Doctor Whom or ET Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Parodication (3 page)

‘Travelling forward?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your résumé,’ the Dr pointed out, placing his forefinger on the relevant bit, ‘suggests that you have experience of travelling backwards in time as well.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, in a manner of speaking.’

‘A manner of speaking?’

‘Yes. It was last year. A haircut.’

‘Haircut?’

‘It made me three or four years younger. Everybody said so. At
least
three years and possibly four.’

‘It
made you
three or four years younger,’ Linn asked, ‘or it made you
look
three or four years younger?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘One of those two.’

‘Mr Tailor,’ said the Dr, sharply. ‘Do you understand what the job particulars involve?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘It is more than simply
travelling
. We have a series of very important missions to accomplish, repairing and indeed correcting the very
nature
of spacetime.’

‘I understand.’

‘There is sometimes danger. Are you prepared for danger?’

‘Danger is my middle name.’

The Dr frowned, and picked up a pen. ‘You really should have put that down,’ he said, making the correction.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not literally my middle name. That’s just a way of saying that, yes, I’m prepared for danger.’

The Dr, frowning in a more pronounced fashion, scribbled out what he had just written.

‘Mr Tailor,’ put in Linn. ‘Let me tell you what it was about your application that interested us. You are a prose tailor?’

‘I am.’

‘You tailor prose?’

‘Yes.’

‘Clearly you are familiar with punctuation. Grammar. Correct syntax. That’s
very
important.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Yes I am.’

‘Allow me to explain,’ said the Dr. ‘This is more than a matter of prose. You see time, history, the life of the cosmos - it has a grammar. There are
rules
. When actual existence violates those rules, somebody needs to step in and
do something
. Somebody needs to go around correcting the
solecisms
and
ambiguities
that creep in. Because, if nobody did that . . .’ He trailed off.

‘What?’

‘It would be too ghastly to contemplate,’ he said, firmly. ‘Wouldn’t it, Linn?’

‘Much too ghastly,’ she agreed.

‘I see,’ I said in an obviously
I’ve no idea what you’re talking about
tone of voice.

‘You need to think of history as a kind of sentence,’ said the Dr. ‘Take your own history: the history of the Planet of the Asexual Slug-men. Now, in the
third
quarter of the—’

‘Earth,’ said Linn.

‘What?’

‘We decided to go to Earth instead,’ said Linn. ‘Don’t you remember?’

‘We’re on Earth?’ the Dr asked. ‘And
not
the Planet of the Asexual Slug-men?’

‘That’s right,’ Linn said.

The Dr looked me up and down. There was a pause. ‘You sure?’ he said.

‘Earth
is
my planet,’ I said, a little nervously.

‘Well if you say so, if you, yes. Start again. Take
your
own history, Mr Tailor: the history of the Planet
Earth
, apparently. Take a figure like Leonardo da Vinci. It’s pretty obvious, I think, that da Vinci was born too
early
in your planet’s history. Do you see? He started having all these ideas that were well before their time. You see, Earth’s history was
building up
to Leonardo.’

‘He was born ahead of his time,’ I said.

‘Yes. You could say that.’

‘And it’s wrong for people to be ahead of their time?’

‘Not
morally
wrong,’ the Dr clarified. ‘
Grammatically
wrong. Those are two different usages of the word
wrong
, you understand. Take that sentence, the one I spoke a moment ago:
Earth’s history was building up to Leonardo
. If Leonardo occurs too early in that sentence it makes nonsense of it:

That’s a very unsatisfying sentence. You see that, don’t you?’

‘In fact,’ Linn put in, ‘the situation is even more pronounced than that. You see, the sentence of Time is structured according to the
logic
of sequential time. Time is one thing
after
another, isn’t it? That’s what chronology
means
. Because of that, Leonardo’s too-early appearance actually disrupts everything that follows. It warps the sentence into something more like this:

 
And that’s an even
more
unsatisfying sentence.’

‘So,’ I said, realization dawning, ‘your job is—’

‘To buzz about the cosmos, making the necessary corrections. Affirming the grammar of Time. Adding an apostrophe here, changing a
who
to a
whom
there, as it were. Changing history in little ways to keep the overall story - the cosmic
hi
story - flowing properly on according to the rules.’

‘So you’re going to sort out Leonardo, are you?’

‘Going to? I did him last year. In the original timeline he was Aviator King of a United Europe from fourteen-ninety-one to sixteen-sixty-six.’

‘That’s an awfully long time to be king,’ I observed.

‘Yes. He discovered an anti-aging potion. He called it Gniga. That’s “aging” backwards. Because it was anti-aging. Do you see?’

‘So you put an end to that possible time sentence?’ I said.

‘We corrected it, yes.’

‘How?’

‘We photocopied all his notebooks backwards and then snaffled the originals. Puzzled him no
end
, I don’t mind telling you. Took him
years
to figure them out. Anyway, that’s off the point. The
point
is that we need somebody who understands grammar - who understands the rules - to assist us in our work. I am a fully qualified Time Gentleman. Linn, here, is my apprentice; after seven years she will be eligible to take the Time Gentleman exams. Are you ready to join our exciting and dynamic team?’

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘You
think
so?’ prompted Linn. ‘Or you
know
so?’

‘I
know
so.’

‘You
think
you know so?’ asked the Dr. ‘Or you
know
you know so?’

‘I know I know so!’ I said, assertively. ‘And, just to be clear, I know I know I know so, and I know I know I know I know so.’

‘Good. Well Mr Tailor,’ the Dr was shuffling his papers, ‘that’s all the questions we wanted to ask you, I think. Do you have any questions you want to ask
us
?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I was wondering about overtime?’

The Dr looked at Linn, and Linn looked at the Dr. Then, for reasons mysterious to me, they both started laughing. ‘Very good, Mr Tailor!’ the Dr said. ‘Very witty. We like you. Welcome aboard.’

‘Witty?’ I asked, nervously.

And so began my adventures with the Dr.

The TARDY rematerialised inside a large white space: bare and spare and perfectly white. ‘We’re here,’ declared the Dr.

‘And where’s here, exactly?’ Linn asked him.

‘Earth. But the real question is
when
. Let’s pop outside, have a peep.’

He opened the door and we all stepped outside.

The TARDY had taken the form of a large rectangular blue box with the word POLICE written at the top of all four of its faces. ‘Well,’ said the Dr, rubbing his chin in an
Antiques Roadshow
sort of way. ‘I’d say, looking at the design, we’re talking somewhere around nineteen-ten. Which is pretty good, considering I was aiming at London in the eighteen-eighties. Not
too
far from the target, now, is it.’

‘We’re thirty years too late!’ I objected.

‘No such thing as late,’ said the Dr, blithely. ‘You know what they say. Wherever you find yourself, there you are. I daresay there’s a kink or temporal solecism for us to work out hereabouts. Put our time-grammatical knowledge to good use.’

‘Caves,’ said Linn, looking around her. ‘It’s
extremely
cold.’

‘Far as I can tell, these walls,’ I offered, running my ungloved finger along one of them, ‘are
ice
.’

‘Ice, you say?’ said the Dr coming over to check for himself. ‘You could be right Prosy. Ice, ice, maybe.’

‘So we’re inside an ice-cave somewhere on Earth in nineteen-ten,’ said Linn, matter of factly. ‘Could it be the north pole?’

‘Or the south?’ I suggested.

‘Or the west,’ agreed the Dr. ‘One of those, definitely.’

‘West pole?’ I said. ‘There’s no west pole.’

‘Indeed there is,’ said the Dr. ‘Very cold it is too.’

‘And where is it, then?’

‘Oh, not to worry. I mean, it’s in Wales. But not to worry. I was hoping to show you London in the eighteen-eighties. I need to get hold of this chap from the East End . . . somebody from your time period, Tailor.’

‘From Earth’s twenty-third century?’ I asked. ‘Really?’

‘Indeed. Fellow called Jack. A much misunderstood individual; he was suspected of a number of rather nasty crimes—’

‘You’re not talking about Jack the Ripper?’ asked Linn, in horror.

‘Jack the
Rapper
,’ corrected the Dr. ‘As I say, he was a Rhyme-tailor from the twenty-third century - from Prosy’s time period in fact.’

‘
Please
don’t call me Prosy,’ I said in a small voice.

‘The twenty-third century,’ the Dr continued. ‘The time period when Earth was governed by the world state of You-Say! and everybody was encouraged to express themselves through the medium of tuneless shouting. A low point in Earth’s history, I’d say. Anyway my friend Jack got dislodged in time and after a series of bizarre adventures, into which I really don’t have time, right now, to go, he migrated to the East End of London in the eighteen-eighties. He’s there now. He likes it there, although his habit of shouting rhyming couplets at people in street has been misconstrued. He’s out of his place; as naked a temporal solecism as you can imagine.’

‘He gets naked?’

‘No
he’s
not naked. The solecism is naked. By which I mean, egregious. Obvious. And my job is to sort that out - recover him and return him to his own time. Set the time-line straight again.’

‘Are you going to do this
before
or
after
he murders all those prostitutes?’ Linn demanded.

‘Before, obviously. That way I prevent all the suffering he creates. Everybody wins. He’s not a bad sort, either, by all accounts. It’s just that his brain is a bit scrambled by the temporal dislocation. It almost always results in disaster, does temporary dislocation. I should imagine Mr Prose here would welcome the chance of a bit of chinwag with a contemporary, eh?’

‘Frankly,’ I said. ‘I have enough trouble with Rhyme-tailors patronizing me as a poor humble tailor of prose at home, without wanting to meet another one on my travels. Beside. We’re obviously
not
in east London.’

‘It’s so
cold
,’ said Linn. ‘Can we just get back inside the TARDY before I freeze to death?’

‘No no,’ the Dr expostulated. ‘Let’s have a little look around, shall we?’ And with that he marched off.

 
We left the ice cave through an opening at the back and passed into a long ice-corridor. This split into two, one sloping downwards to the left and one rising to the right. ‘This seems,’ the Dr was saying, ‘to be a natural cave formation. We should go
right
, here, I think.’

We all trudged up the slope.

‘So is this the north or the south pole?’ Linn asked.

‘I’ve come to a conclusion. This ice is dry - it’s very cold. I believe we’re in an Antarctic cave-system, formed by natural forces. Now, in nineteen-ten the Antarctic continent was completely unexplored. Right now we’re perhaps three thousand miles from the nearest human being.’

‘I say!’ cried a human being, perhaps three metres away from us. ‘Are you chaps English? Or do my ears deceive me?’

He was a young man dressed in a smart, Edwardian-era military uniform: olive-green heavy fabric and military greatcoat. The outfit was topped-off with a hat. Not a top hat, I should add, in case my use of the phrase
topped-off with a hat
gives that impression. That would be silly, under the circumstances. It was a
fur
hat, with ear flaps like two great furry tongues hanging down on each side of his face. Fur, you see, is a better head-insulator than is, er, top. Than whatever top-hats are made of. Anyway this fellow also wore Eskimo-mittens, and snowboots: he was evidently a military officer clearly prepared for the cold.

‘Good afternoon,’ said the Dr, brightly.