Doctor Who: Ultimate Treasure (11 page)

'So, if they're both false, that means neither way is the right one,' said Gribbs.

'Yeah, well maybe that's what they want us to think,' said Qwaid. 'Suppose it's a double-cross? Come on.'

Both paths terminated in dead ends. They had to retrace their footsteps to the original unmarked divergence of the main track and set off down a fresh path.

'Right, so I've got the idea of how it works now,' said Qwaid, trying to sound easy as they hurried along. 'I had to find out, you see, so we don't go really wrong later.'

Gribbs and Drorgon said nothing.

After negotiating several simple junctions without difficulty, the TARDIS party came to a point where four paths met. Here the sign informed them that the pyramid was to the left, and the woods were to the right. The way ahead was unmarked. The woods!' Peri exclaimed. But we're in the woods already. And where's the unmarked path lead to?'

'Yes, the choices have become more complex; agreed the Doctor. 'All we can be certain of, according to Shalvis, is that each sign cannot indicate the thing it purports to. Therefore the pyramid cannot be to the left, the woods alone are not to the right, and anything might be straight ahead - at least as far as the next junction. The correct path might be any of them, since none mention the treasure and so can definitely be excluded.

There is no simple answer. But logically the unmarked path should at least lead to another signpost, since it cannot actually lead to nothing. Let's try that.

Soon they reached another junction with just two paths leading from it. However, the sign was of a different kind. To the left it said NOT THIS WAY, while to the right it said DON'T FOLLOW

THE OTHER SIGN.

'What is this - something from Alice in Wonderland?' Peri said.

'The two cancel each other out,' Jaharnus observed, becoming interested in the puzzle despite her professional preoccupations.

'They don't tell us anything.'

'Not quite,' said the Doctor. 'The right-hand sign does not mention a direction but merely the other half of the sign, so it's actually self-referential. I think we should treat it as a double negative.'

They proceeded to the left.

'What if the next sign says "Ignore last sign"?' Peri asked.

Arnella stared at a sign that said THIS WAY to the left, and FOLLOW THE OTHER SIGN to the right.

Thorrin fumed. 'We cannot even be sure of the solution. How deep should we assume the deception runs? Childish puzzles!'

'But you're not going to let that stop you from solving them?'

Rosscarrino asked mildly.

'What? No, no... of course not. But they are most trying.'

'Exactly. Perhaps that's the point. A lesson that we have to abide by Rovan's rules.'

Brockwell spoke up, and Arnella realised he was trying to soothe his irritable employer's ego.

'They might be deliberately insulting our intelligence and trying to get us angry in the hope that we'll make a foolish mistake. But you're not going to fall for that sort of trick, are you, Professor?'

He lowered his voice. 'And remember, all this is being recorded.'

He tilted his head at the DAVE drone hovering a few metres away.

Thorrin scowled, but then recovered himself and sniffed thoughtfully. 'Yes, you could be right, Will.' He looked at the sign again. 'Well, clearly, taken as a whole, it indicates we should go right.'

'I agree,' said the Marquis with a smile.

Arnella knew her uncle was also trying to keep Thorrin in a tolerable humour. They still needed him until they reached the treasure. After that, of course, they would need no one's charity ever again.

Eventually Qwaid called them to a halt. They were back at the junction of four paths, which they had left ten minutes before.

It had seemed to say that the central path had been the right one... or perhaps the wrong one, looked at another way. He was getting sick of neatly painted signposts.

'I've had enough of this. I don't care what that woman said, we're going to take a short cut.' He took out a miniature inertial compass and looked at the sun as it sparkled through the branches.

Then he pointed between two of the paths. 'Right, that's the same line as the first path that led in here, so we'll stay on that.

If we keep going straight ahead we're bound to come out somewhere soon enough.'

'But she said it was dangerous to leave the paths,' Gribbs reminded him, peering anxiously at the tangle of lush greenery ahead of them.

'How do we know that?' Qwaid retorted. 'Maybe that was a lie as well, just to get us running around like rats in a maze while they laugh at us. Perhaps working it out is part of the test, and this is how you're meant to go.' Gribbs still looked unhappy.

Drorgon shrugged his massive shoulders. 'Anyway were all kitted up for trouble, aren't we? Maybe we can't use our guns on the others, but nobody said we couldn't use 'em on anything else that gets in our way. Go to it, Dro.'

Drorgon's huge machete with its ultra-fine diamond slick coating hissed effortlessly through a hanging tangle of creepers, and they marched forward off the path and into the green-tinted shadows. Gribbs held his own blade ready and hacked nervously at an innocent bush. In two minutes they had passed through the spur of wood and came to a path that crossed their line of travel. Unhesitatingly Qwaid led them across it to the next wall of green.

Down at the end of the path they saw the figures of Thorrin's party clustered round another signpost.

'Hah. Let 'em run around in circles,' Qwaid said contemptuously.'This is the way the really smart types go.'

They had taken perhaps twenty steps from the path when there was a sharp snap. Drorgon gave a howl of pain, dropped his machete, and crouched down clutching at his ankle. The heavy spiked jaws of a plant head that had been inconspicuously spread open flat on the ground had closed about it like a man trap.

Gribbs flinched away from Drorgon even as the Cantarite tore his leg free, looking about him wildly for any new danger. There was a sudden rustle and swish in the grass at Gribbs's feet and a tall slender sapling that had been bowed over a few metres away from him suddenly sprang upright. With a yell he was jerked off his feet and up into the air, a thin noose of wirelike ivy tight about his left ankle connecting him with the top of the sapling.

His frantic struggles subsided as he realised nothing worse was going to happen, and he hung upside down swaying gently to and fro. Then he saw that the DAVE drone hovering a little way off was recording his undignified elevation. 'I don't think this was such a good idea, Qwaid,' he said faintly.

Inside his ship the
Stop Press
, Dynes beamed in satisfaction at the monitor image of Gribbs. Good knockabout stuff and just what the social class Ds and Es lapped up, along with the rest of their predigested newspap. Actually, everybody secretly liked seeing other people's misfortunes, especially if they were known criminals. Could he play the ambivalent card there and slant the angles to make them into the comic element of the story?

Blundering crooks getting what they deserve, but struggling bravely on, so that they subconsciously inspired a touch of sympathy for being such hopeless foul-ups? Yes, it was a distinct possibility.

He checked the monitors that were following the other two parties. Now these were more for his prospective A and B

audience to relate to. They were going about the business of solving the sign problem methodically. If he could record enough of their chatter they could feature it as a brainteaser for the viewers over a station break, or something.

That oversized man, Falstaff, was obviously an eccentric. You didn't see many body styles like that nowadays. Maybe he'd come up with something interesting. At least he could be relied upon to fall over amusingly or get stuck in something somewhere along the way.

And of course these groups also had the two attractive human women with them, one from an aristocratic family, and also Inspector Jaharnus, who was quite a slick-looking Tritonite if he was any judge. They should please the humanoid male audience, and a few related species besides.

He remotely adjusted the bias of the DAVEs following them to hold them in shot more often. He hoped as they went along they might pick up a few suggestive tears in their costumes and some tasteful smudges of dirt here and there. After all, there was nothing like seeing pretty women a little dishevelled to boost the ratings.

Dynes had long ago renounced personal scruples and passing judgement on anything he reported. Priorities to him were exemplified by the fact that there were fewer mutual agreements between planetary law enforcement agencies than between rival news organisations. People wanted gossip and entertainment in preference to law and order, and his job was to deliver what the market wanted with single-minded efficiency. Which was why he was the best in the business. And he had a feeling that this story would shape up into one of the hottest items of the year.

Peri realised that the two-way junction ahead of them was not marked with a signpost. Instead, one of the native Gelsandorans stood there waiting impassively, his hands folded into the sleeves of his robe. While they considered their next move, Falstaff sat down heavily on a convenient boulder by the side of the path and massaged his knees.

'I must catch my wind. I am not suited to this means of travel.

Eight yards of uneven ground is threescore and ten miles afoot with me.'

Peri had some sympathy for him. They seemed to have been wandering up and down woodland paths for hours. Falstaff had several times complained about the soreness of his feet and wiped his brow regularly, but for a man of his size he'd actually kept up the pace quite well. She suspected he didn't want to get left behind in these rather sinister woods. She looked at the silent native again, then at the Doctor. 'Now, he might tell us the truth or he might lie, right?'

'Yes,' said the Doctor, 'but only about which path to take, according to Shalvis, so we can't catch him out with a question about the sky being pink, or anything on those lines.'

'Then how shall we know whether he speaks true or false?'

Falstaff wondered.

'This is going to be worse than the signs,' said Jaharnus. 'I don't want us to fall behind Qwaid and his friends.'

The Doctor smiled. 'Fortunately there is a solution. On Earth it was originated in the mid-twentieth century by a philosopher called Goodman, though of course it's been independently discovered many times on many other worlds. We'll see if it works here.'

The Doctor walked over to the Gelsandoran. 'I believe you may or may not tell the truth if I asked you specifically which path leads to Rovan's treasure?'

'That is correct, Doctor.'

'And have you already determined whether you will be one kind or another, that is either a liar or a truth-teller, in this matter?'

'I have.'

'Then tell me if you're the kind who would tell me that the right-hand path leads to Rovan's treasure?'

'No, I am not.'

The Doctor raised his hat politely and turned to the others.

'We'll take the left pathway,' he said.

When they had gone round the next corner, Peri asked, 'Now how did you work that out?'

'Well, if he was telling the truth when he said no, he wasn't the kind who would tell me the right-hand path was the correct one, then the right-hand path would be wrong, since only a liar would say otherwise. If he had intended to lie, then he would say the right-hand path was the correct one in an effort to deceive me, therefore it would still be the wrong choice. If he'd said yes, meaning he was the kind who would tell me the right path led to the treasure, and he was telling the truth, then the right-hand path would have been the correct one. If he had said yes and was lying, then he was actually not the kind who would say the right-hand path was the correct one, since only a truth-teller would say that, and so again the right path would have been correct, whether answering "yes" was true or not.

'Either way, if he'd said yes I would choose right, and left if he'd said no. I came across something similar on Mars, once. It's very simple, really.'

Peri shook her head and shrugged. 'I'll take your word for it.

But you still don't know if he was lying or not?'

'No, but it doesn't really matter, does it?'

'Uh, I guess not.'

They trudged on. The path no longer branched. Perhaps they were getting somewhere at last. In the near silence she became aware of the slight hum of the DAVE unit that still trailed after them. She'd almost forgotten it was there during the last few hours.

Back inside the
Stop Press
Dynes checked his monitors. The Doctor's party seemed slightly ahead of Thorrin's, who had just encountered a native in a different part of the wood and were going through a similar logical debate. Both were well clear of Qwaid's group. The three criminals had given up any attempt to force a way through the woodland between the pathways, and had settled on following a compass course as closely as they could, notching signposts and blazing marks in pathside trees to help them keep their bearings.

There were two other monitors presently active in the bank before Dynes. They relayed images from a couple of DAVEs he'd sent out to pick up establishing shots around the white pyramid and the Gelsandorans' settlement. He also hoped they might catch any newsworthy local customs or practices, of course.

Regrettably, so far, they seemed entirely too civilised, but he maintained a watch just in case. You could never tell with these quiet types.

The trees thinned and suddenly they were out in the open. Peri looked about her. The edge of the woodland stretched away on either side in a line that could hardly have been natural; while lying before them, already shimmering under the near midday sun, was the most unusual plain she had ever seen.

Inexplicably, Dynes's cameras failed to record Shalvis and the other Seers emerging from the pyramid. They moved in a ring at the centre of which was the plasma cloud. Carefully maintaining their formation they set off towards the landing fields.