Four Doctors, Chapter 5

“Right. So. Let’s just review what we know, shall we?” The Doctor put on his best professorial airs, which still, he felt, didn’t quite fit this youthful and gangly new physique.

“Well I know nothing,” Rory offered. “Amy?”

“Nothing,” she agreed. “That about covers it.”

“Right,” Rory went on. “So really it’s more about you reminding us that you’re the only one here who really knows what’s going on.”

“Don’t be cheeky,” the Doctor said. “I may not look it, but I’m a lot older than you are, or were, before you became an Auton and spent two-thousand years … well never mind that right now, that’s not what’s important.”

He adjusted the overhead viewscreen. A vast network of time-corridors appeared as faintly glowing lines, all crisscrossed and radiating from a central point.

“Looks like a spider web,” Amy observed.

“Yes,” said the Doctor. “It is very much like a spider web. A spider web buried just below the topsoil, if you will, of spacetime. So an underground spider web … something like a trapdoor spider’s web, except nothing like that, really. It’s more like a cosmic system of gopher-holes. And we’re the big lumbering buffalo who’s gone and trod in the gopher-hole and got stuck, and swept away in the currents … you know, metaphors are rubbish for trying to explain a thing.”

“So what you’re saying,” Rory broke in, “is that it’s a lot of tunnels through spacetime, the TARDIS went and stumbled into it, and got swept off-course by it all.”

“That’s… well, yes.”

 The Doctor leaned in close to Amy and, in a loud stage-whisper, added, “I like this boy, Amelia. He’s definitely a keeper.”

“But what’s it all for?” Rory asked.

“Ah, well there’s the question.” The Doctor returned to studying the readouts on the console. “Unidirectional vortices… a very limited functionality… mostly works like a great big cosmic vacuum cleaner, sucking up stuff from all these endpoints and dropping it all here.” He finished with a finger planted at the center of the web on the screen.

“So what’s there?” Amy asked.

“Yes, exactly! What is there, and what does it want with all this out here, and why does it want so much of it, and what exactly does it intend to do with it all?”

“Again with the questions we can’t answer,” said Rory to Amy. “You notice how he does that?”

“Oh, I’ve noticed,” said Amy. “And now he’ll dazzle us with answers we can’t really understand.”

Not quite yet,” the Doctor said. “First I need … if the Old Girl would be kind enough … to locate the when and the where for all these temporal points, and …” He was interrupted by a few petulant bleeps from the console. “I did ask nicely,” he shot back, and was answered by an indignant squonk. “Well then pretty-please. With sugar. And a dollop of honey too, if you like.”

Rory leaned in to Amy and asked, “Does he always talk to the equipment that way?”

“Like an old married couple,” Amy replied.

After a few more knob-twists, button-pokes, and bleeps and bloops, the Doctor straightened up and gave the console an affectionate pat.

“Thank you, Dear. Right,” he continued, turning to face the Ponds, “looks like someone is targeting all the worst, the most devastating, most brutally awful acts of war from throughout space and time, taking things from there and collecting them …” he squinted again at some readings, “… at some central point which does not actually register … not sure how they get in past the time-lock, though… someplace not within normal spacetime … or even within any of the standard varieties of abnormal spacetime, apparently.”

“Which means what, exactly?” Rory prompted.

“You know, my people had an old proverb; ‘All temporal vortices lead to Gallifrey.’ Which, come to think of it, doesn’t seem all that proverbial.”

“It probably loses something in translation,” Amy quipped.

“Not really,” the Doctor said. “My people were never very poetic.”

“Right, question,” Rory broke in. “I’m awfully curious about the ‘leads to Gallifrey’ part of all that.”

“Yes. Well. It looks like the only way we’ll get any real answers here is to break through the time-lock and visit my old home-planet to see what sort of new and unpleasant developments are now being infiltrated into the Last Great Time-War.”

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Rory muttered.

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