Buford S. Greene has just revealed, as villains often do, why he's doing what he's doing, and how to undo it. *sigh* Why are they so predictable? ;-)
He's shown Martha and Donna the remote detonator he's been keeping in his pocket...
Okay, so now what?
Enjoy!
TWENTY-SIX
"So you do have a magic button," Martha sighed. "You have it."
"Yes, indeed," he said, rocking back on his heels, much the way Martha had seen the Doctor do a hundred times. "I find it quite… er… empowering! Yes, empowering. Now, that's a word that the twenty-first century loves to throw about."
"Buford, what are you doing?" Donna shouted, in her only-Donna brand of total exasperation. "Aren't you a citizen, a native of this planet? Don't you care about what happens to it?"
"I have been shown the future, Ms. Noble," he said, rather calmly. "And I don't care to contribute to delinquency of my planet. You lot, you twenty-first-century types, you've got too much power, too fast. Too much AI, too much knowledge right at your fingertips…"
"Too much? And who exactly told you it was too much?" Donna wondered. "Surely you didn't come to that conclusion on your own."
"Like I said, I've been shown the future," he answered. "I've seen the chaos the human race causes. I've seen it with my own eyes. The torture, the mayhem…"
"I still don't think you came to this conclusion on your own," Donna said. "So, someone showed you a barren battlefield, or a wasteland, or whatever, and said it was because of the human race? And you just believed them?"
"The progression of common technologies that you people carry around right now, to interplanetary holocaust, is logical. One need only be explained…"
"Okay," Martha chirped. "Let's talk about holocaust for a sec. If you push that button, do you know what's about to happen to this city? This planet? Yeah, I mean, we'll never branch out and become destroyers of the universe, as you seem to think, but… 1938, Buford. You know what happens in the years following!"
"Yes, the Doctor has illustrated quite a colourful picture of what Hitler might do to the world, without London to stand as citadel," Buford sighed.
"And you don't believe him? Don't you remember the Blitz?"
Greene shrugged. "Maybe we'll get lucky and the time capsule will flatten Germany as well."
Martha couldn't help but laugh. "What? Maybe we'll get lucky? Are you serious?"
"It could happen."
"From what I understand, the damage will extend as far as Northern France, and only because the impact will cause the Channel to flood it. Yet another bastion of humanity that cannot afford to be weakened when the Axis attacks. Britain has no government, no effective military, D-Day cannot happen, the Americans can't free Paris on their own, especially not without a way to land on Europe, and one-by-one, we all fall down!"
Donna chimed in. "And it will be your fault, do you understand that? If you press that button, you have doomed humanity! It won't even be a question of the higher-ups – the Time Lords or the Heimats or whoever they are… it's on you. You have the button. You hold this planet's survival, literally, in the palm of your hand!"
"The Doctor has explained all this to me, in his annoying, haughty, Time Lord way. And I've made my choice. Yes, I'm a bit frightened of the future, but…"
"Are you stupid, or just heartless?" Donna asked, loudly.
"I guess you could say heartless, Ms. Noble, as the heart God gave me never worked properly. I'm just trying to survive."
"At the cost of… everything? Everyone?" Martha asked.
"Yes," he said. "I'm not you. I never took a vow of first do no harm, Dr. Jones."
"Neither did I," Donna reminded him. "And yet, my life isn't a long, meaningless, wasteful hindrance."
"You say my life is a meaningless hindrance, do you?" he asked, raising his voice for the first time, and actually taking a step toward Donna.
She, however, did not move from her spot. "Don't forget wasteful," she shot back. "I said that, too."
Buford growled at her, "That's where you are wrong. My life was meaningless before. I was a waste of space before. Now, I'm making my mark on the world – on the universe. I'm doing good…"
"You're doing good only for yourself," Martha said. "And not even for yourself! You'll have to live through the Nazi apocalypse just like everyone else!"
He laughed. "Nazi Apocalypse. Sounds like a video game. Speaking of meaningless endeavours…"
"Buford! Listen to yourself!" Martha cried out.
His eyes widened in anger at her. "I shall have eternal life! I am the Eternity Agent!"
"We'll see how you feel about eternal life, and being the bloody Eternity Agent, looking at yourself in the mirror each day, forever, knowing what you've done!" Martha retorted.
"Listen, Buford," Donna said, now taking a step toward him, in turn. "Martha, she doesn't understand feeling useless. She's never had a useless day in her life. In fact, she even walked across this great planet of ours once, to save it from a… well, I don't fully understand the story, but she saved the world."
"Congratulations, Dr. Jones," Greene said to Martha. "So sorry you'll not be able to do it a second time."
Donna ignored him. "But even before that, she came from an amazing, resourceful, loving family, and she always had encouragement, growing up. She and her siblings and cousins, they were always told how smart they are, how beautiful and good, and how their kindness and ingenuity could be far-reaching. Their lives were worth more than allowing someone to run roughshod over them – even someone like the Doctor.
"But not me," she continued. "I mean, I know my mother loves me, but her view of me was always… less-than. Or, at least, that's what her treatment of me tells me. My dad and granddad helped mitigate that a bit, but they were never around when I was little, and my dad is gone now. Granddad has his own problems with her these days. Anyway, I think... my mum has been trying all my life to help me by belittling me, and it just… it's just made me feel, as you say, useless."
"Are you saying that my trying to help this planet by belittling it, is just like what your mother has done to you?" asked Greene, with mock-sympathy.
"No, you complete arse," Donna snapped. "I'm saying that on some level, that is all my own, I understand how you must've felt, at forty-ish, with no wife, no kids, no great career, no prospects, feeling like you'll never amount to anything. I mean, I can't say I know what it feels like to face possible sudden death every day, but the point is, either way, I found meaning. By doing good. By looking at the big-picture. By looking beyond my own life."
"Let me guess," Greene lilted. "You found the Doctor."
"Well, he found me, but… yes," Donna said. "I like to think he's the Patron Saint of people like us, Buford. Martha likes to say he changed her life, and he has. In quite a few ways. But honestly, I think she's done more good for him, than vice versa.
"But you and me," Donna went on. "The Doctor really thinks and acts and travels and does his Doctor-thing for us. He's talked to you. He's tried to show you. He's touched your life, whether you want to admit it or not, and yet, here you are, choosing the other path! You're out for yourself! You're making a negative difference. You're subtracting from the existence and vibrancy of this planet, not adding to it. And actually, if you had your way, you'd cause things to stay literally the same… forever. You'd not have the Nazi Apocalypse, you'd have just seventy years of Earth as we know it, over and over again! So now, you're less than useless. And your life really is just one, long, boring, meaningless, wasteful, selfish, hindrance."
He stared at Donna with contempt and surprise.
Martha looked back and forth between them, unsure of who would speak or act next.
"Well," Buford said quietly, turning back to the window. "Maybe the Doctor can intervene with Hitler, and prevent the war altogether, eh? Give England and Northern France a chance to rebuild. If he had any real sense of meaning, that's what he would do."
"That is what you think the Doctor should do?" Donna asked, incredulous.
Then Greene turned away from the window, and began to walk toward the conference room door. "Yes. And then he would turn over the instructions for containing 1938 once more in a capsule, so that we can save the universe from the ignorance of the human race."
Martha and Donna looked at each other in disbelief, and then followed him through the door, to the top of the staircase.
"You are possibly the most stubborn being I've ever met, save for the Doctor himself, do you know that Mr. Greene?" Martha asked.
"Please leave," he said, bounding down the stairs to the landing.
"Not until you give us that detonator," she said.
He stopped on the landing, and took the device from his pocket and examined it. Then he checked his pocket watch.
He turned and walked back up the stairs toward Martha, and held it out to her. And just before she took it, he pressed the button, before putting it in her hand.
The Doctor had one hand contemplatively resting on one of the columns, in the basement of the building.
"Sorry, Doctor, did you say, your people built this building?" Colin asked.
"Hmm?" the Doctor said, inhaling hard. Then, "Oh, yeah… I mean, it's possible. Mind you, if the Time Lords and the Heimat Squad need an Eternity Agent, and they're going to use a human, then they'd need a way to keep him alive for, well, eternity. And if you're going to set up this sort of thing on Earth, you need a front, like a business. So, they built an office building… just large enough to employ a dozen people or so and to be…"
"What?" Colin asked, when the Doctor didn't say anything for about a minute, preferring to walk about the room, examining and ruminating.
"And be regulable from far away."
"Regulable how?"
"Well, to keep someone alive who shouldn't rightfully be kept alive, you'd have to manipulate time. And a space this size, the Time Lords could have done it from a cubicle in the basement of the Citadel. Oh, I had it all wrong! This building isn't a talisman at all. It's an annex!"
"An annex of what?"
"Of Gallifrey," the Doctor said, looking at Colin with a certain mania in his eyes. "My planet. The doors to the outside act as dimensional portals, just the way the door to my TARDIS does. This building is a little piece of my planet. I mean, there's nothing homey about it – except these columns. It's just atmosphere. And it's all been dressed up to look like an office on Earth."
"We're on another planet right now?" Colin asked, panicking a bit.
"Not as such," the Doctor said. "Just an annex. A little pod that contains, as I said, atmosphere. It's in a different dimension…"
"Doctor!" they heard from the top of the stairs. It was Martha's voice sounding frantic.
"Martha! Did you find a detonator?" He and Colin both ran for the stairs.
"Yes, and the button has already been pushed!"
"What? Are you sure?"
"Look," she said, and she held it up for him to see. Even from the bottom of the stairs, he could perceive an ominous red light flashing.
"How did that happen?" he asked, rushing up the steps, with Colin in tow.
She lowered her eyes to the floor. "I told Buford we weren't going to back off without the remote detonator, so he pushed the button and handed it to me."
"Buford? He's here?" the Doctor asked. "Why isn't he out on that corner, watching his glorious pet project come to fruition?"
"Never mind that," Donna interjected. "How come it's not 1938?"
"Maybe it is," Martha suggested, darkly, after a long pause.
"Then how come I didn't feel anything?" the Doctor wondered.
He dashed through the basement door and found himself in the hallway. Martha was the first to stumble through the door after him.
As he made an intentional beeline in the direction of the staircase, she said, "Doctor, wait! He knows you're here."
He stopped and turned toward her, just as Colin and Donna caught up. "What? How?"
"He said…" Martha paused and groaned with the weirdness and urgency of it all. "I dunno… something like, the air in the building changes, when you walk in. The building can feel you, and is disturbed when you're here."
Donna added, "He said, the atmosphere here vibrates differently than normal, when you're in the building."
The Doctor stood quite still for a few seconds and said, "Actually, that might make a kind of sense, given... except I don't feel anything, vibrations or otherwise."
"He said that you have to be in the building when a Time Lord enters it, in order to feel the difference," Donna said. "You and Martha and I didn't feel it because we all came in at basically the same time."
"I might have felt it," Colin said. "A minute or so before the Doctor came down the stairs, I felt a change in the air around me. I suddenly felt nervous and paranoid, like maybe I was being watched, but not. I definitely felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on-end, but once the Doctor came downstairs, I forgot about it, and got involved in whatever we were doing."
"You didn't forget, you acclimated," the Doctor said.
"Well, whatever. I'm not saying it wasn't just good old-fashioned chills, or a sixth sense or something kicking in… just trying to contribute something," Colin explained with a shrug.
"Given what we saw in the basement…"
"What did you see in the basement?" Donna interrupted.
"Columns," Colin told her. "Just like the ones in the Doctor's ship. And a foundation so terribly put-together, the building should be collapsing, yet, here it is."
"This building is an annex, probably of Gallifrey," the Doctor said.
"What?" Martha shouted.
He shushed her, reminding her that Buford Greene might be able to hear them. Then he said to her, "The Time Lords might have thought they could control things that way, especially Buford. So, given that, I have no problem believing that the air in this building is altered with me in it. But it shouldn't make you feel uneasy – it should be a completion, of sorts. A neutralisation of improperly ionised air. It should feel more comfortable."
"Well, that's not what I felt," Colin said.
"And that's not what Buford Greene said," Martha told him.
"Then what's causing it, eh?" he asked. "Come on."
He took Martha by the hand and the four of them went toward the stairs. Along the way, they didn't see Buford S. Greene anywhere.
But what the Doctor seemed to want was a view out the window. He and Martha approached the same glass outlook through which Greene had been peering, just a few minutes before.
"Holy God," Colin breathed, coming up behind them.
Donna made a high-pitched sound that the Doctor had only heard her make once before, at her wedding reception, just before she burst into fake tears. But when he turned to her now, he could see that there was nothing fake in her sobbing. Colin pulled her in, and she shed tight, grief-stricken tears all over the lapel of his tweed coat.
The Doctor patted her back sorrowfully, and he and Martha turned back to the city scene before them, and they embraced, as both felt tears burning their eyes as well. The city of London was in ruins around them. They could clearly see a trajectory of damage in all directions, as a blast had come from a particular "ground zero" in the middle of a firework-like pattern. The water of the Thames had been blasted out of its cradle, and all that remained was a muddy, blackish-brown ditch that ran through a devastated city.
"Could anyone survive this?" Martha asked.
"Oh, yes, plenty of people will have survived, though they'll be injured," the Doctor said. "Plenty will not survive at all."
"Whitehall, Parliament, Downing Street," she whispered, amid Donna's continued sobs. "The Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, St. Paul's…"
"Ssshh," he told her, stroking her head. He whispered back, "That does no good, Martha."
"They're gone," she whispered. "All of them."
"I know."
A somber chapter ending, eh?
Don't forget to leave a review, and hey, thanks for reading!