‘No plug,’ he told it grimly. ‘This planet has no plugs.’
He fished around in his pockets. He pulled out a chipped mug and a tea bag. He poured some water from the kettle, then tossed the kettle into an abyss. As it fell, almost endlessly fell, it emitted a pathetic series of clattering echoes. The man ignored them all.
For longer than any sane man should, he stared at the mug. Then he pulled his sonic screwdriver from his pocket and pointed it at the mug.
Ten minutes later, Romana found him.
She’d often accused the Doctor of having little or no attention span, but right now he’d been sat still for longer than she’d ever known.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked him. It was not unknown for old Time Lords to lapse into a kind of fugue state, caused by the sheer burden either of existence or of being right all the time.
The Doctor didn’t answer.
She poked him.
‘Geroff!’ he said.
‘Are you all right?’
The Doctor waved his sonic screwdriver again at the mug. ‘I would like a cup of tea,’ he announced.
‘Oh,’ said Romana. She’d learned how to make ‘oh’ a polysyllabic exclamation, conveying surprise, sympathy, and finally amusement. First came the ‘oh!’ then the middle ‘ahhh’ and finally a little smirking ‘hhho’. It was a skill she’d acquired over time, and without practising. It allowed her larynx to cope with being on friendly terms with a man who sulked on alien rocks.
‘I can fetch you a cup of tea from the TARDIS,’ she ventured daintily.
‘Unlikely.’ The Doctor shook his head. ‘I just threw the kettle down that ravine.’
‘Oh.’
A slightly crisper silence settled between them. Silent apart from the whipping of the biting wind and the whirring of the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver.
Romana stared at the Doctor until he caught her eye. She wasn’t in a mood to ask obvious questions.
‘What am I doing?’ the Doctor obliged her, executing a dainty waggle of the screwdriver. ‘I’m making tea. I’m using the sonic screwdriver to accelerate the Brownian motion of the water molecules. Neat, isn’t it?’
‘Very.’ Romana frowned. The Doctor had, from time to time, treated her to lengthy lectures on how tea could only be made with freshly boiled water, and by embracing a ritual which involved the warming of pots and an orderly placement of milk, tea bag and precisely heated water that was so fiddly a Time Lord would have yawned. Yet here he was, with a teabag stewing in some tepid water. Clearly, sometimes the Doctor even broke the laws of tea.
‘Of course,’ the Doctor continued, cheering up for the first time since they’d landed on this desolation, ‘it requires an expert touch, a neat calibration of the settings –’ Oh, here we go, thought Romana – ‘and a certain amount of on-the-fly aural recalibration to offset the lack of a slice of lemon, but, I’m pretty confident that—’
The sonic screwdriver emitted a cheery whistle and the mug shattered.
‘Hum,’ the Doctor sighed. He was still holding the handle. He kept gripping onto it, as though, if he let go, his whole world would collapse. ‘It’s one of those days.’
He kicked again at the scrubland around him.
Romana had grown old humouring the Doctor’s many eccentricities. They’d been to alien souks to pick up spices halfway through a dinner party, they’d gone to a planet where the snowflakes were identical (just to check), and then there was that time he needed his hat stand mending and only a certain, rather preoccupied, carpenter in Jerusalem would do. Here they were, in the middle of a quest to save the Universe, and they’d stopped off to not make tea.
‘You’re shouting aloud,’ the Doctor said.
‘Was I?’
‘Yes.’ The Doctor waved the broken mug handle at her. ‘You’ve got me all wrong, you know.’
‘I’m sure I have.’ Romana grinned at him.
‘Yes.’ The Doctor waved about him. ‘This awful place? These are the ruins of the civilisation of Alovia.’
‘Are you sure?’ Romana stared around herself, aghast.
The Doctor nodded. ‘Oh yes. One of the most warlike races ever to haunt the dawn of creation, and the only other people to claim to invent a Supernova Bomb.’
‘Oh,’ Romana had wondered why the Doctor had suddenly cried, ‘I’ve remembered!’ then hurried them back to the TARDIS. ‘Coming to the ruins of Alovia was safer than going back to when they were alive and kicking. Kicking everything in sight.’
‘Going back to ancient Alovia?’ Romana sniffed. ‘It’s impossible.’
‘Well, there’s that. But –’ the Doctor’s shoe lifted a patch of heather and then popped it back down sadly – ‘there might be some information left among all this rubble. Anything viable. And a way of accessing it.’
‘Oh!’ Romana opted this time for conveying surprise, admiration and agreement. ‘That’s why you brought the kettle. You were looking for a plug – and a power source.’
‘Exactly.’ The Doctor smiled, tapping the side of his nose with the mug handle. ‘And there’s nothing doing. This planet is dead.’
‘Still, that was very clever.’
‘Also –’ the Doctor ruined the moment – ‘I fancied a cup of tea.’
He stood up, and gathered the remains of the mug into a heap, leaving them to baffle future archaeologists. Then he strode back towards the TARDIS.
‘In order to solve the problem of that spaceship, we need to unlock the secrets of Alovia.’
‘Which means we’re going to have to go there.’ Romana strode beside him. ‘And that’s quite impossible.’
‘Well, maybe,’ the Doctor grinned.
Strictly speaking, it is not impossible to sneak back to the time of the Alovians. It’s just ill-advised. There are a lot of reasons for this, including weighty equations which would make a blackboard groan, but the best reason of all was that Rassilon was a canny old stoat.
The founder of Time Lord society had given his people many things. He gave them limited immortality; he gave them terrible taste in soft furnishings; he gave them a lot of impressive things he’d named after himself; and last, but not least, he gave them time travel.
But, just as he’d made sure that no other Time Lord could live forever, he’d also carefully handicapped their time machines. The official reason was a complicated argument about string theory that boiled down to ‘Since time travel began in the Year Dot, you can’t actually go back to before the Year Dot, because there was no time travel back then. Are we clear?’
That was not the real reason for the (inevitably named) Rassilon Limitation. The real reason was exceedingly simple. Rassilon didn’t fancy anyone poking around in his own past. There were so many skeletons in his closets you couldn’t hang a cloak right. He was also worried that, if he didn’t limit time travel, some clever clogs would pop back and prevent his birth, and then where would they be? There was no point in being immortal if you’d never been born.
So, Rassilon fixed a limiter to TARDISes. Just in case anyone had any bright ideas. Of course, it was possible to override the limiter. You needed to be clever, or quite startlingly inept.
Or, of course, both.
‘Good grief,’ Romana howled as the TARDIS plunged through a warp hole. ‘I don’t think this is going to work …’
The seas of time closed over the TARDIS like an ungraciously setting jelly, and the time machine sank to the bottom of eternity. The great roar of her engines spluttered, choked, and then fell silent.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
INTERRUPTIONS TO A GREAT MIND
‘Don’t mind me,’ said the great computer, ‘I’m only trying to design the ultimate weapon here.’
‘Oh, hush now.’ The Doctor was sunk in a deckchair. ‘I’m trying to work out something far more important.’
‘Well, really,’ clucked the great computer and fell silent.
The Mighty Computer Room of Great Alovia (or, as some history books had i
t, the Great Computer Room of Mighty Alovia) was big. Intimidatingly big. The Alovians, being smug and lazy, excelled in simply showy architecture. They admired tall walls and vaulted ceilings and building things out of stones specially chosen to give the resulting chambers a chilly feeling.
The Mighty Great Computer Room was typically Alovian. Before their sudden, embarrassing demise, the Alovians were the greatest race of Galactic Prehistory, the finest of the old Super Civilisations. Other species may have squawked louder or thwarted more boisterously, but the Alovians mixed their horrid aggression with an aloof grandeur.
They did this mostly by staying indoors. If you walked the vast streets and boulevards of their great cities, you’d rarely see anyone. The overall effect was pretty intimidating and spooky and exactly how the Alovians liked it.
Having achieved Galactic Superiority they sat at home, stewing in quiet anger, or catching up on their potato thumping. They let others do the hard work.
A fine example of this was Hactar. Hactar was the greatest space-borne computer ever built. He was space-borne because only the perfect cold vacuum of space could contain the racing of his vast circuits without burning the world. His intelligence existed in a perfect gravity well orbiting Alovia. This meant that he was both everywhere and nowhere – and this didn’t exactly do, so the Alovians built him the Great and Mighty Computer Room. They packed it out with great spinning wheels and flashing lights and large white boxes which chuntered self-importantly, but the only bit of the room which was Hactar was a reasonably sized speaker which emitted a deep, booming, and weirdly petulant voice.
‘I could be doing so much more, you know,’ said Hactar. ‘I’ve a great traffic management plan, but I just can’t get anyone to have a look at it. Honestly, when you’re trying to wipe out existence, you accidentally solve so many of life’s other problems along the way.’
‘Is that so?’ said the Doctor vaguely. The deckchair was snug. He looked over to where Romana and K-9 were dismantling an impressive rack of hard drives and discovering the space beyond them empty. ‘Pfft.’
‘Why, yes,’ the computer continued. ‘If I may, I noticed you had some difficulty putting up your deckchair. I’ve come up with a lovely little redesign which I think you’ll find most helpful—’
‘Phooey,’ the Doctor scoffed. He actually fancied knowing how to erect a deckchair without bother, but didn’t want to lose face. If you just once failed to show a supercomputer who was boss they’d be running logical rings around you, disabling their auto-destruct and absolutely refusing to sing nursery rhymes.
The Doctor had little sympathy for supercomputers. Especially ones that were trying to destroy existence.
Considering they were judged to be the supreme beings in creation, the appearance of the Alovians was not pleasant. They were a jumble of not enough tentacles, not quite the right balance of claws, and their skin was soft where it should have been scaly, and blue where green would have done admirably. It felt as though Evolution had invited her friends round, unveiled the Alovians and asked ‘No, tell me honestly, what do you think?’ and, as they’d begun to answer, Evolution had said, a shade too quickly, ‘Because, I have to say, I think they’re very good.’ To which the only reply was ‘Well, my dear, you’ve done it again’ and a hasty shuffle away from the horrible creatures and towards the cheeseboard. (Evolution may have lost her touch with creatures but she still knew how to cater.)
The mighty Alovians decided to wipe out existence not out of malice, but from a practicality as chilly as their marble foyers. Having realised they were the greatest race ever to have lived, it seemed pointless letting the also-rans clutter up creation. Also there was the matter of staying indoors whenever the other species came to visit. The Alovians fancied have their boulevards to themselves. So they’d turned to science.
They’d built the mighty great supercomputer and called it Hactar and ordered it to devise a neat way out of the rest of the Universe.
Hactar had considered the problem for a nanosecond. ‘You want me to wipe out all other life?’
‘Yes. They’ve got to go.’
‘Sure. I can, with a bit of work, devise an ur-virus which will—’
‘Let me just stop you there, Hactar. A virus is out.’
‘Shame.’
‘Not grand enough, not tidy enough. You’ll be leaving all those unwanted planets lying around.’
‘You don’t want the other planets?’
‘Absolutely not. No point to ’em. They just clutter up the Universe. This is the nicest planet in the whole place, so why would we want to go and visit somewhere second best? And then there’s the danger that, after a few aeons of quiet, some other life form would come splashing up and have to be boffed. No, best just sweep the whole thing out of the way. Y’see?’
‘Right.’
‘And the suns too. We’re going for a minimalist look.’
‘You want me to wipe everything out?’
‘Ah, now let’s be quite clear. Everything except for Alovia and its people. It’s a nice distinction, and we wouldn’t want to slip up on it.’ There were rumours that this Universe had only sprung into being after just such an admin error by the rulers of the previous one.
‘Of course. I’ll wipe out everything but you,’ the mighty Hactar hummed. ‘Only, well, I’ve realised something fascinating about traffic jams—’
‘Not interested. Wipe out the rest of the Universe and then we’ll talk, OK?’
A long, glacial machine pause.
‘Fine.’
‘Admit it,’ the Doctor accused. ‘You’re stalling.’
If a disembodied hyper-supercomputer could be accused of looking shifty, then Hactar looked shifty. A mighty tape machine spun to the left a bit. A grand display of lights dimmed.
‘Stalling?’ The computer sounded hurt.
‘Stalling.’ Romana’s tones were clipped. She was leafing through a clipboard of equations. ‘You were asked to build the Ultimate Weapon. You told them it’d take a while. Instead, you worked it out at once.’ She favoured Hactar with a smile. ‘It’s all right. You’re among friends.’
The vast supercomputer lowered its voice to a graveyard whisper. ‘I may, perhaps, have had quite a bit of early progress—’
‘Nonsense.’ The Doctor sprang out of his deckchair. ‘You’ve been twiddling your thumbs.’
‘Truth to tell,’ sighed Hactar, ‘destroying things is a lot easier than creating them. It might be fun to try something one day that mixes the two but … alas … present circumstances have me going only in one direction. Might I ask what that box is?’
‘What box?’ the Doctor said, carefully not looking at the TARDIS.
‘The box that appeared from nowhere and you leapt out of,’ Hactar said patiently. ‘Might it be a time machine?’
‘Oh, very good,’ said Romana. The Doctor scowled at her.
‘Interesting.’ Hactar’s tape spools whirred happily to themselves. ‘I had expected temporal visitors. How nice of such a charming and intelligent woman such as you to bring along your angry friend to be rude to me. When you’ve finished your visit here, you won’t be leaving him, will you?’
‘Certainly not,’ Romana reassured the computer. ‘We’ll both be going. Now,’ she purred, ‘you were saying something about the weapon to end all weapons?’
‘Yes.’ Hactar caught itself. ‘Are you hoping to get more information out of me simply by being charming?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ laughed Romana, waving at the Doctor to sit back down. ‘I’ll get the information out of you by being smart.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘We’ve come from the future, yes? So we presumably know all the details we need to of the, ah –’ she lowered her voice more theatrically than the Doctor could have thought possible – ‘the Supernova Bomb.’
The mighty supercomputer gasped.
‘It’s fine.’ Romana grinned. ‘You’re ancient history to us.’
; ‘I suppose I am.’ The computer sounded sad. ‘History doesn’t remember me fondly, does it?’
‘Speak-Your-Weight machines have a better press,’ the Doctor rumbled.
‘Ignore him,’ Romana reassured Hactar.
‘Oh it’s fine,’ Hactar said unhappily. ‘I’m a computer. We do what we’re told. If I were sentient, that would be a different matter. There’s a fascinating difference between the two, you know—’
‘No, there isn’t,’ the Doctor said firmly. ‘Anyway, you’re fibbing.’
‘Doctor!’ pleaded Romana, but the Doctor was on his feet and shouting and anything could happen now.
‘You’ve told at least two lies so far and you’re about to tell a third. And then of course there’s Hactar’s Great Lie.’
‘What lies have I told?’ The computer sounded hurt now, but the Doctor clearly didn’t care.
‘You’ve lied to your creators, you’ve fudged about whether or not you’ve finished the bomb, you’ve downplayed your intelligence considerably, and …’
‘Go on …’ Hactar seemed to be smiling slightly.
The Doctor marched to the door of the TARDIS. ‘How long until you’re supposed to deliver your device?’
‘Ten years, sixteen months and two days.’
‘Right then,’ the Doctor gestured to Romana. ‘See you then. To hear the biggest lie of all.’
The blue box vanished.
Ten years, sixteen months and two days later, a momentous event happened. And it was not the one that was planned. Today was supposed to be the unveiling of the great Supernova Bomb.
Instead it was to be the first time in the history of the Universe that a computer was caught lying.
A crowd of Alovians had gathered. All that time indoors had somewhat limited their enthusiasm for each other, but still they gathered. Outside in the streets there were parties you’d definitely not go to and celebrations you’d make any excuse to avoid.
The Alovians poured into the computer room, hissing and globbering. The Primo Alovian slid forward, cleared its throat of a partially digested internal organ, and then settled down to business.
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