Doctor Whom or ET Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Parodication (9 page)

‘
I
didn’t detach it,’ said the Dr. ‘It detached itself. It was never a real mountain in the first place. It was a mountain-sized robot pet from a planet inhabited by a race of particularly large rocky aliens. I won’t bore you with the story of how it ended up on earth, or why I gave it sanctuary aboard the TARDY. Suffice to say that it involved me saving the Earth from certain destruction.’

‘But—has nobody noticed that you’ve removed the Earth’s second tallest peak?’

‘Who’d notice? A few dozen mountaineers. Nobody else. And who pays any attention to them?’

‘But surely they would raise the alarm?’

‘They travel all the way to Tibet to climb this mountain. When they get there they discover that it’s actually a small hillock about ten feet high. What do you think they’re going to do? Go back and make a big fuss? Or climb straight to the top, have their photo taken, and then trot back down and spend the rest of the expedition playing PS3? The latter, of course. That way they can boast that they climbed K2 in record time.’

I could stand it no longer. I got to my feet and rushed from the control room, dashing down the corridor in search of a room where I could be alone with my misery.

 
I stumbled into the TARDY’S extensive car-parking facility, a room just large enough to take a narrow single bed. On this I flung myself, and abandoned myself to my grief.

After a while, as my sobs died away, I thought I heard something.

‘Hello?’ came a voice. It sounded tinny, distant, like a voice over a crystal radio set.

‘What?’ I snapped. ‘Who’s that? What?’

‘To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking—?’

‘Leave me alone!’

‘Is that the handsome young male assistant to the Doctor?’ asked the voice.

My curiosity was engaged just enough to overcome my self-pity. I looked around the tiny room: four grey walls, a grey ceiling; a bed (nothing underneath it; I checked). There was nowhere for another person to hide. ‘Who
is
this?’

‘I am the Master Debater,’ declared the voice. As soon as he said it, I thought to myself: I knew I recognised the voice.

‘Didn’t we abandon you upon Earth in nineteen-twelve? ’ I said.

‘Indeed you did. In the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. Hardly polite.’

‘But I suppose you have your own TARDY.’

‘Indeed.’

‘And how are you able to speak to me now?’

‘I’ve patched an audio-communication through the TARDY’S control panel.’

‘You’ve done
what
?’

‘It’s a complicated business, and one that would take me too long to explain fully.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I need your help,’ said the Master Debater.

‘Why should I help you?’ I asked. ‘You are the Evil Time-gentleman.’

‘Why should you help the
Doctor
?’ the ET countered. ‘He killed the woman you loved.’

I was silent for ten or fifteen seconds. ‘You know about that,’ I said.

‘I told you . . . I’ve been in effect bugging the TARDY via a device lodged in its Hyperspatial Scanner. I overheard the whole of that last conversation with the Doctor. Right now I’ve rechannelled a viral subroutine through to the intercom located by the door. I can’t talk for long: the TARDY’S own antiviral programmes will locate this link soon enough and wipe it out.’

I sat up. My heart was fierce with rage. ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked. ‘Understand: I’m not saying that I will do this thing . . . whatever it may be. But I am only asking. What do you want of me?’

‘I just need to know what the Time Gentlemen Convenance told you.’

‘That’s all?’

‘That’s all.’

‘What’s in it for you?’

‘That’s my business,’ said the tinny little voice. Then there was a tinny little laugh. ‘But after all, I
am
a Time Gentleman. It’s hardly
my
fault that they’ve barred me from their meetings.’

‘Weren’t you banned for acts of unspeakable evil, or something?’ I said.

‘Or something,’ he agreed. ‘But if the Convenance has
agreed
something, then I need to know about it.’

‘I don’t see how it could do any harm to tell you,’ I said, a little uncertainly. ‘They announced they’d discovered a TGV.’

‘A Time Gentleman Violator!’ exclaimed the Master Debater’s suave voice. ‘How shocking. Did they say whom had obtained this device?’

‘They said something about Stavros.’

‘Oo, how terrible. If he arms his cyborg army with such weapons,’ the Master Debater said, thoughtfully, ‘then the entire race of Time Gentlemen is doomed!’

‘That was pretty much the gist of the meeting.’

‘That means me too, you know. That doomed encompasses me as well.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Well, don’t you think it was pretty unsporting of the Convenance to keep me in the dark about this news?’

‘Look,’ I said, feeling uneasy. ‘I’m not sure I should even be talking to you . . . I mean, aren’t you the Doctor’s arch enemy?’

‘Well, yes I am. But it’s only a small arch. If I were the Convenance,’ he went on, ‘I’d send the Doctor back on a mission to before Stavros was able to create his robots, and prevent them ever coming about!’

‘I don’t think I can say—’ I said.

‘You don’t need to say anything! Don’t worry, my dear fellow,’ said the Master Debater’s voice, growing fainter. ‘I wouldn’t want you to feel that you had in any way
betrayed
your Doctor . . .’

And with that he was gone.

 
I made my way back to the control room of the TARDY with a slow and rather shuffling step. My mind was undecided. Could I truly betray the Dr? He had never intended to cause me the hurt that had come my way. But on the other hand . . . my mind kept returning to the last time I had seen
her
face.

Inside the control room, the Dr was at the console. ‘Ah!’ he said, cheerily. ‘Feeling better.’

‘Yes,’ I said, in a weak voice. Now that I was with him again, I felt guilty about my conversation with the Master Debater. Had I said more than I ought? Should I tell the Dr about it? ‘I’m,’ I hazarded. ‘I’m sorry for my behaviour earlier.’

‘Don’t mention it. We’ve just had new orders from the Time Gentleman’s Convenance. We’re to abandon this mission and zoop on back to the Planet Skary.’

‘The Planet Skary?’ I queried.

‘Zoop?’ Linn queried.

‘Yep. We’re to stop Stavros before he can create an entire race of merciless cyborgs and arm them with the only weapon capable of destroying the Time Gentlemen!’

It took the Dr a while to recover enough clean towels so that we could dry ourselves properly. Linn and I stood there as he rummaged through the cupboard in the central console, icy water from the North Atlantic of 1912 dripping off our bodies onto the floor of the TARDY’S control room.

‘Here you both are,’ he said finally, bringing out two large blue towels. I held mine in front of me before starting to rub myself with it, and saw that it carried the words TARDY OFFICIAL TO WEL PRODUCT upon it. ‘Official towels?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have
official
towels?’

‘Oh I
do
.’

‘Is there, what, like a
complete range
of merchandise, or something?’

‘Just the towels. And,’ he added, paddling his fingers in amongst the line of his necktie, and looking therefore not unlike Oliver Hardy as he did so, ‘this natty necktie.’ The tie was black, with a rectangular blue shape upon it. ‘But the towels are super, aren’t they? You’ll find,’ he went on, rather smugly, ‘that they can absorb almost unlimited amounts of water without getting damp.’

I gave the towel a try, and soon discovered that he spoke the truth: no matter how sopping I was, the towel sucked up the water and still felt dry to the touch. ‘It’s like magic,’ exclaimed an impressed Linn. ‘How does it work?’

‘Ah,’ said the Dr, sagely, applying the towel to his own prodigious hairdo. ‘It’s all part of the marvellous operation of the TARDY ... one more example of the futuristic technology that has kept the Time Gentlemen ahead of the game—’

‘And how about hot chocolate?’ Linn demanded. ‘You got any marvellous machinery in this spaceship for making
that
?’

 
‘So, this Master-chappy,’ I asked, once we were all dry. The one who was in charge of all those Cydermen back on the
Icetanic
.’

‘Yes?’

‘I was just wondering who we were dealing with back there, that’s all.’

‘Whom,’ corrected the Dr.

‘Whom.’

‘You were wondering,’ said the Dr pedantically, ‘
with whom
we were dealing.’

‘So,’ I started again, cautiously, ‘
whom
is he, exactly?’

‘Who is he,’ corrected Linn.

‘What I mean,’ I said, ‘is that you sounded pretty surprised to see him. I’m wondering whether you had any suspicions as whether
he
was the one who, or whom, either really, was persecuting you?

‘My nemesis,’ said the Dr, in a low voice, as if to himself. ‘The Master Debater. Whom else could it be?’

‘And
who
,’ I said, drawing out the
oo
sound of the word and trying to slip the quietest-possible
m
at the end, such that it could be heard as either ‘who’ or ‘whom’ depending on the listener’s state of mind, perhaps thereby heading-off the Dr’s inevitable correction, something which was, frankly, starting to annoy me, ‘
is
this Master Debater?’ I finished.

‘He
is
a Time Gentleman,’ said the Dr. ‘Just as I am myself. He’s from the Planet Garlicfree, as I am myself. But whereas I graduated the Gentlemen Facilities with a doctorate, he only managed a Masters. The bitterness of this failure soiled him inside.’

‘Soiled?’ asked Linn.

‘Do I mean sullied? No matter. It messed him up, that’s the important thing. Internally. I mean, internally-mentally, not internally-physically or anything like that. He was made bitter, resentful. He became prone to evil.’

‘Prone to it?’

‘Such a waste of his Time Gentlemanly talents. He and I. I and he. We were
best
friends at the College of Temporal Gentlemen. But now . . .’ The Dr shook his head and whistled disparagingly. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I love him like my brother. Or, perhaps like
a
brother. Well,’ he said, rubbing his chin in the search for exact verbal precision, ‘not a
brother
perhaps. But I certainly love him like a brother-in-law. Or, to be more precise, I love him like he was my brother’s lawyer. Or my lawyer’s brother. Who is also a lawyer, and not a very nice one.’

‘You hate him.’

‘Indeedy.’

‘He certainly seems to be going to some lengths to persecute you,’ I pointed out. ‘Why might that be, do you think?’

‘As to why,’ said the Dr, ‘I don’t know. There
will
be a reason, I’m sure. Most people usually do have a reason for what they do, after all. The Master Debater will have some diabolic scheme in mind. But that’s not to say I know what it is.’

‘Is that the best you can do?’

‘Master Debater!’ cried the Dr, as if to the air. ‘Oh,
wicked
Master Debater!
Why
must you tarry in the ways of ultimate wicked evility?’ He raised his right fist to a point a little way in front of his face, and then rotated it slowly, as if examining it from every angle for the intrinsic interest of its knuckles.

‘Can he . . .’ I asked, looking around me but seeing nothing, ‘can he, you know. Can he
hear
you?’

The Dr looked crossly at me. ‘Of course not. He’s splashing around in the icy waters of the North Atlantic right now. How could he possibly hear what I’m saying inside my own TARDY in tempo-spacey travel in the vacuum of deep space?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, a little sulkily. ‘I thought maybe . . . I don’t
know
.’

‘What?’

‘I thought maybe he was eavesdropping. You know, electronically. And that was why you suddenly addressed him.
I
don’t know how your TARDY machines work, now, do I? And anyway, what was I
supposed
to think? Why
were
you talking to him if he can’t even hear you?’

‘I was being dramatic!’ exclaimed the Dr, in an infuriated tone. ‘I was trying to capture a little of the quasi-operatic excitement incipiently present in the situation. I don’t know why I bother sometimes, honestly.’

‘Well there’s no need to be like that,’ I said, hurt, to be honest, by the Dr’s tone.

‘Will you two stop it?’ said Linn. ‘We’ve got our next mission to consider.’

‘Ah!’ said the Dr. ‘Yes. Gather round, assistants. Gather round.’

Linn stepped smartly to stand next to the Dr. I tried to do the same, but caught my knee on the edge of the central console in my haste. This was very painful. I yelped and doubled over, trying simultaneously to grab my knee and to keep my balance. I failed in both respects, and instead slammed my forehead against the console. This was also very painful.