Heidi was asking more questions. ‘Where are you from? What do you want?’
‘If you would allow me to take those questions in reverse order, what I want is a drink. Would you care for one?’ Smoothly, patiently, he crossed to the drinks cabinet, fully intending to keep his appointment with that exquisite brandy. Be a shame to miss that.
He selected his favourite glass, bowled in at the top in order to enhance, well, everything about the brandy. He was taking a risk, of course he was, but if he showed her how rattled he was, then he was lost.
‘Stay away!’ She was shouting now. The poor thing was actually terrified of him. How interesting. He could use that.
The Count took no notice of her and picked up the brandy bottle, rubbing a thumb through the patiently acquired dust as he twisted the stopper.
‘Put it down!’ The bracelet and the gun were rattling together. That thing could go off at any second. So close to his goal.
The Count put the bottle down slowly and turned to face her, his smile at its most charmant and empty.
‘Who are you?’ She looked at him as though seeing him for the first time.
Clearly there was no sense in pussy-footing around this. But he did find it rather difficult to say.
‘I . . .’ he began and stopped. His mouth was dry. He really could have done with that brandy. ‘I am Scaroth.’
‘Scaroth?’
‘The last of the Jagaroth.’ He smiled, aware of how little that meant to her, but everything to him. ‘It has not been difficult to keep secrets from you, my dear,’ he purred, casually shooting his cuffs. He knew he was about to be deliberately, maliciously cruel. It wasn’t perhaps the best tactic, but for some reason he just couldn’t stop himself. ‘A few fur coats, a few trinkets, a little excitement . . .’ He smiled. Mere nothings for a soul.
If he’d hurt her, she did not show it. There was still some of that admirable cool-headedness about her. ‘What are the Jagaroth?’
‘The Jagaroth?’ Absurdly, he was really rather enjoying being honest with her. ‘An infinitely old race. And an infinitely superior one.’
She took this in. The general lack of alarm and screaming told him that yes, he really had made an excellent choice in her. What a shame it was ending like this. Perhaps it wasn’t too late. But no. In for a penny . . .
‘Allow me, my dear, to show you what you want to know.’
The Count showed her his smile for the very last time. Then, starting above his right eye, he tore his face apart in slow, steady strips, the flesh forming little mounds on the floor.
He heard her gasp, but the gun did not go off. Which was a relief. She had probably gone into shock. That happened.
For the first time in their marriage, the Count and Countess stood face to face.
She had broken. He could see that. Somewhere inside her eyes. He knew now that she would not fire the gun. He was the strong one.
‘I am Scaroth,’ he told her. ‘Through me my people shall live again.’
She just stood there. Quivering like those apes had so long ago.
What would happen next? Scarlioni just didn’t know.
Well then, best get on with it. In case she suddenly found her trigger finger.
He coughed delicately.
‘I am glad to see that you are still wearing the bracelet I designed for you, my dear. It is, as I said, a useful device.’
The Countess had dropped the gun, her hand going to the bracelet as it started to emit a piercing noise. Her fingers were scrabbling at that awkward fiddly catch. Maybe she’d undo it in time. Maybe she wouldn’t. How interesting.
The Count stroked his signet ring, and the Countess started to scream in agony as the bracelet discharged its power pack into her.
It took her a distressingly long time to die.
Time enough to enjoy that brandy.
He reflected that the last thing that had made him Count Carlos Scarlioni had gone. Really, there was no need to bother putting that mask back on. He was Scaroth now.
He regarded Heidi’s body, smouldering on the rug. He should have felt liberated. Instead he felt strangely sad.
‘Goodbye, my dear,’ he said to her. ‘I’m sorry you had to die. But then, in a short while you will cease ever to have existed.’
Scaroth put down the empty glass, straightened his cuffs once more, turned on his heels, and left the library.
* * *
So, there they were, locked up with six Mona Lisas. Which was all very well if you liked that sort of thing, but it was currently the last place Romana wanted to be. For one thing, it put her rather too close to the Doctor. He was boiling with anger at her. He’d called her naive, weak-willed, and giddy, and he’d been very loud about it. Worse, he’d not once congratulated her on building a time machine out of little more than tinfoil and sticky-backed plastic.
‘Whole of Paris being destroyed?’ he was thundering. Her headache had returned in spades. ‘What are you talking about, Romana? Is that what he threatened you with?’
‘Well, can’t he?’ Romana pursed her lips.
‘That’s not the point. Paris!’ The Doctor wrote the city off with a disdainful roll of his eyes. ‘I’ve a good mind to take you straight back to the Time Academy and have you sent down. You’d be a computer programmer for the rest of your life.’
‘But he said—’
‘Said, said, said! They all say stuff like that.’ The Doctor softened slightly. ‘You have to learn to ignore it. Just think, will you? He had two alternatives, both of which he would have destroyed for himself if he’d messed around on the local scale. Either there was the time bubble . . .’
‘But he couldn’t get in that.’ Duggan was trying to prove he’d been listening. ‘We saw what happened to the Professor and the chicken.’
‘Yes.’ Romana found herself agreeing with Duggan. This was a first. ‘It doesn’t travel in time, it just goes forward or backwards in its own time cycle. If he’d got in it, he’d just have become a baby again. End of threat.’
‘If he got in it!’ thundered the Doctor. That was the problem with Academy students, even ones as brilliant as Romana. Just because they never thought outside the box, they assumed no one else ever did. The Doctor had never thought inside the box in his life. Oh, he remembered those tedious, awful lectures on Sidereal Time and whatnot. The Academy on Gallifrey taught on the noble principle of ‘least said, soonest mended’. Their reasoning went something along the lines of ‘We, the Time Lords of Gallifrey are so above all other life that we have mastered time travel. No one else has, and we will make jolly sure that no one else will. Because it’s tricky. So, we simply need to make certain that every Gallifreyan understands why, having got the most fun toy in the universe, we must never ever play with it. Because it is, lest we forget, tricky.’
The Time Lords just couldn’t understand why anyone else would want a go with time travel, for fun, friendship and maybe more. They reminded him of the French monk who discovered champagne. He was aghast at what he’d found. He frantically tried to find ways to take the bubbles out of his wine. For one thing, the bottles kept exploding. He was even more horrified to find that people loved drinking the stuff. They didn’t mind that the bottles sometimes blew up in their faces. Worse, they even invented new non-explodey bottles. Reluctantly, Dom Pérignon tried a sip. And the rest is history.
Talking of bubbles and history, Romana was still missing the obvious. ‘The bubble is useless. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’
‘Supposing,’ the Doctor said slowly, ‘he stayed out of the bubble?’
Lady Romanadvoratrelundar, graduate of the Academy of Time Lords (triple first), favoured scion of the noble House of Heartshaven, and the terror of the trans-temporal debating society, stared at the Doctor and said: ‘Huh?’
‘Supposing,’ the Doctor repeated slowly, ‘h
e stayed out of the bubble and put everything else in it?’
‘What?’
‘The whole world!’ The Doctor threw his arms in the air. ‘What he was really trying to do was stuff the whole world in the bubble. Push the whole world back in its life cycle. Like the tiny time jumps when we first arrived.’
Romana thought about this a bit. ‘Oh.’
‘The cracks in time. He shifted the whole world back in time for two seconds. What he really wanted to do was shift it all back to his time. Four hundred million years ago.’
‘But without a stabiliser he couldn’t have been there himself to save his ship.’ Romana felt relieved. ‘Besides, how would he have got the power?’
The Doctor pointed through into the secret chamber, at the six Mona Lisas.
Duggan coughed. ‘What do you think we’ve been chasing around for all this time?’
The Mona Lisas! The audacity and stupidity of the entire plan made Romana giddy. Working across history partly in order to pay a power bill that would never be sent because even the accounting department of Électricité de France would no longer exist to send it. Some people, sighed Romana, just didn’t understand time travel. Well, it was tricky.
The Doctor brightened and gestured to the Mona Lisas almost fondly. ‘He could never have sold them anyway.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well . . .’ The Doctor jammed his hands in his pockets and tried desperately hard to look casual. It was as successful as an all-elephant production of Macbeth. ‘You see, before Leonardo painted them I wrote “These are fakes” on the blank boards. In felt tip. That’d show up on any X-ray.’ He looked around the room triumphantly. He may have whistled. Just a bit.
Duggan’s jaw suggested he was trying to swallow a tennis ball.
‘Problem solved,’ the Doctor announced firmly. And then stopped grinning. ‘Or it would have been if there wasn’t a second alternative that someone in this room had just given him.’
He stared long and hard at Romana until she felt like moving to Belgium.
‘You!’ He jabbed a finger at her. ‘You’ve given the Count the vital component he needed to just take himself back through time to his ship.’
‘But I had to!’
‘In direct contravention of the Time Laws.’
‘The what?’ At the mention of laws, Duggan had perked up.
‘The Time Laws.’
‘Do they count in France?’
‘They count everywhere!’ boomed the Doctor.
Romana was getting pretty fed up now. This was a bit rich. ‘Doctor, I’ve never known you to be much of a respecter of the Law.’
‘Ah, but . . .’
‘No, let me finish.’ Romana wasn’t going to be lectured by someone who remembered the Laws of Time, Physics, Gravity and Polite Conversation only when they suited him. ‘If you’d bothered to ask me before you launched into one of your broadsides—’
‘Did I launch into one of my broadsides?’ the Doctor appealed to Duggan.
Duggan suddenly stared very hard at one of the Mona Lisas. ‘Yes,’ he announced eventually.
‘Well, then, I’m terribly sorry,’ said the Doctor, sounding anything but.
‘Keep out of this.’ Romana smiled at Duggan, gratefully. She turned back to the Doctor and played her trump card. She really had thought of everything, you know. Which was rather more than he ever did. ‘Doctor, when I made that component, I rigged it so that he could only go back in time for three minutes. After that, Scaroth would be catapulted back here to 1979. Now, he couldn’t do any harm in that time.’
‘Oh yes he could.’ Thinking like a Gallifreyan, a three-minute visit was barely enough time to recite the first Observational Protocols, let alone write the answers down. For any other species in the universe, three minutes was plenty of time to cause mischief.
‘Oh, what now?’ said Romana.
‘A very minute would be enough time to contact his ship and prevent it taking off. Which would mean he would then not be splintered in time.’
‘Yes.’ Romana conceded the point.
‘And everything he has done in history would suddenly not have happened. The history of the human race would be totally changed, maybe even abolished.’ The Doctor paused. Something was nagging at his head. Something terrible that he couldn’t quite answer. So he asked a question instead. ‘What are you going to do about that, then?’
Crushed, Romana looked at the door. ‘We’d better get out of here very quickly.’
‘Agreed,’ said the Doctor. Friends again. ‘How?’
‘Er,’ said the captain of the Arcalian Chapter Debating Team.
‘I’ve got an idea!’ The Doctor grinned.
‘What?
‘We’ll ask Duggan.’
‘I thought you wanted me to keep out of it.’ Duggan sounded hurt.
‘Ah, yes, but that was before,’ said the Doctor.
‘Duggan, please,’ pleaded Romana, ever so sweetly.
With the greatest display of brute strength he’d shown so far, Duggan threw himself through the air, launching himself feet first at the door. It was a move he’d seen in a Bruce Lee movie and always fancied trying out. Bruce Lee had landed like a ninja. Duggan landed like a dropped teapot. But the door burst open, handily knocking Hermann out as it went.
‘See?’ The Doctor beamed at the results in approval and helped Duggan to his feet. ‘I always have the best ideas, don’t I?’ He patted Romana. ‘Sorry I shouted. It’s been a bad day.’
‘You didn’t have to sleep in a café last night,’ growled Romana.
They strode out to freedom.
* * *
Duggan had seen a lot in the last day. Chickens. Maniacs. Mona Lisas.
Now he was being held at gunpoint by an exquisitely dressed plate of calamari.
‘What the devil’s that?’ he cried.
‘The Jagaroth,’ hissed Romana.
Scaroth was striding down the stairs, covering them coolly with a gun which had recently belonged to his wife. Ex-wife. ‘You now see me as I truly am,’ he announced.
‘Very pretty, probably,’ said the Doctor.
‘And you will now witness the culmination of my lives’ work.’
‘How terribly fulfilling for you.’ The Doctor missed Count Scarlioni. He had been quite a bit more fun than Scaroth, who seemed, well, rather less likely to send out for cocktails.
‘For thousands upon thousands of years, my various splintered selves have worked towards this very moment.’ Was that a trace of a smile creeping through those tentacles as Scaroth sauntered across the cellar? ‘And now with the aid of this device, so kindly provided by the young lady’—he produced it, and for a moment adopted the air of a stage magician—‘I can make this equipment function as a fully operational time machine.’
‘Well—’ began Romana smugly. The Doctor trod on her shoe. She’d clearly never learned when not to gloat.
‘I am fully aware of the limitations you have built into your device, my dear.’ Scaroth waved this away like a small problem with the meringues.
The Doctor altered his judgement. Clearly Count Scarlioni was still very much alive inside Scaroth. He wondered about appealing to his better nature. Perhaps a friendly natter? But Scaroth continued to talk, his tone measured, even and precise. ‘Believe me, your limitation will not affect the outcome in the slightest. I will return to the moment just before my ship exploded and prevent myself from pressing the button.’
With a flourish, he plugged Romana’s device into the machine. The entire catacomb started to hum with energy, pouring into the pulsing spikes of the time bubble generator. The tape memory on the computer began to spin like an excited washing machine.
Scaroth looked at it all, allowing himself one last moment of pride. All this, he had caused all this.
; He offered one final confidence. ‘You will not be able to read the settings on these dials, by the way. They will explode as soon as they have activated. Goodbye, Doctor.’
He pressed a button and strolled into the heart of his machine, pausing only to toe the skeleton of Professor Kerensky to one side.
The bubble formed around Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth, and whisked him away with a cheery wave.
Romana’s device exploded and the bubble collapsed.
Silence came to the cellar.
17
WE’LL NEVER HAVE PARIS
This was the last day of the planet Earth. These were its very final hours. And, in the cellar of the oldest house in Paris, one man made a very important decision.
* * *
‘Well’—Duggan dusted his hands and beamed—‘that’s got rid of that, then. I don’t know about you, but I need a drink.’
The Doctor and Romana shook their heads simultaneously.
‘No.’ The Doctor glanced up from trying to read the melted settings on the machine. ‘We’ve got a journey to go on.’
‘Where to?’
Romana squinted at the charred ruins and then started running.
‘Four hundred million years ago!’ she called as she and the Doctor dashed up the stairs.
Out of habit, Duggan followed them. ‘Where?’
‘Just don’t ask,’ yelled the Doctor.
They raced through the chambers of the Château, which seemed so empty and sad now without their master. A horrible thought struck Romana. ‘But we haven’t got the time or place coordinates, Doctor. Four hundred million years ago and the whole of Earth to choose from is like looking for a needle in the corn prairies.’ Romana paused to lean against a Michelangelo.
‘You two,’ puffed Duggan. His feet hurt from all the running and kicking. ‘You’re both off your respective rockers.’
‘So will the whole of history be if we don’t get to my ship.’ The Doctor was grim. He already had a slightly nauseous sensation.
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