Doctor Who The Taking of Planet Simon Bucher Jones

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.And the horror and the shame of that was even greater when he confronted the evident fact that the Doctor didn’t even seem to notice.Still, he was pleased to see it didn’t work on Compassion.Not obviously anyway.If she was turned on to the Doctor’s proximity she wasn’t showing it.‘Now this is what I call amusing.’ The Doctor beamed.‘Professor Mildeo Twisknadine’s Wandering Museum of the Verifiably Phantasmagoric.Also known as the Museum of Things That Don’t Exist.I’ve been trying to catch up with these people for some time.They’ve made a special study of the mythic, the outré and the rum.With the Enclave up in smoke, if anyone can suggest a backway into the Obverse, they should be able to.’‘You really want to go back?’ Fitz asked, remembering the icy terror of the plains, and the ruined shards of glass that had rained down when war came to that peculiar little crystal city.‘He doesn’t like to be thwarted,’ Compassion said.‘You must see how it would annoy him to have to bow to destiny.’ Her voice was slightly too cold for humour.‘Destiny, my dear Compassion, is the art of throwing darts at random and claiming that anything you hit was the target all along,’ the Doctor said.‘I suppose I just can’t bear to leave a story unfinished, still less a universe unexplored.’‘Gnomic,’ Fitz muttered, ‘brilliant.’ But his spirits lifted as he imagined other reasons for the Doctor’s interest.‘They’re up to something then.A crime’ He stared round at the neonlike walls of the chamber as if expecting a bunch of ruffians to jump out of them, and lowered his voice.‘Smuggling dope, or gun-running.’ His face brightened.‘White slavery!’The Doctor combined shock and disapproval in one thunderous but brief expression, before reverting to his normal state of twice human enthusiasm.‘Oh no, nothing like that.At least, I don’t think so.Honestly, anyone would think I spent all my time looking for trouble.There’s quite enough mistrust in any universe without going around suspecting people of things.Sufficient unto the day is the burden thereof, Fitz.’Fitz sighed.‘So what is this Mildew Twistknacker’s Museum about, when it’s at home? We can’t make any sense of these leaflets.’‘Why, my boy,’ a strange voice boomed, and, as if by magic, a man appeared behind them.‘It is quite simply the plenum’s premier peripatetic plenitude of potentially possible parafactology, and I have the honour to be none other than –’ the plump little man’s eyes gleamed – ‘Mildew Twistknacker himself, so I ought to know.’Turning, Fitz saw a rotund bear of a man, flashing tortoiseshell shirt split open to show chest hair braided into a thousand pleats.The man’s face, too, was covered in hair, so that he resembled a botanist looking through foliage, but his eyes were icy circles of scarlet, piercingly, frighteningly alert and interested.Fitz felt an all too familiar embarrassment threatening.He opted for bluff and manly certitude.‘No offence, Professor: probably a common enough name where you hail from, but sadly a tongue-twister to my humble language translator.’ He had seen such things in use a few times – to complete his gambit he made a burbling sound between his teeth, and poked at his pocket, deliberately mumbling a few random verbs.Right, sorted.Sadly, his explanation fell on deaf ears, for the professor and the Doctor were too busy clapping each other on the back, and name-dropping third parties.They were, Fitz gathered, both friends (possibly, in the case of Mildeo, a rival) of someone called Vorg the Magnificent.Professor Mildeo claimed to have known him when he went by the name of Vorg the Adequate – ‘and that was a gross extension of his capacities into the realm of hyperbole’ – while the Doctor confided that he had last encountered the other showman trying to sell crustacoid pornography to the bemused unicellular life forms of Van Madden’s Star.‘What’, Compassion asked, ‘is parafactology?’The Doctor opened his mouth to explain, but glanced sideways at the self-proclaimed professor first and, as if in acknowledgment of his evident eagerness, waved a hand for the man to continue.‘Parafactology is the science of the untruth, my dear.The study of mistakes, misapprehensions, hoaxes, bamboozles, misconceptions (both common and rare), and the twelve catalogued kinds of bafflegap.We also have a small department dealing solely with technobabble, but that is rather new and will not be a serious discipline until another thousand years or so have passed.By studying the limits of the possible, by examining the things people choose to believe in the face of the absence of disproof, we can map the domain of the real, and –’ he bowed as if expecting applause, ‘thereby transcend it!’The Doctor grinned.‘Splendid.I couldn’t have put it half so well.I’m ever so pleased to have caught you.My friends and I would love a tour, and I have one or two special fakes and oddments aboard my ship so I’ve been meaning to drop in to see your collection ever since I first heard about it.Tell me, have you got a South American Missing Link? I have a bund forgery somewhere.’‘No, but I’ve got nine types of Yeti, including the robotic and the fungi varieties – perhaps we could swap!’Fitz looked at Compassion.Compassion looked at Fitz.Perhaps some things did transcend all cultural barriers, bind together the divergent strata of the mind’s metaphorical tectonics.It looked like being a long tour.A very long, boring tour.* * *Actually the museum was a surprise.It was serious, even imposing, from the outside, a hymn in marble and gold – although Mildeo’s mannerisms had led Fitz to expect a cross between a gypsy caravan and the nine boxes of knickknacks he had kept at the back of his flat, waiting for his mum to get better.Presumably they were still there, if the landlord hadn’t tipped them out for the bin men.The museum also looked utterly immobile and about as peripatetic as the Empire State Building.Fitz stopped himself asking how it got from world to world.He knew from experience that the Doctor would say something like, ‘Well it emfoozles via the ephasmotic metahedron’ – and he’d just have to nod as if he had understood.Sod it! He’d just take it as read for once.Mildeo saw his look, but mistook it for architectural interest.‘It’s modelled on the temple of Zeus, one of the seven wonders of Ancient Earth.Specifically chosen because the best reconstructions made up to the mid-twenty‐ninth century were conclusively proved by zigmaphotography to be completely wrong.’‘So this is based on the latest findings,’ Compassion said.‘Oh no.The earlier ones, naturally.All the worst bits.We’re very interested in certainty.Particularly when it’s mistaken.’After that Fitz really started enjoying himself, and it may have been his imagination, but he thought Compassion was unbending just a little.Perhaps she went for hairy men.The planetarium was an especial hit.* * *‘Here’, Mildeo intoned proudly, ‘we have the entirety of the Solar system.Vulcan of course, nearest to the sun – as detected wrongly in 1880, disproved by Einstein, and then deliciously discovered again in 2003, only to vanish by 2130.’ He waved his plump, hairy fists around like an excited Homo habilis [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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