Notions of heroism have always been problematic, but now heroes appear quaint relics of an age when a white man could save the day just by walking into a room and imposing his moral values on the ‘bad guy’. Following the attacks of September 11th 2001,¹³ we all know the problems of the world aren’t so easily defined, let alone solved. Heroism is not relevant to the current international paradigm, and seems out of context in domestic political situations. It is no coincidence that the ‘heroes’ of modern narratives, while often good family men and patriots,¹⁴ are often troubled, flawed characters with fragmented, traumatic pasts,¹⁵ endlessly condemned to nightmares and flashbacks of some loved one they couldn’t save.¹⁶ A post-modern hero,^{17, 18, 19} then, is on a journey of self-examination and self-validation. He is darker than the world around him, condemned to enact a revenge fantasy that will merely restore the world to imperfect, pluralist normality for an indifferent general population,²⁰ rather than to spread his virtues to inspire a ‘better society’. Rather than ‘Holding Out for a Hero’²¹ it is easy to conclude that most modern observers would actually find all the forms and attributes of traditional heroism old-fashioned and actively undesirable.

Extract from a book of essays by a

prominent popular historian, 2003

Chapter One

New and Missing Adventures

The walls were meant to be soundproof.

Mondova had spent a great deal of time and money trying to block out the noises and sights of the vast city below. The terraces of his palace had been built miles high so that they enjoyed a cool breeze, not the mephitis that belched from the armament plants, germ foundries and war-robot factories which clung to the narrow streets. Here, although the air was thin, Mondova rose above the concerns of his subjects.

Now, though, as he stood on the edge of the very highest terrace, he could hear the loudspeakers telling people to stay in their homes. Worse, he could hear that those proclamations were being drowned out by cheering crowds. Laughter and insolence. Music was being played. Mondova hated music, and had banned it as his first act as monocrat, over two hundred years before. Slogans were being chanted. He could hear what sounded very like a vast statue being toppled. On this planet, there were only statues of one person. Was it the one in Victory Square, Mondova wondered, where he was holding a spear aloft in one hand, a peasant’s head in the other? That was his very favourite.

‘Crallan!’ he yelled. ‘Crallan, what in the name of the Seven Systems is happening?’

His chancellor ran into the room, already cowering, almost tripping over his dark grey robes.

‘My Lord Mondova.’

‘Where are my bodyguards?’

‘They’ve fled, my lord.’

‘Scum! I knew they would be unreliable. That’s why I had my Kyborgs built. Deploy them in the streets. Wipe out this resistance.’

‘The Kyborg legion changed allegiance to the rebels, my lord. That’s why the bodyguards fled.’

Mondova hesitated.

‘Then I have no choice. Call in the space fleet. Order them to atomise the city.’

‘The space fleet has gone, my lord.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

Crallan shrugged. ‘We haven’t managed to figure that one out yet.’

‘It is the most powerful space navy in the galaxy. It has snuffed out stars, Crallan. Civilisations spanning whole sectors of space have surrendered at the mere thought I would launch my fleet against them. It has campaigned, unbeaten, for over two centuries.’

‘No longer, sir. It’s… gone.’

The cybernetic regulators of Mondova’s stomach skipped a track. He lurched at Crallan, grabbed him with one armoured hand, lifted him into the air.

‘We have to regroup. Gather those still loyal to me, bring them here to the sanctum! I’m not defeated, you hear me?’

He dropped Crallan, who picked himself up and dusted himself off. ‘Of course, my lord.’

‘Find my daughter,’ the monocrat growled, concerned with little else now.

‘I’m here, Father.’

She was so beautiful. The slits, folds and colours of her exquisitely tailored outfit contrived to make her long legs longer, the curve of her back more graceful, the blue of her skin more delicate, the white of her hair more vivacious. Her eyes burned with gold fire, just as her mother’s had done.

‘I have been persuaded of the error of my ways, Father. For twenty decades you have bullied your subjects, killed them on a whim, sent them across the universe to die in your name.’

It was impossible to see Mondova’s face behind the burnished-steel mask, so he didn’t seem to react as Crallan pushed his way past his daughter to flee the room.

The monocrat’s voice sounded calm, when it came. ‘Persuaded by whom, may I ask?’

She smiled. ‘He only arrived here this morning, but… he opened my eyes, Father. He showed me what was really going on in the city. He’s given the people down there hope.’

Mondova watched her carefully. There was defiance in those opened eyes. A joyfulness he’d never seen before.

He had lost her.

He toyed with the idea of reaching over and snapping her neck.

‘Who?’ he asked instead.

‘The Doctor,’ she said simply.

‘Doctor?’ Mondova roared. ‘Doctor who?’

A man stepped into the room. He was not an old man, but neither was he really a young man. His long face was oval, with an aristocratic nose and a full mouth. He had a high forehead, framed with long, dark-brown hair. His skin was milky-pale. He wore a long, dark velvet coat that flapped behind him.

‘I think that’s my cue,’ he said, a little shamefaced. ‘There comes a time when you have to accept it’s over. It’s over, Mondova. Your power base is destroyed, your people have spoken. There’s no place in the universe for tyrants like you.’

Behind the Doctor were his companions.

‘Hi, I’m Fitz, this is Trix. Glad we caught you.’

Fitz was a scruffy, tall man in his thirties and Trix was a little younger, slim and elegant. They had grabbed Crallan, and were leading him back into the room.

The Doctor held up a small silver device, some sort of tool. It emitted a whirr so faint it could barely be heard.

‘No…’ Mondova managed, before gravity caught up with him.

The armour crumpled to the floor, the man inside sagging with it.

‘Too heavy,’ he wheezed.

The metal plates that cocooned him had been kept weightless by the generators. But now the mechanisms he had designed and built were broken, fused. The armour was just ordinary scrap metal. The Doctor was pulling it off him, piece by piece. Mondova looked down at his own bare arms and chest as the armour came clear of them, surprised to see how slight and pale he had allowed his body to become.

Finally, the Doctor tugged off the helmet. He held it up for a moment, looked into its empty eye slits. Then he tossed it over the edge of the terrace, to the city below.

The Doctor looked down at the naked old man at his feet.

Then he held out his hand, to help him up.

‘It’s over,’ he told him. This time, Mondova believed it.

An hour and a half later and very far away, a police box that wasn’t a police box sped through a place where there was no time and no space.

As with a book, you couldn’t judge the TARDIS from what it looked like on the outside. It appeared to be an old wooden police-telephone box with peeling blue paint, but (again like a book) inside it was far larger, more grand and complicated. And, as with the best novels, you couldn’t always tell where it was going. The TARDIS was a machine capable of travelling to any point in space and time. That alone would be enough to make it special, but what really made it unique was that it was the place the Doctor called home.

As with his ship, there was more to the Doctor than met the eye. He was an adventurer, a bookworm, a champion, a detective, an explorer, a father and grandfather, a historian, an iconoclast, a jackanapes, a know-it-all, a lord, a meddler, a nuisance; he was old, a physician and a quack, a renegade, a scientist, a traveller, a utopian, a violinist, a widower, a xoanon; he was youthful and he was a zealot.

One thing he wasn’t, though, was human. Two hearts beat in his chest. He’d lived for centuries, at the very least. The Doctor didn’t think much about his past; he rarely talked about it, even with his friends. He lived in the now, the only time that meant anything to someone who could spend yesterday in the far future and tomorrow in the olden days.

Now he stood at the central console, right in the middle of the cavernous control room, the very first room you’d come to if you’d just stepped inside the TARDIS. The console was hexagonal, the size of a large desk. Thrusting out from the centre right up to the ceiling was a powerful piston, encased in a glass tube. It rose and fell, pulsing with blue light as it did so. The Doctor watched it, almost hypnotised. He was still wearing his frock coat. He would occasionally break away to start operating controls, check readouts and generally fuss about. He wasn’t steering the ship, though, so much as trying to decide where it was heading.

The Doctor was smiling to himself. A tyrant toppled was always a good day’s work. The planet Mondova had taken control of had been a beautiful world of orchards, sculpture and music. Now it could be all those things again. That would be for the people there to decide.

In another part of the TARDIS the Doctor’s two companions, Fitz and Trix, were smiling too. They had also been celebrating the fall of Mondova and his regime. Unlike the Doctor, they had done this by going to Fitz’s room, by downing a couple of bottles of wine they’d liberated from the monocrat’s wine cellar, by turning up a record player and dancing, then by grabbing each other and kissing.

While they had known each other for some time now, and had both been living in the TARDIS all that while, it was the first time Fitz and Trix had done any of these things together.

‘A day can be an awfully long time, can’t it?’ Trix noted, rolling on to her back, still a little breathless.

Fitz’s head had ended up somewhere around her midriff. He mumbled what sounded like an agreement.

‘What was that?’ Trix asked.

Fitz’s rather unshaven face emerged from the bed sheets. ‘I said you’ve got a flat stomach.’

‘Thank you. You could get one too, if you did a few push-ups.’

‘When did you first think we would…?’ he began.

‘I hoped we might when you put the record on,’ she said.

‘Really?’

Trix smiled. ‘Really. Why, have you been holding a torch for me for months, or something?’

‘No. Not like that. It was… it was this afternoon. When we were splashing around down in the catacombs. I thought that Kyborg had drowned you. When I saw you again, I realised then how much I’d missed you. How much you meant to me.’

Trix shifted, a little uncomfortable.

‘Hell,’ Fitz said quickly, sitting up. ‘Look, if this was just a, y’know, a thing, then it’s a thing. There’s a lot of lust in there. On my part, I mean. Those legs of yours… they’re long, aren’t they? Not freakishly long, obviously. But, well, what I’m saying is that if you want to keep this superficial, then I’m a pretty superficial person.’

Trix smiled. ‘I never doubted that for a second.’

‘Good, cos I mean it.’

‘What are you doing?’

Fitz pointed to the cigarette he’d just put in his mouth and turned his other hand to show her the lighter.

‘I know what you’re doing. What I meant was don’t do it.’

‘Not you as well. Does no one smoke in the future? Do you all just go straight to sleep?’

‘I’m not from the future, I’m from the present. You’re from the past, remember?’

Fitz smiled. ‘Yeah. Old enough to be your dad. I need a ciggie. Even though this is my room, and my record player, and my bed, I’ll go and find somewhere else to smoke. Happy?’

Trix sank back into the pillows. ‘Ecstatic,’ she assured him.

* * *

All his memories had come flooding back.

Rachel had done what Marnal had asked: shooed the relatives away, explained that she’d made a mistake and that he’d got better, and that, no, they couldn’t see him. It had taken over an hour to round them all up, convince them and herd them out to their Rovers, Audis and Lexuses. She’d gone back upstairs to find him in one of the many spare bedrooms.

‘Time Lords are the ruling class of the planet Gallifrey,’ Marnal began to explain. He vanished into the huge wardrobe, but his voice carried on. ‘All Time Lords have increased cranial capacity, blood with a vastly superior capacity to carry oxygen compared with haemoglobin, a body temperature of sixty degrees, a respiratory bypass system, a lindal gland, a reflex link…’

Rachel had started fidgeting halfway through the list, and had tuned out long before Marnal had finished.

‘Most importantly, Time Lords have the ability to regenerate our bodies if we are mortally injured.’

‘Are these characters in your books?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said coldly, returning from his journey with an armful of clothes. ‘This is what I am. The Time Lords are my people. Shortly, I will be rejoining them. I have to look my best.’

He started pulling on a pair of trousers that were a little too baggy on him.

‘They sound like your books, that’s all. I read some of your stuff when I was a kid. All about the Time Lords and their adventures, that was you, wasn’t it? I was never really into science fiction. I prefer real stuff.’

‘That was “real stuff”. That was my life. The early stories flowed so easily, I remembered some things, you see. But there came a point where…’ he paused for a moment, then started again. ‘I wrote everything I remembered down. There were always gaps, but I had to keep going. I was the only person who knew anything about Gallifrey, you see. I couldn’t ask. And I didn’t even remember its name.’

He was wearing a frilly Mr-Darcy-style shirt now. Over that, he pulled on a dark-blue blazer. It was a peculiar ensemble. He hurried over to the mirror and examined himself, pudging up his face with his fingers.

‘Um… This is all right, I suppose,’ he said to himself. ‘A little scrawny. A little young, but I’ll grow out of that.’

He shrugged off the blazer and found himself a velvet jacket.

‘And so what you did before… that was regeneration?’

‘That’s right. This’ – he pointed down at his own body – ‘is my thirteenth incarnation. The process renewed me, a surge of artron energy restored my damaged synapses. Gave me back all the memories I had lost.’

‘You were suffering from post-traumatic retrograde amnesia,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s rare, but it happens. In people, I mean.’

Marnal looked impressed as he discarded the jacket in favour of a light blue knee-length coat.

‘I got my degree,’ she reminded him. ‘And because of that, I know that there’s no such thing as a lindal gland or any of the other things you mentioned.’

‘You saw me change,’ Marnal reminded her. He was turning, admiring himself in the mirror. Then he threw away the coat, scowling at himself, and put the blazer back on.

‘I’ve been thinking about that. It was a dark room, and I was on my own in there. It could easily have been a trick. You’re one of the old man’s nephews or something.’

Marnal turned to her, stared at her.

‘You were the one that believed me,’ he said, a hint of cruelty in his voice.

Rachel hesitated, thought about it for a moment. ‘I do believe you,’ she said. At the very worst, it was a harmless fantasy.

‘Every word?’

‘Every word.’

‘It’s all true, I promise you. The world you know is just one of an infinity of worlds.’

He took her hand in his, pressed it against first one side of his chest, then the other. A heart beat on each side.

‘How are you going to get back?’ she asked.

He pulled a small cube from his pocket.

‘It was there all along, only I didn’t know what it was.’

He pressed it to his forehead, screwed his eyes shut.

‘There we go.’

He put the cube back in his pocket.

‘A telepathic signal. The miracle of time travel is that whenever they receive my message, they can dispatch someone to this exact point. We won’t have to wait.’

They waited.

The Doctor frowned and put down his book.

There was something there. He could hear it over the sound of the time engines.

He slipped out of the control room, through one of the many doors that led to the depths of the ship. He walked past the workshop and one of the smaller libraries, carried on down a winding corridor.

This was the corridor that led nowhere. You walked through a couple of doors, then after the last turn there was another fifty paces to walk, then there was just a wall, covered in the same round indentations as most of the other walls. The Doctor knew that his time-space machine was very large, so large he hadn’t been able to explore it all. But he knew this corridor well. He thought of it as the back wall of the TARDIS.

Sometimes, when his companions were asleep, he would come down to the back wall. The Doctor knew Fitz had discovered this place too. Fitz had never tried to discuss it with him. The Doctor didn’t know if he’d ever heard the strange noises. If Fitz spent any time down here, he would have heard the scratching. Today was no different. He must have wondered if an animal was trapped on the other side. Or perhaps a person, their fingernails grown into claws over the centuries they’d been down here.

‘Oh… Hi.’

The Doctor turned to see Fitz. His companion was wearing a tatty dressing gown, and had one hand stuck in his pocket. The noises behind the wall had stopped.

‘Come down here for a smoke?’ the Doctor asked.

Fitz removed the hand, and the packet of cigarettes that had been in there with it, from his pocket.

‘Yeah… er… you weren’t waiting down here to catch me, were you?’

‘No. I often come down here.’

‘You mind?’ Fitz asked, taking out a cigarette. Then: ‘I mean if you want one, then of course…’

The Doctor looked pained.

‘Yeah, all right, just being polite.’ Fitz lit the cigarette and took a draw from it to get it going. ‘How did you know?’

The Doctor pointed to the pile of around a hundred cigarette butts on the floor. ‘Elementary, my dear Fitz.’

His companion nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, well, this ship may be full of stuff, but there’s not one ashtray.’

‘Cigarettes will be the death of you,’ the Doctor said.

Fitz took the cigarette from his mouth. ‘You know that for a fact?’

The Doctor looked askance at him.

‘Hey, look, sometimes you know the future, yeah? You being a time-traveller. I’ve seen you do that “I know you” stuff, and then you tell someone their destiny.’

‘I’ve not done that for ages,’ the Doctor laughed.

‘So you don’t know how I die?’

‘No. There are some things it’s better not knowing.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you all right? You look like there’s something on your mind.’

Fitz looked distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Er… look. Didn’t mean to interrupt. I’ll get back to… I’ll go back to my room.’

It had been an hour. Marnal had been sitting in the same spot, the same look of expectation on his face the whole time. He’d been writing up today’s events in his diary, scribbling away happily. He’d not once asked Rachel for her side of the story.

‘I don’t think they’re coming,’ Rachel said gently.

‘I don’t understand why they haven’t shown up. There must be a good reason.’

‘So how did you end up here on Earth?’ Rachel asked.

He was clearly a little irritated by the question. ‘I’ll explain later.’

‘Don’t you have a rocket or a flying saucer or something? You could go to them.’

Marnal shook his head sadly. ‘My TARDIS was taken from me.’

‘TARDIS?’

Marnal took a deep breath before starting. ‘It stands for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. TARDISes are semi-sentient dimensionally transcendental time-space machines created using block transfer computations and powered via the Eye of Harmony. They dematerialise from one point expressed as a set of relative space-time coordinates and travel via the time vortex until they rematerialise at another point. My TARDIS was a Type…’

Rachel listened carefully, wondering if she should take notes.

‘So you’re stuck on Earth?’ she asked, when she was sure he’d finished.

‘Yes.’

‘No alien technology at all? Not, of course, that you’d think of it as alien.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Is there no other way to get in touch?’

Marnal thought for a moment. ‘There may be,’ he concluded. ‘We need to check the library.’

The Doctor was back in the control room, sitting in his chair with his book.

There was a chime from the console. The Doctor finished the scene he was reading and headed over. The computer display was scrolling data too fast for human eyes to take it in. The Doctor read it carefully, then read it again to make sure.

He reached out, a little tentatively, and flicked a couple of switches. He waited for this to take effect, then adjusted a dial. There was an anomalous reading coming from Earth. He tried to pinpoint the time zone.

Trix was sneaking past him.

‘I can see you,’ he told her, without looking up. ‘Getting itchy feet?’

‘Eh?’

‘Can’t wait to land?’

Trix relaxed. ‘No, sorry. Looking for something in the fridge.’ She was in silk pyjamas. ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma?’ she asked.

‘Yes. I met Shaw at one of Wilde’s parties.’

‘I didn’t think Shaw drank.’

‘He didn’t drink spirits or beer. He drank champagne. “Doctor,” he told me, “I’m not a champagne teetotaller.”’

‘That gives me an idea,’ she said, resuming her journey to the TARDIS fridge. ‘Wait a second. Oscar Wilde?’

The Doctor smiled and nodded. ‘March 1895. Around the time of the McCarthy murder. Sherlock Holmes solved the case before I could, as I recall.’

‘Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character,’ Trix pointed out.

The Doctor grinned. ‘My dear, one of the things you’ll learn is that it’s all real. Every word of every novel is real, every frame of every movie, every panel of every comic strip.’

‘But that’s just not possible. I mean some books contradict other ones and –’

The Doctor was ignoring her. ‘We’re heading to Earth, 40 BC. We’ve had to change course to avoid resolving a quantum storm front. We should have landed any minute, but it’ll be more like three hours now.’

‘Oh. OK. Three hours?’ she asked.

‘You don’t mind?’

Trix had a bottle of champagne tucked under her arm. ‘Not at all. I’m sure Fitz and I will be able to fill the time somehow.’

‘Jolly good,’ the Doctor replied, returning to his study of the readouts as she hurried away.

* * *

Marnal was pacing around the library now. He kept playing with the lapels of his blazer, and clearly loved it. Rachel wondered if it was a little too tight for him.

Most libraries consisted of books written by other people, but this one was different. There were a dozen bookcases, packed with volumes of all sizes from big leather-bound books to yellowing paperbacks. There were also papers, pamphlets and notebooks stuffed into every available space, and countless magazines, comics and journals. Every single thing here had been written by Marnal. How many words, Rachel wondered. Tens of millions, easily, she thought, although she had no real idea how many words there were in a novel.

She had looked him up a few months ago, when the agency told her that her new patient was an author. She had a vague feeling that she recognised the name, but she couldn’t place it. She hadn’t found ‘Marnal’ in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, between Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field and Marney, Lord. Or in Cultural Icons, between Marley, Bob, and Marsalis, Wynton. She’d gone online. There weren’t any books in print on Amazon, although The Emergents and The Kraglon Inheritance were listed. Bookfinder was little better – she put in an order for The Witch Lords, the one book her search revealed, but was emailed back by the seller and told the copy had just been sold. On Google she got a list of autoparts and vitamin retailers. When she added ‘science+fiction’ she got one hit: a page in Spanish that she decided was best left untranslated. It had taken her a couple of days at a library, and a brief correspondence with a science-fiction society, to find out anything more tangible. This had sparked off some memories. She’d read a couple of his novels, but couldn’t remember very much about them.

There was something sad and strange about finding all these forgotten books here, together in one place, gathering dust. It was the literary equivalent of the lost gardens of Heligan. That’s what everyone thought of Marnal, if they thought of him at all: a rich, colourful mind that had become overgrown, tangled as it grew old. An author of popular adventure fiction who had succumbed to senility without realising it, whose books had become an impenetrable jungle, alienating even his most loyal fans.

‘Where do we start?’ she asked.

She reached up, moved aside a Hugo Award and pulled down a copy of The Strand Magazine that had almost fallen apart.

Carefully, she opened it, and flicked past pictures of Moriarty and Holmes and the falls at Reichenbach until she found the story she was looking for. ‘The Giants, by Marnal,’ she read. ‘Once, long ago, on an island in a sea of clouds, there was a land where giants walked. The giants lived amongst the other peoples of that land, and they used their great strength to help them. But the power of the giants was too great, their hands were too strong, their tread too heavy and the more they tried to help the people, the greater was the destruction that they caused. Until the people that they had tried to help were no more.’

Marnal took the magazine from her. ‘The first myth of the Time Lords, and my first foray into the Terran literary world.’

Rachel sifted through a pile of Pearson’s Magazine, The Idler, The Graphic and more copies of The Strand.

‘These are all over a hundred years old,’ she told him.

‘George Bernard Shaw was first published in 1884,’ Marnal replied. ‘He was still writing when he died in 1950, and the obituaries said his was the longest literary career this world had ever seen. Since 1960, I believe that honour has belonged to me. I don’t think anyone ever noticed. These books represent the longest-running science-fiction series anywhere in the world, an exercise in world-building that –’

‘Well, no one’s written your obituary,’ Rachel interrupted. ‘And they probably think “Marnal” is a pseudonym like, I dunno, Hergé or Saki or Iain M. Banks or something.’

Marnal waved his hand. ‘What I need is in one of these books, but I can’t remember which one.’

‘What? I thought you had your memories back?’

‘I have a good memory, but not total recall. That’s one of the reasons I wrote all these. There had to be a record. Help me to look. I think it’s in one of the Arrows. A paragraph describing the main temporal monitoring chamber.’

He reached up and pulled down an armful of colourful paperbacks. Rachel took them. They all had lurid covers variously depicting bronzed men in flowing robes standing over scantily clad (but not too scantily clad) women, spaceships shaped like egg timers, monsters that looked like trolls, vampires and icky worms.

‘Whatever the books’ literary merits, their covers were always a problem,’ Marnal conceded. ‘Come on – we have work to do.’

 

There was structure, the universe was a web made not of spider’s silk but of space and time.

But in such a cosmos, one of fluxing quad-dimensionality, who was to say what was cause and what was effect? Even the newly woven children of his world understood the solution to that solemn inquiry: there was no history, don’t you see, only established history. Time was an ocean of broth, rich in elements and possibilities. Observations could be made to spot trends and to predict, for the oceans of time were subject to the laws of temporal mechanics. But these were projections of reality, not the reality itself as long as the Lords of Time remained in their Citadel, merely watching. Yet, if a single one among them were to cease observation and to step out into the universe, they would freeze time wheresoever their feet touched the ground, wheresoever they drew breath from the atmosphere. At that moment, their mere presence would change time, from a fluid to a solid thing. If one of the Lords of Time but glanced into the night’s sky, the stars would become true in the instant they were seen, and thence back for every picosecond of the ten thousand years of the stars’ photons’ journey. When a time-traveller swam in this ocean, it solidified around them, crystallised, became transmuted into that which could never change. And so was written the most sacred law of all – for even the softest touch of a Lord of Time could condemn a man to existence or non-existence, bring empires into being and destine them to ruin, and blot out the sky or fill it with heavenly radiance. Observe. Never interfere.

Extract from The Hand of Time (1976) by Marnal

Chapter Two

Gone

Rachel put the book down. She wasn’t sure that ‘destine’ was really a word, or that ‘flux’ was a verb, but they might have been. Marnal had been a writer for a hundred years longer than she’d been alive, so she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

She was skimming through the gaudy paperbacks, looking for the words ‘temporal’ (which appeared a lot, almost as often as ‘anomaly’ and ‘eldritch’), ‘monitoring’ and ‘chamber’. It was like a one-armed bandit, she thought – every so often one of the words would spin into view, but not all three of them at once in a row. So she hadn’t hit the jackpot. Marnal was making slow work of it. Reverentially lifting the books, opening them ever so carefully, treating them like medieval parchment.

‘This is the entire history of Gallifrey,’ he explained. ‘Or at least everything I remember. A record of the greatest civilisation the universe has ever seen.’

‘If they’re stories,’ Rachel began, ‘then, er, how true are they?’

Marnal glared at her.

‘Because every time you write something down you, er, well it’s like you say here. You crystallise it. If you do that, you change it. Yeah?’

Marnal was still giving her that stare of his.

Rachel dug herself in a little deeper. ‘You have to change it a little, to make it a story in the first place. Tidy it up, make sure it’s entertaining. Your own opinions inevitably seep into the story, don’t they?’

‘Everything happened like I said it did,’ he told her firmly. ‘Everything. That’s the whole point of writing it down. Humans might not be able to write what happened down without skewing it and ruining the truth of it. I can, and I did.’

He continued his search, in silence. Rachel made a half-hearted effort to do the same. Almost straight away, though, she found what they were looking for.

‘The Time of Neman, page 104,’ she said.

Marnal snatched the book from her, and scanned it quickly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well done.’

‘Er… Now what?’

‘We build one of these,’ he said, stabbing his finger at the page and passing the book back to her.

‘A temporal monitoring chamber?’

‘Yes.’

‘Er…’

‘If you know the true way to read it, this book contains codes and hints for building a pocket universe that maps every aspect of the real one. Using such a device, we’ll be able to see Gallifrey.’

Rachel looked down. ‘That book?’ she said.

Marnal’s eyes glinted. ‘If you clear a space on the dining table, I’ll show you.’

After half an hour Marnal had assembled all sorts of things from the garage and various piles of junk around the house. A big glass bottle from a home-brewing kit, an old portable television, what looked like a section from a recording studio’s mixing desk. After about an hour’s work connecting them up with cables to a row of smelly old car batteries, he stood back.

To Rachel’s amazement, the inside of the glass bottle had gone dark, then tiny bright dots had started to resolve.

‘Galaxies,’ Marnal assured her. He was twiddling with the mixing-desk controls, checking the television screen, which was full of what looked like Greek symbols.

‘Greek?’ she asked.

He smiled condescendingly. ‘No, these are letters of the Gallifreyan omegabet.’

‘Which is like an alphabet, but superior?’

‘The last word, you might say.’

Rachel peered into the bottle. Wherever she looked, she was able to focus in and in and in and in and in. So the galaxies became stars, became planets, became patches of land. It made her eyes go funny, and she had to blink and start again a couple of times. She saw something that looked like the moon, only the rocks were more jagged and there was a strange purple sky. Things that looked like woodlice were burying themselves in the soft sand.

Aliens, she realised. She was looking at alien life forms.

Then the contents of the bottle faded away, and she found herself staring at Marnal’s face on the other side, distorted in the clear, curved glass. He was holding the power cable, which he’d unplugged from the car batteries.

‘These will go flat in a matter of minutes. I need a better power supply,’ he told her. ‘I’ll construct a cold-fusion reactor. Shouldn’t take long.’

‘But no one knows how to do that,’ Rachel said.

‘No one on Earth. It’s child’s play to my people. Your human children rub sticks together to make fire?’

‘I was a Girl Guide, but I was useless at all that.’

Marnal gave her a forgiving smile. ‘Well, fusion is just a simple matter of rubbing helium nuclei together to make energy.’

‘And it’s safe?’

‘Oh yes. Completely clean.’

‘You could solve loads of problems on Earth,’ she told him. ‘The energy crisis, the dependence on fossil fuels, air pollution, cheap space travel…’

‘Yes, but there are more pressing matters. I have one last car battery.’

He connected it up and started scanning star systems.

‘Now, it’s towards the galactic core, it should be around…’ He paused. ‘I don’t understand. It’s gone.’

‘What do you mean gone?’

‘If I could answer that question… I can’t find Gallifrey. I can’t even see Kasterborous. Anywhere in space or time.’

‘You don’t want to go to a genuine Roman orgy?’ the Doctor said, astonished.