If, at the end of the previous chapter, you were saying, "Oh, shit. What now?" then you are well within your rights! Enjoy!
TWENTY-SEVEN
Martha Jones, Donna Noble, Colin Brownhill, and the Doctor all sat at the large conference table in the glassed-in room on the second floor of an office building, just outside London.
Of course, at this moment, London was just outside London.
They had, five minutes before, looked out the window and seen the impact of a tightly-wound capsule of time unleashed. 2008 had been stamped out, for the moment, by 1938, and the impact had flattened the city. It had happened just as the Doctor had predicted, and no-one had been able to stop it. Though, not for lack of trying.
And now, what lay ahead for London, all of Britain, in fact, not to mention Europe, and most of the West… it was horrific. Ethnic cleansing, paranoia, struggle, violence, famine, ruins, general disregard for human life… This was what the Doctor had predicted as well, and no-one in the room had any reason to believe that this "Nazi Apocalypse," as they had come to think of it, would not come to fruition.
All of them stared at their hands in their laps, trying to make sense of it.
"Why didn't we feel it?" asked Donna, breaking a truly oppressive silence.
"This building is insulated from it," the Doctor answered.
"How's that?" Colin asked, solemnly, ever the architect.
"It's in another dimension, remember? It's an annex of Gallifreyan atmosphere. It's basically out-of-reach of rubbish like this."
"Well, isn't there something we can do?" Donna asked.
"Probably," the Doctor shrugged. "It just hasn't come to me yet."
"Can't we just go back in time, and like, stop this whole thing?" she practically whined.
"Like, how?" Martha asked, incredulous.
"Like… if there were a way to pinpoint the date when Greene was approached by Time Lords, or whoever from the Whozit Squad…"
"The Heimat Squad?" the Doctor asked.
"…then we could stop him from agreeing to do it, and we could head the Time Lords and the Heimats off at the pass!"
"What do you think this is, Back to the Future?" the Doctor asked.
"Well, I don't know! Why couldn't we do it?"
"It's dodgy doing stuff like that, Donna, I thought you'd have learnt that by now," the Doctor sighed.
"Don't you dismiss me like that, like I'm some tedious preteen!"
"I'm not dismissing you," he said. "I'm just very, very tired."
"Doctor, I've seen you break the laws of your people seventeen ways from Sunday," Donna protested. "We're talking about the fate of the Earth! Isn't it worth whatever risk?"
"Donna, I know I meddle all the time, but… ugh, going back in time with the actual intention of changing history, stopping a thing from happening…"
"Marty McFly style?" she asked.
"Yeah..."
"Well?"
"Have I ever told you about the time when Rose saved her father from a speeding car?" he asked her.
"What's that got to do with anything?" Donna shouted.
"Look, it's just not what time travel is for!" he shouted back.
"Then what is it bloody for?" she practically shrieked, getting to her feet, staring him down.
"Donna," Colin said, taking her hand. "Why don't you sit down? I'll get you some water."
"I don't want water," she spat. "I want answers. From you, Doctor. You talk a good game about saving this planet and loving humanity, but when it comes right down to it…"
"Donna, don't finish that sentence," Martha said firmly, but without anger. "You know you'll regret it later."
"Of course you would defend him," Donna whined, knowing even then that she was being juvenile. She began to wander around the room, arms folded over her chest, trying not to scream, or weep.
"Look, even if I wanted to do what you're saying, I couldn't. Not because of some Time Lord gut-level code-of-ethics, which is, I will admit, something that does weigh formidably upon my actions," he said, contemplatively. "But because the Time Lords would need to be stopped. If we interfere with Buford, they'll just find another miserable human being to do their bidding, and then we'll be in this jam all over again. If we used time-travel to fix this, I would have to intervene with the Time Lords directly, and that can't be done because they're in a time lock."
"They're in a time lock?" Martha asked.
"Mm-hm," the Doctor confirmed. "The whole planet. Its existence is inaccessible via time, via space."
"Then how is this place accessible?" Martha wondered. "I mean, if the entire history of he planet Gallifrey is shut away in some sort of – pardon the use of the word – capsule, then how are people just walking in and out of this building all the time?"
The Doctor stared at her with wide, incredulous eyes, and it was a look that betrayed wheels turning in his brain. "Oh my," he said, barely breathing.
"What?"
"How are people just walking in and out of this building all the time?" he asked, repeating her question. "How indeed, Dr. Jones?"
"Are you seriously asking me? No, no… you can't be asking me…" she stuttered.
"Well, the answer is because there are at least two doors to the outside, that have polarized and specially-calibrated compression fields, just like the TARDIS, so that no-one realizes they've shifted into another dimension. And since this building isn't actually on Gallifrey, it's accessible. It's here. It's on Earth. It's got doors. But the interior. The interior…"
He dashed out of the room, and into the office area. The three left in the conference room could see him through the glass walls, but they followed him anyway.
"Doctor, what are you doing?" Colin wondered.
The Doctor picked up a mug of coffee from one of the desks. The mug was a heated, battery-operated travel tumbler that had the company's name and logo on it. He took a drink from it. He seemed to burn his tongue.
"You couldn't just feel the steam coming off it?" Martha asked, a bit exasperated.
"You're missing the point, Martha. It's still piping hot," he said. "Donna, how long would you say it's been since the suits left?"
"I don't know," she said. "A half hour?"
"Taste this," he said.
"I hate coffee," she said. "I'll take your word for it: it's hot. But it's a heated tumbler, Doctor."
"The heating mechanism is turned off."
"Oh," she said, flatly, reaching out for the mug. She touched her upper lip to the surface of the coffee and winced.
"A bit hot for having sat there for a half-hour with no heating mechanism, don't you think?"
"Yeah, I guess so," she conceded.
The Doctor then went behind a solid wall and disappeared, and it surprised everyone except Colin.
"Blimey, I thought all the walls in this place were glass," Donna muttered.
They followed him, and found themselves in the office's kitchen. The Doctor opened the fridge door. "Look at this," he said, handing Martha a small container of milk. He then handed her a carton of cottage cheese and a still-sealed yoghurt. "And this, and this. What are the expiry dates?"
She examined what was in her hands. "There aren't any."
"Right," he said, sauntering up close to her. "Someone has rubbed them off. Look."
He indicated a place where it seemed, indeed, that something had been scraped away.
"Why would anyone do that?" she asked.
He took all of the dairy products from her and replaced them in the fridge, and then the top half of him seemed to disappear inside the white box. When he came back out, he was holding a brown paper sack. "Jackpot," he said. "Someone forgot to get rid of this… twice." He showed his companions the label, written in blue marker, that said 'Tamsin's lunch – 16/11/07 – do not touch.'
"Whoa, it's been in there eight months?" Colin said, wincing.
"Yes, but I'd wager…" the Doctor began. And with that, he stuck his hand into the bag, and pulled out an egg salad sandwich, inside a small plastic zipper bag. He opened it, and took a large bite of the sandwich, much to the disgusted groans of all three of his friends.
"See?" he said, chewing. "It's fine."
Then he plunged his hand inside the bag again, and came up with a little cardboard container of milk. He waggled it at them delightedly, opened it, and took a big swig.
"Oh my God," Martha said, in revolted exasperation. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Don't you get it?" he asked. "The expiry date on this milk is 23 November, 2007, which is eight months ago, and yet, it tastes fresh."
Martha, Donna and Colin all exchanged looks. They now understood that something time-related was very weird in this building, but they hadn't caught up to the Doctor yet, of course.
The Doctor didn't wait around for them. He flew back into the office area and pulled the sonic screwdriver from his inside breast pocket. He aimed it at the nearest computer, and the device made a high-pitched sound that indicated something definitely amiss.
"Whoa," he said, and he sat down, and started clicking about. He hacked somehow onto a page of gibberish symbols that seemed to be floating by on the screen. "This machine has been rigged to move forward."
"Rigged to move forward?" Donna asked. "That makes no sense."
"It's been rigged to… well, mimic the passage of time," the Doctor said, leaning back, watching the storm of symbols. "The computer doesn't want to work on a linear basis – it's confused. Someone, probably the Heimat Squad, has hacked in and forced it behave like other computers on Earth. It's like a really aggressive software override that has the hardware going against its computer-y instincts."
He stood and moved again, pulling a face clock off the wall. He looked at the back, and said, "Runs on batteries. Is not wired into the walls."
"Doctor, you're going to have to start getting specific real soon," Donna said. "We're all really impressed with this enigmatic time-is-wonky thing you're doing here, but frankly, it's getting old."
"You don't see it?"
"No!" the three of them shouted at once.
"This is an annex of Gallifrey. Gallifrey is in a time lock. But this building isn't on Gallifrey, it's just connected to it. Which means it's accessible, but time has stopped. Foods don't spoil, coffee doesn't get cold, the computers are confused, clocks have to be independent of the inner-workings of the building, if they're going to keep time. It didn't even feel the impact of 1938. The building is unaffected by time. Nothing is moving forward here, because nothing is moving forward on Gallifrey."
"Whoa," Colin breathed. There was a pause, and then he looked at Martha and said, "Is your life always like this?"
"With him, yeah," she answered, a bit absently.
"The Time Lords set up this annex because they reckoned it would be easy to control from here, most specifically, the projected long, long life of Buford S. Greene, everyone's favourite Eternity Agent. There would be myriad ways for them to do that, the easiest of which would be simply to douse him with regenerative energy every now and then, and let him keep on ticking. Piece of cake," he said. "But… then, the Time War happened, and everything went to hell, and now Gallifrey is gone, and its existence is in a time lock. So now, time has stopped here, and things work very differently."
"Buford said he has to spend three times as much time in this building as outside of it, in order to maintain his eternal life," Donna said.
The Doctor shook his head. "He won't have eternal life now. Not unless he never leaves the building. With the three-times-as-much-time policy, he'll merely have a life that's four times longer than a human's should rightly be. He'll live, I predict, to age three-hundred or so. He must've done the math on that! How could he not know that?"
"He said he's been cured of Bradycardia," Martha said. "He said he was a ticking time-bomb in his 'real' life, but he's cleared of all that, now that he's eternal. Maybe he thinks as long as he's been magically freed of his heart condition, he's magically freed from mortality."
"What kind of sense does that make?" the Doctor asked her, a bit dismissively.
"What kind of sense does any of this make?" Colin pointed out.
"So he goes through the fridge and rubs the expiry dates off of stuff so that no-one notices that the milk doesn't curdle and the strawberries don't mould," Donna mused.
"And they have those heated tumblers as 'gifts' to all the employees, so they don't notice their coffee and tea doesn't cool," Martha added.
Colin sighed. "And I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I'd bet that if you look at the employee roster, no-one works here for longer than about five years," he said.
The Doctor nodded. "I reckon you're right. People spend roughly a third of their lives at work. Five years would be about as long as they could go without people noticing that they aren't ageing at the same rate as their other friends."
"Nine years, at the most," Donna said. "Definitely before you hit the decade mark."
"This is mental," Colin commented.
"But," the Doctor said, mysteriously. "You lot, you're still missing the big picture."
"Tell us about the big picture, then," Martha said, starting to get aggravated at the enigmatic routine. Clearly the Doctor was jazzed-up about something, but when he was light-years ahead of everyone else, and just wouldn't spill it… it was annoying.
"The big picture is, I'm a great big walking time-disaster," he said. "I'm a Time Lord, it's in my guts, in my blood. I travel around and muck things up. And in this place, I disturb the air."
"Oh!" Donna said, jumping up. "I see! Time has stopped here, and it doesn't want to move forward, so when you're in the building, it's like the air here is agitated!"
"Yep," he said. "When time is contained, and set to do something specific, and you give it a sloppy dose of me, things get weird."
He said this in such a way that anyone with eyes and ears could tell that he was trying to emphasise the importance of something. Again, the three companions exchanged looks. They could kind of see where he was going with this, but as non-Time-Lords, it was nigh on impossible to connect the dots.
But Martha came close. "So, we do what? Shove you into the time capsule and confuse it? Wouldn't that just make things worse?"
"Yes! And no, it wouldn't make things worse," he said. "Remember when we talked about the slow leak?"
"Yeah," Martha said. "The slow leak actually sounded a bit worse than having 1938 explode all over the place."
"In theory, if I can channel that explosion through myself, two things could happen. One, I might – small amount of might – be able to control it. It would hurt, but I could do it. Two, the time energy would, as you said, get confused about what its supposed to do. It would sort of… grab onto me, consider me, get sidetracked by me, before eventually realising what it was meant to do, and vent. That way, 1938 imposes itself upon 2008 at a reasonable speed."
"And that solves our problem?" asked Colin.
"It prevents London from getting levelled to the ground even before the Nazis can get their hands on it, so yeah. History carries forward the way we know it should," the Doctor said, even now looking a little worried. "Blitz, allies, atomic bomb, V.E. Day."
"Oh, yay," Colin said, under his breath.
"But…" Donna sputtered, gesturing in the direction of the window they'd been looking through, at the ruins of their capitol city. "It's too late. Isn't it?"
The Doctor began to walk swiftly toward the front of the building, where the conference room was, and the staircase. He went down the stairs, and as he did so, he explained, "I might – again, small amount of might – be able to get back to our version of 2008, if we're very, very careful."
"Really?" Martha asked. "They've not created a new timestream or something?"
He was still moving down the hall as fast as his long, thin legs could carry him. He stopped at the side door of the building and looked through the glass at the TARDIS. His voice dropped to a whisper. "It has. But it's only been a few minutes. Where we are, the effects haven't settled in… the long-term damage has not been hinted at. The four of us, cloistered here inside this annex, closed-off from the rest of reality… well, in here, it's still 2008, in a manner of speaking. It's our 2008. The seal hasn't been broken."
"That doesn't sound right," Martha mused. "I mean… sorry, what do I know? I'm not a Time Lord."
"It doesn't sound right because it's extremely tenuous," the Doctor admitted, muttering almost to himself. "But it could work, if we summon the TARDIS, rather than going out to it."
"Okay, Doctor, but what's to stop General Kir from starting this whole all over again, if we set things right?" Donna asked.
"And kidnapping us both, and doing… God knows what, to make you comply?" Martha asked, voice harried and high.
"What's to stop him?" the Doctor asked. Resolutely, coldly, but quietly, he replied, "Me."
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