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Dr Who [Lethbridge Stewart] Andy Frankham Allen (v5.0) (epu
Content Selected Essays on Tech Cory Doctorow
Amazing Doctor Darwin Charles Sheffield
Brian Moore The Doctor's Wife (epub)
Bite My Cookies [Who Needs Chri Joyee Flynn
Doctor MC Three More Wishes Be Kind To Y
Doctor Rat William Kotzwinkle
Doctor No Ian Fleming
Czepko von Reigersfeld, Daniel Sexcenta Monodisticha Sapientum
Craig Schaefer Daniel Faust The Living End

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.* * *The TARDIS, though, was in the Vortex.The breathing of the time rotor showed they were in flight.Ace, who had flopped into a basket‐chair near the hatstand, thought it best not to ask why the console room was suffused with a dim red glow, which appeared to be emanating from the time rotor itself.‘Exactly how many rooms have we lost, then?’ Ace asked.‘Lost?’ The Doctor was engrossed in the console.‘Nothing’s been lost.Just changed.’‘So where’s the chemistry lab? You can’t fool me.You’re not the only one who takes a stroll round the corridors.Have you told Benny her collection’s gone?’‘I don’t think she needs telling.’ The Doctor’s hands were flickering over the controls with their usual pianist‐like dexterity.‘No, no,’ he said agitatedly, and started to gnaw at his fingers like a worried child.‘That’s not right at all.’‘Don’t tell me.It’s having another sulk, and you don’t know your way around this one properly.’ Ace sat back with her hands behind her head, rather enjoying the Doctor’s discomfiture.After recent events, she rather felt he needed telling that he could not always do things his way.‘I mean,’ she said, ‘it’s his, isn’t it? Well, yours, I mean, but the other one.’‘The TARDIS is the TARDIS.The architectural configuration has been in progress for some time, but then I wouldn’t expect you to know that.’ He looked up, glaring at her as if an earlier comment had registered.‘And it never sulks!’‘So what’s up?’‘The path tracer claims we have just left the fifty‐fourth sector of charted space.These co‐ordinates.’ He jabbed at the monitor on the console.‘they bear absolutely no relation to the space‐time co‐ordinates for Oxford in 1993.Which should be our last trace.’‘And the TARDIS thinks we’ve come from somewhere else?’ Ace was intrigued despite herself.‘From the other side of the galaxy.’* * *In the dark silence of the space‐station, the dust began to dance on the fallen skull of a crew member.The breeze intensified, became a wind whipping up the dust and debris into a whirlpool.A swirl of twinkling lights, no more than a few centimetres across, came into being in the centre of the corridor.It sparkled and fizzed like the bubbles in a glass of champagne, and glowed blood‐red.The intrusion grew to the size of a football, bathing the cracked steel walls and the tattered skeleton in its crimson glow.And it grew bigger still.At the heart of the storm of lights, an oblong prism came into view.It was naturally blue, and seemed purple in the light of the whirlpool.The light on its top side was slowly pulsing.* * *Nothing had seriously stirred the vaults of the TARDIS library for centuries.Even the Doctor or one of his companions, searching for information or a first‐edition Dickens, had trodden with awe, breathed with care, lifted the books from their shelves with reverence.If the Doctor had been in charge of the library’s organization himself, then the books would have been in no order whatsoever.The yellowing First Folio of King Lear would have jostled for space with the Penguin paperbacks.The diskettes containing the complete works of the 21st‐century environmentalists would have been shoved in next to the tablets engraved with Linear B.The TARDIS knew better than that.The architectural configuration circuits had reorganized the library long ago.Under the second tower of mini‐diskettes, one of the gravity pads, used for access to the top shelves, began to glow, indicating that someone had stepped on to it to use it.But there was no one to be seen.Or was there?Just for a second, like a picture in a burning flame of red and green, a figure appeared.There was a brief impression of a close‐fitting uniform and a visored helmet.And then it faded and the gravity pad thumped back to the floor.In the highest reaches of the library, where forgotten tomes in thick hide rested under films of dust, crackles of reddish light threaded like snakes.A wind blew, ruffling pages in sequence, like a Mexican wave at a football ground.And from somewhere amidst the echoing vaults came a chilling, inhuman howl of despair.* * *‘It might just be a fault in the communications circuits between the memory bank…’ The Doctor ducked under the console, ‘and the output.’ He flipped open a panel and, fishing a laseron probe from his pockets, began to make a few experimental prods and pokes.The time rotor was still rising and falling regularly, and Ace wondered whether she ought to keep an eye on it.It was just then that the ship seemed to shudder imperceptibly, and Ace felt ripples beneath her feet as she heard something just beyond sound.As if someone had struck a gong deep within her subconscious…‘Doctor –’‘Not now, Ace!’ A shower of sparks erupted from under the console, followed by a Gallifreyan curse which Ace recognized.Her instant translation, though, was blotted from her mind by a second reverberation of the gong.And it was then that she realized what the doom‐laden tolling was.Something fizzed and crackled on the wall nearest the double doors.Ace’s eyes widened as she saw a swirl of red and green lights gathering in one of the roundels.Just as she opened her mouth to call the Doctor, her mind was shaken by the third resonant clang of the cloister bell.It lasted just a second, but she saw the creature jump.It was a humanoid, outlined in flickering red and green and leaving a trail behind it like after‐images.It carried some kind of chunky weapon while the face was visored and wore something that looked like a futuristic filter‐mask.It leapt in slow motion from the roundel to the door, as if passing through on its way to somewhere else.And then it was gone.The Doctor’s head popped back up.‘Ace, get me the artron meter and the vector gauge.’ He did a double take when she failed to respond.‘Ace?’ The Doctor followed her horrified gaze, but saw nothing in the corner of the console room.‘What is it?’‘Something was here, Doctor.Something was inside the TARDIS.’In his fourth incarnation, or even his fifth, the Doctor would have scoffed at such an idea, saying that nothing could have entered the TARDIS while it was in the Vortex.The Doctor, however, had learnt a great deal from experience, although he knew there had always been something up with the temporal grace circuits.‘And I heard the cloister bell! Only it wasn’t sounding in the console room.It was sounding inside my head.’‘Fascinating.’ The Doctor’s face was shadowed with troubles, dark with foreboding in the dim chamber.‘The TARDIS chooses to give a telepathic warning and sends it exclusively to you… and the intruder is seen only by you.As if it knew…’ The Doctor approached her, eyes burning with the reflection of the time rotor.‘Tell me exactly what you saw, Ace.’* * *At 3.23 p.m.on November 18th, 1993 – a Thursday – a black Porsche, like a wedge cut from the night, sidled in to park outside the Randolph Hotel in Oxford.The girl who checked in was tall and attractive, with short black hair and mirrored sunglasses.She carried a briefcase at her side, as dark and glossy as the car she drove.The receptionist did not report the arrival.Had the day been the following Sunday, she would have recognized, with a jolt, the face that was all over the newspapers and TV as the wanted assassin of the Home Office minister.But as the murder had yet to take place, she did not bat an eyelid.* * *Chapter 3Atmosphere Normal‘No,’ said Bernice.‘I think we’ll give it a miss [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]