Hello.

About a year ago, I started writing a Dr. Who novel called The Laughing Elders. It was to be a story in three parts; I completed the first part. Then, I tried to interest BBC Books, the publishers of Dr. Who, in publishing it, but they only accept submission from writers approved by the producers of the TV series. Makes sense. So, I contacted the agent of Russell T. Davies to see if I could interest him in it, but she politely informed me that he was too busy. Okey doke.

I've decided to put the complete first third of the novel on my Web site, Les Pages aux Folles (.ca), in September to celebrate its seventh anniversary. Until then, I've decided to give those interested on this site a taste of the story: I will publish a chapter every second week of July and August.

I started writing the other two parts of the novel, but moved on to other projects when I hit the BBC wall. If there is any interest, I may take them up again.

Enjoy,

Ira Nayman

Dr. Who:

The Laughing Elders

PART ONE: Harlequin's Toy

Chapter Three:

The Littlest Companion

As the TARDIS control panel started humming, the Doctor looked at the baby in Martha's arms. The baby looked back at him, benign.

"Was it absolutely necessary –" the Doctor started.

"I couldn't very well leave her on the street," Mother responded.

"No. No, of course not. Absolutely not. Just wouldn't do." Pause. "Still, maybe you could have, I don't know, left it with your mother?"

"Yeah, right," Martha verbally rolled her eyes. "Hey, mum, I picked this baby up off the street – its parents were barely alive and it needs looking after – would you do us a favour while me and the Doctor go off and save the world? Yeah – that would have gone down a treat, that would."

"See what you mean," the Doctor glumly said. "But, I mean, still, no girlfriend or – OI, GET AWAY FROM THERE!" The Doctor swatted at the baby's pudgy little hand as it appeared to be making for one of the levers on the control panel. The little girl looked at him for a moment, startled, then started bawling.

"Oh, well done," Martha commented as she started rocking the baby back and forth.

"Aww, I didn't get close to it!" the Doctor protested.

"Her," Martha quietly hissed. "It's not some alien creature, it's a baby girl."

"She was reaching towards the control panel," the Doctor petulantly stated.

"Worried she might ruin something?"

"It's delicate," the Doctor lamely told her.

"Are you serious?" Martha couldn't believe her ears. "You knock it about like it was Charlie Chaplin or something. You really think an infant could do anything to it?" The Doctor seemed to be at a loss for words, a rarity for him, so, after a couple of seconds, Martha added: "Maybe you just can't stand the thought of more than one baby being on board!"

The Doctor almost sputtered something about the unfairness of the accusation when he caught himself. Instead, he hit something on the control panel. A door opened up. Not the usual one that lead outside. A door opposite that one which lead deeper into the TARDIS. Before Martha knew what was happening, he had disappeared into it.

Oh, great, Martha thought. This baby won't stop crying and the Doctor has left in a hissy fit. A minute or more passed before the Doctor returned, a small wooden cradle in his arms. "Put her in here," he quietly suggested to Martha.

Martha was dubious about the possible effects of the rickety old thing would have on the baby, but she knew better than to argue with the Doctor when he was being serious. So, she tenderly laid the baby down in the soft blanket in the cradle. It continued crying.

"Doctor, I don't think –" Martha began.

"I haven't turned it on, yet," the Doctor cut her off. He touched something on the side of the cradle, some button that Martha couldn't see, and the cradle began rocking itself. As she watched, a star with planets spinning around it was projected over the cradle. The little girl's sobbing slowly subsided. She grabbed for one of the planets in the mobile, but it was a hologram and her hand went through it. The Doctor and Martha watched as she fell asleep.

Then, the Doctor made a motion for Martha to follow him and moved to another part of the room. "I'm sorry, Martha," he said, "I don't know what comes over me sometimes."

"Well," Martha responded, "you spend all of your time solving mysteries and fighting evil monsters. Stressful work, that. I'm surprised it doesn't get to you more often."

"Yes," the Doctor soberly agreed. "I'm sure that must be it." Although he had told Martha about the destruction of Gallifrey and the end of the Time Lords, he had never mentioned that he had had children and grandchildren who had perished in the Time Wars. Before he could even think of telling her about them, he pushed the thought out of his mind, clapped his hands and said, "Well –" in his cheeriest tone, which also happened to be his loudest. The Doctor looked over at the crib to make sure he hadn't woken the baby. Then, with the same enthusiasm, but fewer decibels, he said, "Well, that was some adventure we had this morning. Or, from the position of the sun, I would say it was mid-afternoon. But, if that's the case, why is my stomach telling me I should have a little lunch?"

"Doctor?"

"Alright. Where did you get the baby?"

"Who was the woman on the street?"

"Ah, this time I asked you first."

Martha told the Doctor about all the people on the street. Finding the child was straightforward enough, so the Doctor only interrupted her a dozen times with questions. Then, the Doctor told her about his encounter with the oddly costumed woman.

"But, Doctor, who was she?" Martha asked when he was finished. More or less.

"You didn't recognize her?"

Martha thought for a moment. "I saw a show on telly when I was a kid," she said, "with a character that could have been –"

"Just so!" the Doctor enthusiastically clapped his hands. "Harlequin – Arlecchino, to use his original name – was a character in the Commedia dell'Arte – an old Italian theatre form. Aww, it was brilliant! No scripts – the actors improvised all of the comedy. It didn't last long, but the characters have been around in one form or another ever since."

Martha didn't entirely understand. "So, we were attacked by…a character from an old Italian comedy?"

"Or somebody taking on the identity of a character from an old Italian comedy," the Doctor nodded. "Yes. The good thing is that the weapon she was wielding explains what happened to all of the catatonic people."

"What weapon? You mean that white crescent thing she was holding?" The Doctor nodded seriously. "That wouldn't hurt anybody," Martha protested, "unless you threw it at their head!"

"Ah, looks can be deceiving," the Doctor told her. "The Quantum Gun is actually a really, really, really, really, really powerful weapon – and, that's five reallys, so you know I'm serious."

"Quantum Gun?"

"Yeah. Brilliant technology…in a demented sort of way. Want to know how it works?"

"Umm, okay."

"First, you need to know a little bit about quantum physics," the Doctor warmed up to the subject. He clearly enjoyed being in professor mode. "Imagine an atom moving through the universe. Let's call it…Molly."

"Why Molly?" Martha asked.

"Why not Molly?" the Doctor asked. "I used to know a girl named Molly – an opera singer and gun runner – it's a good name, isn't it?"

Martha shook her head a bit. "Uhh, sure."

You couldn't argue with logic like that. However, the Doctor didn't usually give you the opportunity, and this time was no exception, as he continued: "Okay. So, Molly's been hanging about since the Big Bang, right? She's just moved through space interacting with other atoms. What Molly doesn't know – can atoms 'know' things? – well, anyway, Molly doesn't know that, of the sesquidillion atoms around her, she is about to be singled out for an experiment. You see, humans – gotta love 'em – have developed a way to figure out where exactly an atom is in space, and they want to test it out."

"Oh," Martha tried to interrupt. "Doctor –"

But the Doctor was not to be deterred. "Now, a moving atom has two qualities: speed and direction. The problem with the human experiment is that when it detects one, it interferes with the other. So, if you want to know the speed, you have to change the direction. Where, and you're probably way ahead of me on this, if you want to know the direction, you kind of have to change the atom's speed."

"Actually –" Martha said, but the Doctor ignored her.

"Do you – humans – let that stop you? Naah! You want to understand the universe. Good on you, I say! So, what you do is you imagine all of the different paths through space and speeds that Molly could possibly have. This is the quantum world – alive with possibilities! Now – this is the tricky bit – how do these possibilities actually become the real world that we observe and live in every day? We observe it and live in it! You see, when a phenomenon is observed – when somebody actually looks at it, all of the possibilities collapse into the single reality – Molly, the atom, in all her glory! Have you ever heard of anything so brilliant?"

"Erm, actually, I have," Martha replied. "College physics course. I understand basic quantum theory."

The Doctor looked crestfallen. "Oh," he said.

"What I don't understand," Martha continued, "is how you make a weapon out of that."

"Ah, well, that's where we leave Molly behind," the Doctor said, once again enthusiastic. Imagine that the same idea is applied to you. You're Molly the atom. Now, think about you at this second. You have a choice: you can scratch your nose or ignore the itch. That's not all you can do, of course. You can…walk over to the other side of the panel…or ask for a cup of tea…or jump up and down for no apparent reason. Actually, it would be interesting to see you jump up and down for no apparent –"

"Doctor," Martha tried to interrupt, but it just brought the Doctor's wandering attention back to the main argument.

"Yes, well, let's keep it simple. You have a binary choice, a choice between two possibilities. This second. Then, each of those possibilities leads to two more possibilities in the next second. That's four. Then each of those leads to two more – that's eight. Eight possible choices in three seconds. If you keep going, in a single minute, you would have to make 23 to the power of 18 choices. That's 23 with 18 zeroes after it – in one minute! In a single day, you would face more choices than there are grains of sand in the Bahamas!"

"Why the Bahamas?" Martha asked. When the Doctor just looked at her, she twigged: "Yeah. Why not the Bahamas? Okay, I get it."

"Now," the Doctor continued, "in this universe, we simply make a choice and live with it. But, some people believe that every time we make a decision, a new universe is created where we made a different decision."

"Infinite alternate universe theory," Martha stated.

"Right," the Doctor agreed.

"But, Doctor, what this has to do with what happened to those people in Toronto?"

"Ah, well," the Doctor, answered, "that's where it gets really interesting. Ordinarily, we aren't aware of all of the alternative choices we didn't make, the paths not chosen, as it were. One of the effects of the Quantum Gun is to do just that. Imagine becoming aware of all of the different paths your life could take in the next few seconds…minutes…hours. The human mind can't process that much information, it's literally overwhelmed by it. So, to cope, it shuts down."

"Like people with autism."

The Doctor clapped his hands, delighted. "Exactly so."

"Why would anybody create such a weapon?" Martha wondered.

"It wasn't originally intended to be a weapon," the Doctor told her. "See, once upon a time, there lived…"

"Once upon a time?" Martha protested. "Are you telling me some galactic history or a bedtime story?"

"I'm telling you some galactic history that was told to me as a bedtime story," the Doctor explained to her. "Now, if I may…?"

Martha nodded sheepishly.

Once upon a time, the Doctor said, there lived a race of people called the Jan'Anda. They were quite scientifically advanced, and had all of the latest technologies: computers and telephones and indoor plumbing and vaccines against all manner of diseases and paperclips and clock radios and automobiles and automatons and washing machines and lasers and holographic movies and toothpaste and cloning (well, of lower life forms, in any case) and advanced calculus and printing and books and magazines and hydrogen power and…and, well, perhaps a list of the science and technology they had isn't the point. The science and technology that they didn't have is more to the point. And the one thing the Jan'Anda didn't have was flight. No Wright brothers had ever existed to show them how to get off the ground. As a result, they had no space travel.

One of the cleverest of this very clever race was a woman named Mok Jay. The Jan'Anda had a good knowledge of astronomy – they knew all about stars and planets and comets and novas and supernovas and black holes and – sorry. Like many of her people, Mok Jay wondered what they were missing, what kept them from developing a workable idea of space travel and, like all of her people, she couldn't imagine what it was. She spent many years attempting to build a machine that would take her people into space, with no success.

Around the same time, a Jan'Anda man – I like the rhythm of that: Jan'Anda man. It trips off the tongue, don't you think? Jan'Anda man? Aaaaanyway, a Jan'Anda man named Andrum Fwee developed his race's version of the infinite alternate universe theory of quantum mechanics. I haven't studied it myself, but I understand it was quite elegant. Fwee gave lectures at academic conferences – which, for the Jan'Anda, were something of a competitive sport and a little like a religion – which, come to think of it, isn't that much different from Earth's academic conferences – knowledge is revered throughout the universe, and…uhh, where was I? Oh, yes: it was at one of these conferences that Mok Jay was introduced to Andrum Fwee's theory. She realized that, if it could actually be applied, it could solve the problem she had been studying all those years.

How so? Mok Jay figured that if she could move through a variety of different universes, she would eventually come upon one in which the Jan'Anda had discovered flight. Then, she could return to this universe and bring flight to her people. Easy as pi.

Mok Jay was the lead scientist in her kingdom; Andrum Fwee worked for a different sovereign. Her first task was to convince her king to convince Andrum Fwee's queen to let the two of them work together. This was not as easy as it sounds – was, in fact, perhaps the most difficult thing this distinguished scientist ever had to do – since Mok Jay was not experienced in the arts of diplomacy. That's always the way, isn't it? A person with the confidence to lead a team of dozens of scientists has difficulty making a simple request of one person in power.

But she did. At first, the request didn't go over very well, since the two realms had only recently entered into an uneasy peace after decades of border skirmishes and other low level hostilities. However, the attraction of space travel (not to mention the riches that would be the reward for anybody who could achieve it) was greater than the mutual distrust of the sovereigns, and they agreed to let the two scientists and their teams work together.

For all of Andrum Fwee's theoretical knowledge and Mok Jay's prowess at building scientific instruments, it took them and the teams working with them over 30 years to develop the Quantum Gun. The records – of both their scientific experimentation and Jan'Anda society in general – end at this point. However, we can guess what happened. Mok Jay and Andrum Fee didn't know what power they had. They turned on the gun, but it didn't work the way the expected, and it was far more powerful than they had anticipated. Instead of taking them through a variety of alternate universes, its power slowly spread across the entire planet, shutting down the brains of everybody its rays touched. Imagine it. Millions of sentient beings curled into balls, their minds shut down because they couldn't cope with the possibilities unfolding in front of them.

The only reason we know this story at all is that over 100 years later, a merchant trading vessel passed through their solar system. It hadn't planned on making any stops, but a science officer doing a routine scan of the planet's surface noticed patterns that couldn't have been natural, and, he correctly reasoned, must have indicated intelligent life. Only, when a landing party reached the planet's surface, they didn't find any life. Only skeletons and meticulous records of what happened to the Jan'Anda.

And the Quantum Gun.

"That's horrible!" Martha told the Doctor.

The Doctor nodded grimly. "That's why we have to find the gun and reverse its effects," he responded. "Then, we must find a place for it where it can never harm anybody again."

NEXT: Chapter Four: Interlude, With Soy Sauce