by Adam Roberts
‘But tell me,’ she asked, urgently, ‘tell me of the world outside the helmet. Did you meet the Dentist?’
‘No Dentist,’ I said. ‘Only the Doctor.’
‘He is your Time Gentleman then? Please tell me!’
‘That’s right. I’m his assistant-stroke-companion.’
‘Did your Doctor ever talk of The Dentist?’
‘No.’
‘Then perhaps,’ she wailed, ‘perhaps my Dentist is truly dead! Oh, my poor Dentist, perhaps I have maligned you! Perhaps you tried to help me - perhaps you lost your life in the very struggle to release me from this prison!’
‘Wait a minute. Dentist? Come to think, he did mention a dentist,’ I said. ‘I’ve just remembered.’
‘He did?’
‘If we’re talking about the same person,’ I said. ‘He talked not of The Dentist, but of That Tooth-Hurting Wino Git. It comes back to me now . . . the Doctor once told me that he originally bought the TARDY off WhoBay, the hypernet sales site, from a Time Gentleman who happened to be in reduced circumstances. I’m trying to remember his exact words - some old codger who had sold everything else, even his own teeth, in the search for money to feed his drink-habit, and had finally sunk so low that he had to hock his own TARDY.’
‘Ah,’ said Lexanco.
For a while we both stood in silence.
‘Well,’ she said, in a small voice. ‘It only goes to show. You should not trust some person who shows up on your home world and carries you off without so much as a by your leave.’ She pondered some more. ‘He was always a little tipsy, you know. Blundered about a fair bit. Double vision. Do you know, he once told me he had multiple hearts? I thought this was merely a physiological fact of Time Gentleman anatomy, until I realised that he’d been looking at an internal scan of his own body with alcohol induced double-vision. He also told me he had two livers, four lungs and an invisible friend called Claudius.’
‘He let you down.’
‘He did. I assumed he would rescue me, and I was proved wrong.’
This made me think, uncomfortably, of the frequent evidence of unreliability that the Dr had demonstrated since I had known him. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you are right. Perhaps we should do more than just wait around for the Doctor - for my Doctor, I mean - to lift the helmet up. Perhaps we’d better get ourselves out of this mess ourselves. Under our own steam. Rather than just depending, passively, upon the actions of others.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But how?’
And at that very moment, inspiration struck. ‘I’ve got it!’ I cried.
‘What?’
‘Look at the floor!’
She did so, and presented me with a view of the top of her head. It may seem silly to you, but the sight of that top of the head moved me almost as much as the sight of the rest of her body. Her hair was purple, the strands straight and parallel arcs, and the top of her cranium was marked with the tender and exquisite line of her parting. If you cannot conceive of a hair-parting as being tender, or exquisite, then you have never truly been in love. Perhaps it is the blend of vulnerability and intimacy that that slender sight of her scalp granted me, I don’t know. Parting, a poet of Love once wrote, is a sweet sorrow - what a foolish and ignorant thing to say! In this case it was a sweet joy . It took actual effort on my part not to leap forward and kiss the top of her head.
She looked up at me again. ‘Why did you instruct me to look at the floor?’
‘Don’t you notice,’ I said, my heart pounding, ‘anything odd about it? You may have been padding around this space in your knickers for over three decades, but that was in the dark. Your helmet was inside a cupboard in the central console of the TARDY control room.’
‘True.’
‘Now it is resting on the floor of the TARDY itself. In the outside world it occupies a space no larger than a dinner-plate; but inside it takes up acres of space. Acres and hectares! Hectacres, probably.’
‘And?’
‘So the floor beneath us is the TARDY floor, except that it is magnified by a factor of - well, I can’t calculate the factor. Certainly it’s a lot. The floor I remember from the TARDY is perfectly flat and white. But when we look down the floor is bobbly.’
‘Bobbly,’ she said.
‘Blobbly. As if paved with miniature cobbles. Trillions of them - I’m guessing those are the actual molecules of whatever substance the floor of the TARDY is composed. Being inside this helmet is like being inside a gigantic microscope.’
‘I don’t see how this helps us,’ Lexanco said. Her brow was deliciously furrowed with noncomprehension. I wanted to kiss her forehead. In fact, to save time, I might as well admit that I wanted to kiss pretty much the whole of her, regardless of how long this process might take, and excepting only her big toes. I’ve always had something of a phobia about big toes. The rest of a woman’s toes I’m fine with; they’re even sweet, in a certain way of looking at things, all lined up in a row on the foot like that. But there’s something a bit revolting about the big toe - knobbled and protuberant with that toenail like a chip of faded bakelite. Urgh! But I’m getting distracted.
‘Don’t you see?’ I urged her. ‘Every tiny imperfection or indentation in the floor will be enormously magnified inside the helmet. If we work our way around the rim of the helmet I feel sure we will find a gap eventually - something that might be only the tiniest of dint or scrape in the surface of the TARDY floor, but which will inside here be a trench large enough for us to climb out of.’
‘You should not end your sentences with prepositions,’ she observed.
‘But apart from that, what do you think?’
‘An excellent plan,’ she said.
‘There’s no time to lose!’ I cried, enormously excited. ‘Let us start here and work our way clockwise around the rim. This helmet cannot be resting perfectly flat upon the floor - no floor is absolutely and perfectly flat, not on a molecular level! As soon as we find a gap we can escape.’
‘It is a very good idea,’ she said.
I did not add what I was truly thinking - that then, in the outside world, when her gratitude to me as her saviour temporarily overwhelmed her quite natural physical revulsion, I would be able to seize the chance for a cuddle. Perhaps two cuddles. Perhaps - and why not? - a whole series of cuddles. And what, I found myself wondering excitedly, is the collective noun for cuddles? A huddle of cuddles, perhaps? A gaggle of cuddles? Or, if the principle of naming collective nouns applies across the board (I mean that principle which chooses a word primarily by its randomness with respect to the thing being grouped: an unkindness of ravens, a metaphysics of chairs, an obliqueness of proctologists, that sort of thing), then perhaps a bacon-slicer of cuddles, or a venn-diagram of cuddles. Although, come to think of it, that last one isn’t so random.
Anyway: the point is that I anticipated some form of affectionate reward for helping the beautiful woman - the girl of my dreams - to escape. My fantasising knew no bounds. Except, of course, the bounds of decency such as was consonant with the tenets of teatime family entertainment.
We set off at once, Lexanco leading the way and me following, keeping the wall of the helmet on our left. For the first ten minutes or so there was nothing: the base of the helmet sealed perfectly against the white, stippled surface of the floor. I began to wonder about the soundness of my reasoning: perhaps, I thought to myself, the TARDY floor was constructed from some space-age advanced material that kept itself perfectly flat. This thought was a distinct worry to me.
‘What did you do on your homeworld of Tapov?’ I asked, by way of making conversation.
‘We danced,’ Lexanco said, simply. ‘Everything, our religion, culture and economy, is entirely based about the continual performance of the sacred dance. Tap dancing, from which our world gets its name, is one key component; but there are many other forms of the sacred dance. It has been my one consolation, in the many years of darkness, that I have been able to keep my body in shape and my th
ighs and buttocks trim by dancing the sacred dance.’
‘Trim,’ I said, nodding. ‘Thighs. Hmm.’
‘The point of the dance is to capture the sacred oneness of the cosmic principle of movement - stars and planets dance in their orbits, the very atoms out of which we are composed dance with quantum finesse and intricacy. By acting out the ritual with our own bodies, we connect with this core harmony of reality,’
‘Buttocks,’ I said. ‘Yes. Trim. Hmm. Thighs.’
‘I was apprenticed to a minor dance troop in my home town,’ she reminisced. ‘Every morning I practised the dance moves, moving arms and legs in carefully choreographed motions.’
‘Trim,’ I said.
To be honest my mind wasn’t really on what she was saying.
‘Wait!’ she cried! I was snapped from my reverie. ‘Look!’
‘Where?’
‘Oh Prose, you were right! Do you see?’
She was pointing at the base of the wall. There, in the fabric of the ground, was an indentation. It was shallow, no more than ten inches deep, but it was surely deep enough for the possibility of escape. Some scratch in the TARDY floor out there, in here grown to the size in which an adult might - just - wriggle free.
We both got down on all fours to peer more closely at this dent. ‘Do you think it reaches all the way through to the outside?’ I asked.
‘There’s only one way to find out,’ she replied. ‘To squeeze through. Shall I go first?’
‘Be my breast,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Guest,’ I said, rather too loudly. ‘Be my guest. Be my, be-be-be—I said guest, definitely.’
She gave me a slightly puzzled look. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I shall go through first, and you can follow.’
‘Yes.’
She lay on her front and wriggled into the shallow indentation. Her head went under the base of the wall, but then she stopped. For some moments she lay there squirming and jiggling. It took me a moment to realise that she was calling to me. My mind was on something else. I can’t, um, remember what exactly.
‘Prose!’ came her muffled voice, for perhaps the fourth time.
‘Eh? What? Eh?’ I said, startled. ‘What! I am listening, honestly I am.’
‘For the last time pull me out . . . I can’t get through.’
I took her ankles in my hands and heaved her back. She emerged gasping. ‘I can see the light,’ she told me. ‘The dent goes all the way under the helmet - all the way to the outside!’
‘Fantastic!’
‘Alas I cannot fit. My chest area is too ample to permit me to squeeze through. But you, Prose, are a man, completely lacking the more built-up or developed tissue around your ribcage. I feel sure you could get through.’
‘Yes! I shall go at once!’
‘And when you get to the outside of the helmet, you must promise to lift it up - carefully, straight up. Do you understand?’
‘To free you. Of course.’
‘I’ll walk towards the centre of the helmet now,’ she said. ‘So that I am as central as possible when you lift the helmet. I don’t want you to snag me as you pick the thing up!’
‘I’ll be careful,’ I promised.
‘Then we are but minutes away from freedom,’ she cried, delightedly. ‘For both of us!’
‘No more delay,’ I promised. I dropped straight down to my belly and wriggled like a tadpole. My head went under the wall, and my shoulders and chest followed, my arms by my side. I propelled myself by pushing with my feet, and by a generally wormy process of wriggling, inching forward. There was indeed light at the end of this shallow tunnel, as Lexanco had said: in fact the tunnel deepened as I passed into it, becoming broader and wider. Soon I was able to crawl. I passed underneath several dozen metres of helmet-wall above, the tunnel deepening all the time. Before long I was able to stand upright, and as soon as I could I was running for the light - a widening smile-shaped space of brightness directly ahead.
I leapt—
—and landed, tumbling and rolling, inside the control room of the TARDY itself. I was free!
I came to rest against the far wall of the machine, with its curious pattern of inset circular alcoves, like gigantic exploded bubblewrap. ‘Lexanco!’ I cried. ‘I’m free!’
I got to my feet, and there was the Dr. He was standing on the other side of the helmet in one of the doors.
‘Where the bloody gecko did you come from?’ he exclaimed. He had a look best described as ‘startled’.
‘Doctor! I was trapped inside the helmet!’
‘What helmet?’ said the Dr crossly. He had, evidently, just woken up from his nap. When I say woken up, I mean, was in the middle of the slow and crotchety process of waking up. He glowered blearily at me. ‘What are you talking about?’
Meeting Lexanco had impressed itself so deeply upon me - love fountaining from my heart and filling my chest - that I couldn’t think, for a moment, how I had gotten inside the helmet in the first place. ‘Linn,’ I said, and it came back to me. ‘Linn and I decided to go outside and complete the mission whilst you were asleep.’
‘But the air would be poison to you,’ the Dr snapped, rubbing his left eye. ‘I told you that.’
‘We found two helmets inside the console there,’ I explained. ‘Breathing apparatus. We were going to put them on and . . .’
‘What are you talking about?’ the Dr demanded, grouchily. ‘What helmets?’
He took a step forward.
Oh! That fatal, sleepy stride! How I wish he had stayed put - how I wish now he had carried on napping in whichever TARDY antechamber he had gone to. Or, at the very least, if only he had put his foot forward with less forcefulness; if he had tiptoed, or shuffled, rather than flinging his whole leg, like a championship Strider competing for the Striding Cup.
‘Doctor! No!’ I cried. Or do I only imagine that I cried out in this Bond-like fashion, in the nightmares that have haunted me since that day? Was I not, rather, struck dumb with the horror of what was happening right in front of me? Is this my subconscious prompting me to do something, to try and prevent the inevitable? Those nightmares! They plague me still!
The Dr’s foot connected with the helmet, still lying on the floor in the middle of the control room. Inadvertently the Dr booted it. It flew, with the force of a well struck football, in a fast, straight line; skimming a little way above the floor. It struck the far wall, and bounced back, turning in the air; ricocheting off the central panel, and then rolling to a halt. It turned, and turned, and then clonked upright, rattling briefly on its rim before settling back on the floor.
‘My toe!’ cursed the Dr. ‘Who left that damn thing there in the middle of the floor?’
But I was frozen to the spot in shock. ‘No!’ I gasped. ‘No!’ I rushed to the helmet and gingerly, very gingerly, I lifted it up. There was nothing - a nothing that for the briefest flickering instant fed my hopes (of course, it was absurd - but hope, as love, can subsist upon absurdity). But then, with the very slightest sensation of weight shifting inside the thing, she came tumbling out. She fell, collapsing through the open bottom of the helmet to slump onto the floor of the TARDY - full sized at last—but—dead, as dead as could be.
I howled.
‘Will you keep it down?’ hissed the Dr. ‘Not only have I got a bit of a headache, but— now—I’ve hurt my toe.’
I imagine her walking dutifully towards the centre of the helmet, as we had agreed, looking forward to the moment when I would lift the device off her. But that never happened. Instead she must have seen the far wall of the helmet suddenly hurtling towards her. If the Dr, in the outside world, inadvertently kicked the helmet with enough force to propel it at, say, twenty miles an hour at the far wall, then on the inside it must have moved with a speed of several thousand miles an hour. Perhaps that solid wall of so many tonnes of metal, dashing towards her at the speed of a hyperbullet, had struck her before she had the chance to register what was happening. Per
haps she died in a blissful ignorance. I can only hope so.
Anyway, I cried.
Chapter Ten
THE GENESIS, DEUTERONOMY AND BOOK OF TOBIT OF THE GARLEKS
It was a dark and stormy night on the planet of Skary. At the same time it was a bright and sunny day. That’s the thing with planets: it’s night and day at the same time on any given planet. Planets, with their offensive roundness, thumb their noses at the simple rule that night follows day in chronological order. There’s a reason for that chronological order, you know. It helps keep the timeline straight. This is one of the reasons why Time Gentlemen hate planets.
The TARDY materialised at dusk. It assumed the shape of a Skaryish Police Megaphone: a tube not unlike an alpine horn, although roughly twice as large. The Dr, Linn and I emerged from the round open mouth of the horn: it was like stepping out of an ivory cavemouth.
The air outside was cool. In the distance the landscape retained some of its beauty: purple-coloured mountains serrated the horizon; dark blue trees, tall as church spires, waved and hushed in the evening breeze. The sky was plum. But nearer at hand was evidence that a large scale war was being fought. We were standing upon a plain of churned mud, with so many craters that it looked like a stretch of brown bubble wrap in which all the bubbles have been popped. The stumps of wrecked trees, like burnt down fuses, poked up here and there. Away to the left a broken tank was half buried in dirt: one of those old style tanks on which the tank-tracks went all the way around the body in a giant parallelogram. Either it had been blackened by fire, or else somebody had gone to a lot of trouble with a tin of black paint and a brush. I assumed the former explanation was the more likely.
‘Well,’ said the Dr, looking around himself. ‘Here we are. The Planet Skary. The Skary Planet. A war has been being fought here . . .’ He paused. ‘Is that right? Has been being? It sounds a bit odd to me.’
‘No, I mean yes.’ I said. ‘I think that’s right.’
‘Perhaps it should be will have had been being? I get my tenses mixed up sometimes.’