Doctor Who - Nuclear Time (20 page)

'Detonation point! Eject and overshoot!' The Doctor nearly pulled the lever off in his hand, and above him the stasis field glowed white, swelling in a nanosecond before snapping out of the TARDIS's interior dimensions with a sonic boom of repressurising air that made the Doctor reel with sudden deafness.

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NUCLEAR TIME

5.15, 5.26, 5.55, 6.10, 6.23, 6.45...

The Doctor slumped over the handbrake and, with his last ounce of strength, depressed the button and forced it on. He collapsed to the floor with exhaustion, watching the glow of the central column grind and slow as the TARDIS jumped and skidded through time before coming to a halt in the middle of Appletown village square at 6.49 p.m. on 28 August 1981.

'They're coming for us!' Rory turned his head as far as he dared. He was sure a ride-on lawnmower shouldn't be travelling this fast.

'Let

'em.'

Amy

grinned.

'They

might

be

indestructible but they'll stay away from these blades if they're clever.'

All around them, the citizens of Appletown were tearing down front doors, vaulting over garden hedges and sprinting out into the road in pursuit. The steady crowd was growing stronger with every passing second, each model travelling at top speed, their strides pounding the ground in unison.

All around the couple, the wooden-clad buildings were crumbling and disintegrating, tiles and timbers cast into the air as they dissolved in the fire like sugar in tea. The sky was filled with angry clouds -

low, amber monsters that blotted

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DOCTOR WHO

out the sun and transformed the afternoon into an eerie twilight.

'You know we thought we were going to be nuked?' Amy called over her shoulder as she swerved to avoid the owner of the coffee shop who had thrown himself onto the street from a top-floor window.

Rory was too busy holding on for dear life to care at this point. 'Oh yeah?'

'Well, I think it just happened.'

The ground was on fire now, the stones melting beneath the thundering wheels of the mower. A pack of androids rounded an upcoming corner, and Rory retched as he saw the melted, stringy plastic that dripped and fell from their faces. They stumbled to their knees as the mower tore past, metal sparking and shattering as they disintegrated.

'I suppose there's no point asking why we're not affected?'

Amy shook her head. 'I don't know the answers, but I know someone who owes us some!'

She pointed ahead of them.

'Oh, mama, I never thought I'd see that again!' cried Rory.

The dark shape of the TARDIS was grinding into existence at the end of the road. Dust and debris tore across its faded outline as the howling
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NUCLEAR TIME

roar of the engines threatened to take on the wind itself.

There was a sharp thud and the mower skidded sideways, Amy wrestling for control as a wheel and both of the machine's blades snapped away from the chassis. 'The mower's gone squiffy!' she shouted through gritted teeth.

'It's in the middle of a
nuclear explosion!'
Rory exclaimed. 'Just keep it straight, we've got enough momentum to slide the last bit.'

The metal crumbled away from their legs, red-hot dust spraying across their shins as they skidded across the desert sand, Rory's trainers curling and smoking as they hit the ground.

'Doctor!'

Amy

shouted

as

they

prepared

themselves for impact with the TARDIS. 'Open the doors!'

As if viewed through a dream, a bright haze flooded out onto the path ahead as the double doors of the TARDIS were flung open to receive its guests.

A silhouette slouched against the frame and, with the flourish of a circus ringmaster, the Doctor beckoned the pair into its vast interior, just as the mower exploded into a cloud of liquid metal behind them.

Casually, the Doctor reached out a hand and caught a small black box before tossing the object into the air and slipping it into his pocket.

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DOCTOR WHO

He tugged his forelock at what was left of Appletown and - with a cheery 'Goodbye for ever!'

- he slammed the doors behind him as the storm exploded outside.

A second later and the TARDIS had faded away.

'Aaaand bingo!' With a sweep of his wrist, the Doctor crossed out the first item on his flip chart and stood back to see all three of his goals thoroughly scribbled out. He rubbed his chin. 'Should have put "Save Rory and Amy" at the bottom - would have made it much more satisfying to work through that way.' He looked at the bedraggled pair in the corner of the room. 'But between you and me
they -'
He nodded his head conspiratorially -

'probably wouldn't have appreciated that.'

He was interrupted by a loud flapping sound as Rory tried to extinguish his shoes against the wall of the TARDIS. 'I'm sure I keep a fire bucket handy somewhere...' the Doctor muttered, glancing around in an attempt to be helpful. But the shoes were already out, their blackened soles crumbling to ash in Rory's hands, so the Doctor simply shrugged and forgot about it.

He strode over to the railing along the gantry and leaned over to grin at his companions from
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NUCLEAR TIME

their position by the door. 'It's called a thingy by the way,' he said.

'What is?' Amy asked.

'The

thingy

that

delayed

your

mower's

disintegration so that you could get here. I call it a thingy because I'm always forgetting the names of stuff, you see - I'm always going, "Where's that thingy?"

and "What have I done with my thingy?" and "Ooh, what's my thingy doing there?" Now I'll always be looking for something specific, even if it isn't actually what I'm after.' He paused for a second and considered. 'Well, actually that could get quite annoying, especially if people kept passing it to me when I didn't need it.'

'I'd rather you'd not used a "thingy" at all, Doctor,' Rory began. 'I'd rather you'd just landed in front of us or something, you know,
before
the whole nuke thing.'

The Doctor shrugged and held up his palms.

'Sorry, couldn't move from the square, you see? It was the bomb's impact site and I couldn't deviate from those specific coordinates whilst carrying out my clever plan.'

'Which was?'

The Doctor hopped down the steps until he was standing in front of the pair. 'Saving my two best friends from dying in a nuclear explosion that had no place occuring in 1981, that's what.' He opened
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his arms and hugged them both tightly to his chest.

'Oh, and I got a new bike as well,' he said, pointing at the rusting contraption by the door.

Amy hesitated and pulled away from the hug. 'But it
did
go off, Doctor.'

'Sort of,' the Doctor replied, wondering how to explain what had just happened. 'It's like throwing something out of a moving car, a bit of rubbish or whatever. The TARDIS is like the car, the bomb is like the bit of rubbish, and the road outside is time, more importantly the time spanning one particular point so that driving forwards goes into the future of that point and reversing travels into the past, see?'

They didn't.

'If the car wasn't moving and you threw something out of the window, it would just hit the verge next to you. But if the car's moving really fast then the bit of rubbish will travel with the momentum of the car after it's thrown, hopping and skipping along the road behind it. I materialised the TARDIS around the nuke and took a run-up, ejecting it at the moment of impact. Because it was still moving rapidly

forwards

through

time,

the

bomb's

instantaneous explosion was spread over an hour and a half as it hopped and skipped across the future before coming to rest in normal time. The result was that the time

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NUCLEAR TIME

line
knew
that a nuclear bomb was supposed to explode but was unsure
when,
so it took a while to catch up. In the end, to cover its tracks, it produced all the after-effects and destruction of a nuclear bomb, but combined it with a patchy and inconsistent moment of detonation. There's no mushroom cloud because there's no specific point for a mushroom cloud to occur, and you two have enough time to find me before the future catches on; especially as a pair of time anomalies like you are the last thing an uncertain past is going to try and impose consequences on.'

'Uh, right,' Rory mumbled. 'Well, thanks anyway.'

'You're welcome!' the Doctor replied cheerily, sauntering back up the steps to pack his flip chart away.

'Righty-ho, always moving on, moving on.'

Amy caught up with him before he could disappear down a corridor. 'That's it?' she said. 'That's all that happened to you — the run-up and the throwing-a-bomb-out-the-window thing — that was
everything,
was it?'

The Doctor shrugged. 'What do you mean?'

'I mean Albert. He didn't die. We remember him dying, we watched it happen. But he didn't die, Doctor, it never happened.' She frowned.

The Doctor looked away. 'Well isn't that nice for everyone?' he said.

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'Isley said she saw you talking to him, at the military base.'

'You
spoke
to Isley?' The Doctor raised an eyebrow. 'If I'd known you were going to
make
friends
with the killer androids, I'd have taken my time a bit more.'

'Be serious, Doctor.' Amy touched his shoulder, but he brushed it away.

'Today was a very long day, Amy,' he said eventually. 'I'm too tired for this.'

He turned and began to make his way down the corridor, boots clumping on the floor. Amy stood in silence for a second before resolving herself. She turned to see Rory waiting for her by the edge of the stairs and blew him a kiss. He caught it and stuck it on his bum with a wink.

Suddenly she turned back.

'Doctor!' she called after the retreating figure. He stopped. 'Did you do it, though? Did you manage to save them?'

The Doctor looked around and flashed his companion a sad smile. 'Yes,' he said quietly.

'Saved all of them. Every, single, one.'

And Amy was happy.

236

Colorado, 28 August 1981, 5.20 p.m.

Albert pulled on a pair of goggles. 'I'm going outside,' he said simply.

A gantry had been erected along the exterior of the structure, running parallel to the observation room, and the wind tugged at his lab coat as he stepped onto the steel deck. It was like nothing he had ever seen before. The horizon sparkled in the distance, flashes of bright, blinding light flaring and dying amongst a flat sea of crimson flame. The display had lasted over ten minutes now and reminded the scientist of a lighthouse off the coast of a beach he'd used to holiday on as a child.

Inside the compound there was an awed silence,
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DOCTOR WHO

rows of soldiers ranked up across the gates to the courtyard, taking it in turns to borrow the limited supply of goggles whilst the others turned their backs to avoid being blinded.

Albert's life was in that town, and it was burning.

'The Russian plane passed overhead three minutes ago.' Geoff was suddenly at his side. 'God knows what they'll make of this. God knows what
anyone
will make of this, it's like no nuke I've ever seen before.'

'Maybe that's a good thing,' Albert responded. 'More room

to

manoeuvre

politically

with

an

indescribable event.' For the first time in nearly ten years, he felt a glimmer of hope. 'It's up to Washington to make the right decision now.'

'Well we were all pretty freaked out when it came to crunch time. Even the boys in suits must have a heart somewhere.'

'No one wants to die,' Albert responded.

There was silence for a moment. Then Geoff coughed awkwardly.

'Albert, I think you should take a look at this.' Albert was surprised to find Geoff's blue folder thrust into his hands. He looked up enquiringly. 'Just go through the summaries. It'll give you the gist.' Geoff nodded to him.

Carefully, Albert opened the folder, holding it
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NUCLEAR TIME

with his thumb to keep the papers from blowing away.

The turning of sheets marked each passing minute until finally he handed the bundle back.

'It's not a huge surprise,' he said eventually. 'We've always been pretty dangerous — the things we know.'

There was a pause. `Do
they
know that you know?'

'No. A friend at the Pentagon passed it to me. These are the briefings they gave the platoon yesterday.'

Albert stepped back from the railing, out of sight of the soldiers below. 'So they've been ordered to shoot us?'

'Disappear is the preferred term. Who knows, they might actually let us live, in some form or other.'

'I think that depends on what you count as living,' Albert remarked.

Geoff coughed once more. 'But it's OK for you,' he said, 'because I got you this.' From behind his back he produced a parcel, brown Christmas wrapping paper tattered and torn at the edges. 'It took me a year.

But I kept my promise.'

Albert gave him a look as he took the parcel, carefully tearing the edge off one side and shaking it a little before sliding his hand in to feel around.

He pulled out the items one by one.

The first was a little navy book.

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DOCTOR WHO

'A passport - valid for anywhere,' said Geoff. A wad of notes.

'One million dollars in traveller's cheques. That's my pension right there.' He smiled half-heartedly.

A small money bag, filled with dollars of varying denominations.

'Petty cash.'

And a key.

'There's a motorbike under a tarpaulin in the corner of the courtyard. It's yours.'