. I . . . I do not ask too many questions.’

  ‘A scientist’s job is to ask questions,’ snapped the Doctor. ‘Like, for instance, what’s that?’

  Inside the bubble, the egg had gone. Time had continued to flow backwards over it and eventually it had found somewhere else to be. But the flow of energy had continued. Back, back and back at an ever-accelerating rate.

  For a very brief instant, a face flickered into being inside the bubble. A face that was a mass of tentacles surrounding a single eye.

  Kerensky stared at the sight in disgust. T
he Doctor thought the creature looked vaguely familiar.

  Then the face and the bubble vanished and the machine turned itself off.

  * * *

  There was a moment of pure, stunned silence.

  And then Duggan hit the Professor on the head with a spanner.

  Professor Nikolai Kerensky, the world’s foremost authority on temporal theory, slid to the floor. Completely unconscious for the second time in a day, which was something of a record.

  The Doctor boggled at the space the Professor had recently vacated with utter horror.

  Duggan was more sanguine. ‘Right, then.’ He dusted his hands together. ‘Can we stop worrying about conjuring tricks with hens and start getting out of this place?’

  The Doctor was still staring dead ahead. ‘Duggan,’ he said evenly. When he used this tone, invasion fleets tended to start backing away nervously. ‘If it moves, hit it, is that your philosophy?’

  The Doctor bent down to examine Kerensky, running a tender hand over the Professor’s world-renowned head. He stood up, relieved. ‘Well, he’ll be all right.’ The Doctor rounded on Duggan, jabbing the air furiously. Despite himself, Duggan flinched. ‘But, if you do that sort of thing once more I shall . . .’ The Doctor petered out. He realised he was becoming just as aggressive as this belligerent fool. He scowled. ‘I shall have to take very firm measures.’

  ‘Like what?’ Duggan growled.

  ‘I shall ask you not to.’ The Doctor wagged a finger. Sternly.

  * * *

  Romana, surely more by luck than very precise timing, chose that moment to come skipping out of the storeroom. She also chose to ignore the unconscious scientist on the floor and the Doctor and Duggan squaring up to each other like prizefighters.

  ‘Doctor! I was right!’ she called.

  ‘What?’ The Doctor never really liked it when someone else in the room was right. ‘What about?’

  ‘The room measurements!’ persisted Romana.

  Oh, that.

  ‘There’s another room behind the storeroom wall.’