Doctor Who The Eye of the Tyger Paul J. McAuley

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.Strange mists divide the armies and the time zones.Travel between the time zones is possible, using a white, boxlike structure approximately the same size and shape as a smallish lift, or, even more prosaically, a public toilet: you get in in 1970, you come out in Troy or Mons or Waterloo.Only you don't come out in Waterloo, as you're really on an eternal plane, and behind it all or beyond it all is an evil genius who has taken the armies, placed them here, and is using the white boxes to move guards and agents from place to place, through the mists of time.The boxes were called SIDRATs.Even I figured that one out.Finally, having no other option, and unable to resolve the story in any other way, the Doctor – who we now learned was a fugitive – summoned the Time Lords, his people, to sort the whole thing out.And was, himself, captured and punished.It was a great ending for a nine-year old.There were ironies I relished.It would, I have no doubt at all, be a bad thing for me to try and go back and watch The War Games now.It's too late anyway; the damage has been done.It redefined reality.The virus was now solidly in place.These days, as a middle-aged and respectable author, I still feel a sense of indeterminate but infinite possibility when entering a lift, particularly a small one with white walls.That – to date – the doors that have opened have always done so in the same time, and world, and even the same building in which I started out seems merely fortuitous – evidence only of a lack of imagination on the part of the rest of the universe.I do not confuse what has not happened with what has not happened,and in my heart, Time and Space are endlessly malleable, permeable,frangible.Let me make some more admissions.In my head, William Hartnell was the Doctor, and so was Patrick Troughton.All the other Doctors were actors, although Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker were actors playing real Doctors.The rest of them, even Peter Cushing, were faking it.In my head the Time Lords exist, and are unknowable – primal forces who cannot be named, only described: the Master, the Doctor, and so on.All depictions of the home of the Time Lords are, in my head, utterly non-canonical.The place in which they exist cannot be depicted because it is beyond imagining: a cold place that exists only in black and white.It's probably a good thing that I've never actually got my hands on the Doctor.I would have unhappened so much.A final Doctor Who connection – again, from the baggy-trousered Troughton era, when some things were more than true for me – showed itself, in retrospect, in my BBC TV series, Neverwhere.Not in the obvious places – the BBC decision that Neverwhere had to be shot on video, in episodes half an hour long, for example.Not even in the character of the Marquis de Carabas, whom I wrote – and Paterson Joseph performed – as if I were creating a Doctor from scratch, and wanted to make him someone as mysterious, as unreliable, and as quirky as the William Hartnell incarnation.But in the idea that there are worlds under this one, and that London itself is magical, and dangerous, and that the underground tunnels are every bit as remote and mysterious and likely to contain Yeti as the distant Himalayas.Author and critic Kim Newman pointed out to me while Neverwhere was screening, that I probably took this idea from a Troughton-era story called The Web ofFear.And as he said it, I knew he was spot on, remembering people with torches exploring the underground, beams breaking the darkness.The knowledge that there were worlds underneath.yes, that was where I got it, all right.Having caught the virus, I was now, I realised with horror, infecting others.Which is, perhaps, one of the glories of Doctor Who.It doesn't die, no matter what.It's still serious, and it's still dangerous.The virus is out there, just hidden, and buried, like a plague pit.You don't have to believe me.Not now.But I'll tell you this.The next time you get into a lift, in a shabby office building, and jerk up several floors, then, in that moment before the doors open, you'll wonder, even if only for a moment, if they're going to open on a Jurassic jungle, or the moons of Pluto, or a full service pleasure dome at the galactic core [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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