‘Why don’t you want to go?’ Ace asked.

  ‘Oh, Ace, let me count the ways. They’re old, boring and judgemental.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘I’m just getting warmed up! They’re hidebound and they’d rather dress up in their ceremonial robes and watch the universe than actually participate in it.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘They treat me like a naughty schoolboy!’

  Ace laughed. ‘But you’ll go anyway?’

  The Doctor sighed. ‘Yes. I have to. Every cell in my body is telling me that something is terribly wrong here.’

  Ace glanced up at the viewscreen and saw Tulana standing outside the TARDIS. She looked like she was searching for a doorbell.

  ‘Doctor?’ said Ace, pointing at the screen.

  The Doctor looked up, saw Tulana and reached for the door controls.

  ‘Are you going to meet the Time Lords?’ Her face beaming, Tulana fired her question at him before she’d barely set foot over the threshold.

  Not for the first time, the girl managed to make the Doctor’s jaw drop. ‘How did you know that?’

  Tulana’s eyebrows rocketed upwards.

  ‘It would be fairly odd if you didn’t,’ said Tulana with a puzzled expression. ‘After all, you are one of them.’ She was really excited and rattled on, hardly pausing for breath. ‘It’s so weird. I’ve been learning all about the Time Lords for years, then I meet you and now I get to meet loads more Time Lords.’

  ‘You can’t come with us, Tulana,’ frowned the Doctor.

  ‘You can’t really stop me.’

  ‘I won’t take you.’

  ‘You don’t have to take me, I’ll go by myself.’

  ‘And how will you manage that?’ the Doctor asked.

  Tulana raised a distinctly unimpressed eyebrow. ‘I’ll. Walk. There?’

  ‘Walk?’ said the Doctor. ‘To Gallifrey?’

  ‘No,’ said Tulana incredulously. ‘To the Great Hall in the Assembly Building. The High Council of the Time Lords arrived there about ten minutes ago.’

  ‘The High Council came here?’ The Doctor sounded like he was being strangled. ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes! They’ve come to officially thank the Daleks for operating on the Lord President last month to remove a micro-aneurysm from his brainstem.’

  The Doctor’s jaw practically hit the console.

  ‘The Time Lords brought the Lord President here for surgery?’ asked Ace.

  ‘Oh no, he was far too ill to travel. They invited a Dalek team to Gallifrey. But they’re all here now.’ And she strolled out of the TARDIS again.

  Ace looked at the Doctor. He wore an expression she’d never seen before.

  ‘Come on then. Let’s go see your Time Lord buddies,’ said Ace.

  ‘There’s no point.’ The Doctor’s voice was flat and lifeless. He sounded defeated.

  ‘Why not? You said the Time Lords monitor everything. You said they’d know what was going on. And now you’ve got a whole bunch of them right round the corner.’

  ‘I’m afraid it won’t do any good.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I thought this was a Dalek plot, but it’s much worse than that. I thought that the Time Lords were just keeping their heads down the way they usually do. Sitting back in splendid isolation and not interfering.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But there is no way that they’d invite hostile Daleks to visit Gallifrey. It would be like the hens inviting a skulk of foxes around for afternoon tea.’

  ‘A what of foxes?’

  ‘A skulk, my dear Ace, is the collective noun for a group of foxes,’ said the Doctor. ‘But now is not the time for an English lesson.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that! So why has this visit from the Time Lords put your nose so out of joint?’

  ‘It means that this change to the universe is real and huge. And any changes on this scale that even the Time Lords don’t know about are dangerous and must be the result of some very powerful force or entity that has changed things.’

  ‘Even more powerful than the Daleks and the Time Lords?’

  The Doctor nodded, his expression grim.

  Ace couldn’t believe it. ‘Well, can you fix it?’

  ‘This strikes me as something way beyond my capabilities,’ the Doctor admitted. ‘We, like the universe, are in big trouble.’

  5

  That afternoon was peculiar, to say the least. Ace had never seen the Doctor in a stranger mood. From the frown lines creasing his face, he was obviously still deeply troubled, but at least he wasn’t quite as jittery. The fact that the Daleks weren’t just pretending to be agreeable but actually were meant that he didn’t have to worry about some kind of imminent ambush.

  Ace and the Doctor strolled through the Academy, exchanging pleasantries with Daleks who always stopped to say good afternoon or to ask the Doctor’s advice on their research. And he helped. The Doctor started talking to the Daleks and treating them as fellow scientists. But he never lost his watchful, worried expression.

  In the early evening, with the dying light of the setting sun making the tops of the distant mountains look like they were on fire, Tulana found the Doctor and Ace admiring the view.

  ‘I hear you’ve been having conversations with Daleks instead of zapping them. What changed?’ asked Tulana.

  ‘These Daleks aren’t like any I’ve ever met before,’ the Doctor admitted. ‘There can be only one explanation. This is some kind of alternative timeline, very different from the one I know.’

  ‘I was never any good at temporal physics – it gives me a headache.’ Tulana pulled a face.

  ‘Nevertheless, for whatever reason, the universe has changed,’ said the Doctor. ‘Some things are better, some things aren’t. The planet Sussashia Four has been destroyed so the reticulated sheep of Chonev are now extinct. The Sontarans won the battle of Kharax Rift, the Suxora Empire never fell, but the Kligoric Imperium did. The list goes on and on.’

  ‘And what caused all that to be different?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ he replied quietly, staring across the plaza at a couple of Daleks allowing themselves to be pushed around by a number of chortling young aliens on a nursery outing.

  ‘But you think the Daleks are responsible, don’t you?’ Tulana said.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past them. They are immensely advanced technologically, and they’re one of the most devious and dangerous races I’ve ever met.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, you’re just a man making up stories.’ Tulana shook her head. ‘You can tell tall tales all day about planets that were destroyed and sheep that became extinct and alternative universes in which Daleks are evil. But that’s all they are – stories. I live in this universe, and the Daleks are my friends. And the one who is a narrow-minded, inflexible, xenophobic bigot is you!’ And with that she stormed off.

  Ace watched her go, and then turned to the Doctor. ‘How come every single person, including the Time Lords, thinks that the Daleks are cute and fluffy, but you and I can still remember them doing bad stuff?’

  ‘Good question, Ace,’ said the Doctor. ‘Something obviously happened while we were trapped in the Temporal Plexus. Some cataclysmic event altered history, but we were shielded from its effects by the Plexus.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that have to be something enormous?’

  ‘Not necessarily. If you make a tiny change at just the right moment in time, then everything else follows naturally, like a ripple effect.’

  ‘The universe can change like that?’ asked Ace. ‘I mean, the whole thing?’

  ‘It’s incredibly rare – but it happens.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Someone has to fix it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Time Lords, usually.’

  ‘The Time Lords don’t think there’s a problem.’

  ‘One of them does!’

  ‘Could it be that you’re being … prejudiced?’

  ‘I am not!’ the Doctor said, scandalised.

  ‘Are you sure? You pride yourself on your open mind and your live-and-let-live attitude, but when it comes to the Daleks you’re as single-minded as they are. You told me once that there could be an infinite number of timelines, each subtly different from the next. But you refuse to believe in any timeline in which the Daleks might not be evil. Face it, Doctor, when it comes to the Daleks, you’re as intolerant as the rest of us.’

  ‘I most certainly am not,’ spluttered the Doctor. ‘I just know what they’re capable of. That doesn’t change, not in any timeline.’

  ‘See what I mean? I rest my case!’

  The Doctor opened his mouth to argue, but then he paused. ‘You’re right. I don’t like them. The faint whiff of ozone when they move makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I hate the silent way they glide about. I hate having hundreds of years of memories of every evil, rotten, violent, tyrannical, genocidal plot they’ve ever conceived.’

  ‘Then maybe you need to stop living in your memories and open your eyes and start living in this world,’ Ace told him. And with that she walked off to catch up with Tulana, leaving the Doctor gazing at a group of children sitting cross-legged round a Dalek, listening to it telling them a spooky story.

  6

  The next morning, Ace was jolted awake by her bed shaking violently. Unnerving sounds filled the TARDIS and it pitched and juddered like it was caught in a tornado. Ace ran to find the Doctor. When she arrived in the control room, she skidded to a halt and gawped.

  The console was very nearly on the ceiling, raised up on a glowing white pedestal. The floor was half missing, the other half was covered in tools and Ace could only just see the Doctor’s head as he crawled around, busily doing goodness only knew what.

  ‘Doing a spot of redecorating?’ she asked as she island-hopped carefully across the room.

  ‘I’m converting the TARDIS into a Vortiscope.’

  ‘A whatiscope?’

  ‘A Vortiscope. It’s a way of examining the time vortex and –’ He stopped. ‘The point is that it will allow me to determine the coordinates of the initial space-time dislocation.’

  Ace could see he was excited. For the first time in ages, he was enthusiastic again. Of course, she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. ‘A space-time dislocation sounds painful!’

  The Doctor smiled. ‘Think of space and time as a lake. We know that someone has changed the shape of it, put in new fish, new plants, changed its depth.’

  ‘OK …’

  ‘But they had to start somewhere. There had to be a first change: the first new fish they dropped in the water.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘That would have caused ripples.’

  Ace finally got it. ‘So you can tell –’

  ‘– where the ripples started, which will confirm once and for all if it was the Daleks who were responsible for this changed universe! Ah! Sometimes I amaze even myself!’ the Doctor finished happily.

  ‘And when you find out it wasn’t?’ said Ace.

  The Doctor waved the magnetic de-interlacer in her direction. ‘Let’s not count our chickens!’

  ‘I know the Daleks didn’t cause this, Professor. And, when you confirm that, then we can stay put – right?’

  After a moment’s thought, the Doctor said carefully, ‘If I’m mistaken, if there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this universe, then we’ll stay … for a while.’

  It took most of the day. Ace offered to help, but when the Doctor said no for the third time she went to see Tulana’s room at the Academy instead. After watching the Time Lords depart, they spent the day swapping experiences and having a good laugh. They had so much in common that Ace knew she’d made a good friend. She didn’t have too many of those.

  ‘Ace, what are your plans for the future?’ Tulana asked as they sat sipping their sludgies, which resembled thick grey gel, but tasted like mangoes and passion fruit back on Earth.

  ‘No idea,’ Ace shrugged, before licking her lips. ‘Travel and have adventures, I guess. What about you?’

  Tulana said without hesitation, ‘I want to be a force for good, a voice for peace – the way the Daleks have taught me.’

  Ace could only look on in admiration. ‘Well, Tulana, if anyone can do it, it’s you.’

  They shared a smile and returned to their sludgies.

  When Ace got back to the TARDIS, the control room still looked like a bomb had hit it. The console had been lowered again, but not all the way. The Doctor was standing on tiptoe to see what controls he was operating. Leaving the doors open, she headed over to him.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Have you finished building your ripple-detector?’

  The Doctor stared intently at the instruments. Slowly, he turned to Ace. ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I know what caused the problem.’

  Ace stared then glared at him. ‘Well? Don’t keep me in suspense.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘I caused all this,’ said the Doctor.

  7

  Ace’s eyes widened in shock. ‘How?’

  ‘You were right about seeing a second TARDIS in the Plexus, but it was more than just a temporal echo. I think it was us, but at two different points in time existing simultaneously within the Plexus. When I created the supernova to get us out, the counter-shock looped through the Plexus and tangled the timelines of both TARDISes, twisting them together. And then when all that energy from both ships was released, this alternative timeline was created.’

  Ace blinked rapidly as she tried to take it in. ‘Hang on. So that means there’ll be no more Dalek invasions? That’s a good thing – right?’

  If anything, the Doctor looked less happy now than before. He slowly shook his head. ‘I’ve changed everything.’

  ‘Yeah, but you change things all the time,’ Ace pointed out. ‘You go backwards and forwards in time, meddling with stuff, overthrowing tyrants and sabotaging alien invasions.’

  ‘This is different,’ the Doctor said. ‘This isn’t a minor change in some quiet corner. This is a total rewrite of the history of everything – and it has to be corrected.’

  ‘You want to change all this?’ asked Ace, horrified.

  ‘I have to!’

  ‘But why? This universe is OK. It may not be the way you and I remember it, but what gives you the right to say that this particular change is wrong?’

  ‘Because I’m a Time Lord.’

  ‘Oh, excuse me!’

  ‘That’s a better reason than you might think.’

  ‘And yet the other Time Lords don’t seem bothered. So you’re not just smarter than the Daleks and Tulana, you’re smarter than all the other Time Lords too?’

  ‘Don’t you think I’ve thought about this?’ the Doctor argued. ‘I know how it looks, but this universe is flawed.’

  ‘It’s not. It’s working! The Daleks are fantastic! All these people are happy and productive. You can’t just flick some Time Lord switch and send everything back to the way it was. That isn’t fair.’

  ‘Ace, this universe shouldn’t exist.’

  ‘But it does! You’re doing this because you hate the Daleks. You’ve always hated them. You think that they don’t deserve to thrive in this universe or any other. You’re just some arrogant Time Lord with a petty god complex, punishing them for all time.’

  The Doctor ran an agitated hand through his hair. ‘This isn’t arrogance or elitism, I promise. I don’t think my opinion on this situation is better because I’m a lot older than you or because I have a monstrous ego, it’s because I’m a Time Lord. For you, time is waves on a beach that you dip a toe into. For me it’s a whole ocean, all the way from coast to coast and from the surface to the ocean floor. I feel time in the very core of my being in a way that you never can. Some things are not meant to be. Some changes are too fundamental; they threaten reality itself. These philosophical Daleks aren’t a problem in themselves, but they are a symptom of a universe that has gone terribly wrong – because of me.’

  ‘OK, so things used to be different. So what? Why can’t you just keep this universe? Nice Daleks – what’s the problem? In lots of ways, this new universe is better than the old one.’

  ‘No, Ace, this universe is wrong. There’s a basic design flaw at its very heart. At this moment, I’m the only one who can feel it, but the cracks are already there, and they’ll get worse. By the time the rest of the Time Lords catch on, it’ll be too late to repair the damage.’

  ‘Says who? You?’

  ‘Ace, you’ll just have to trust me on this.’

  ‘But what if we hadn’t been in the Plexus? Then nobody would know there was a problem.’

  ‘Don’t you understand? Our escape from the Plexus caused the problem in the first place,’ said the Doctor. ‘I created this mess. It’s up to me to sort it out.’

  ‘And how’re you going to do that?’

  ‘We need to get back to the Plexus,’ said the Doctor.

  Ace blinked like a stunned owl. ‘We only managed to escape from that thing by the skin of our teeth. And now you want us to go back?’

  ‘We have no choice.’

  ‘There’s always a choice. You taught me that,’ Ace argued.

  ‘But the choice in this case is either do nothing or put things right,’ said the Doctor. ‘And believe me …’

  A strange vibration rippled beneath Ace’s feet, followed closely by another, and another. Each ripple was progressively stronger.

  ‘Professor, d’you feel that?’ Ace frowned.

  ‘Of course I do,’ the Doctor retorted.

  ‘What is it?

  The Doctor checked the console. Stunned disbelief swept across his face. ‘It wasn’t meant to happen yet,’ he muttered, racing round the console to check yet more readings.

  ‘What wasn’t?’

  ‘I told you that this universe was inherently unstable,’ said the Doctor. ‘I just didn’t expect the space-time decay to happen quite this quickly.’

  ‘English please,’ Ace begged.

 

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