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From: bx996@torfree.net (Cameron Dixon)
Subject: Fear of Dying Alone - 3/3
Message-ID: <Du4C0z.Hqw.0.queen@torfree.net>
Organization: Toronto Free-Net
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 11:02:59 GMT
Lines: 339

			FEAR OF DYING ALONE (part 3 of 3)
				by Cameron Dixon

* * * * *

He's standing in the doorway, feet apart, holding a small black tube about
the size of the cardboard at the centre of a toilet paper roll, with a
knob on the end.  The Doctor looks at the Master, his eyebrows raised.
"About time you showed your face.  Is that a tissue compression eliminator
or are you just happy to see me?"

The Master ignores him.  "Typical," he sighs, looking at me.  "Absolutely
typical... of the sort of... *asinine* behaviour I have to put up with
from humans.  Give them two choices, they'll take the sixth.  I should
have dealt with your kind centuries ago."

The lights begin to flicker.  The guards holding the Doctor look nervously
up at them.  Palnu's looking at the Master as if he's seen a ghost.  His  
assistant tugs nervously on his sleeve.  "Doctor Palnu?  What's wrong,
Doctor?"

"Buggered if I know," Palnu replies distantly, and his eyes swing back to
the Master again.  He takes a step towards the intruder.  "I've seen you
before... Haven't I?"  He pauses as if questioning himself.  "But I can't
have.  I don't remember you."  His face takes on a haunted look.  "I don't
remember you at all but I've seen you before..." he starts whimpering.
"Who are you?"

"My name isn't important," the Master replies.  He grins viciously at the
Doctor.  "You see?  You're too late.  I'd already started the power cycle
the moment you even entered the complex.  I set the wheels in motion while
you were...*distracted* by the otherwise untrustworthy Mr Kelner."  He
waves a hand--the hand that isn't holding the gun--and the guards let go
of the Doctor and stand to attention.  "You might as well go now, gentle-
men.  There's no need to guard the Doctor any more, there isn't anything
he can do now.  Why don't you devote your energy to standing by the door
of this room and making sure nobody interrupts us in the final stages?"

"Yes, Master," they chorus and march out of the room.  The Doctor watches
them go, his face unreadable.

Palnu shakes his head and takes a step forward.  "Look, I don't really
know what this has all been about, but--"

"No, you don't," the Master agrees.  "That's why they call it a tragedy.
Dr Palnu, please kill your assistant for me."

The assistant grins nervously and looks at Dr Palnu, who punches him in
the face.  The man spins backwards, blood pouring from his nose down his
uniform, and I hear the Doctor's cry of protest mixed with a cracking
sound as the back of the man's head bounces off the corner of a console.
One of the other technicians screams.  There's suddenly a mass stampede
for the doors, and the Master stands politely aside to let them go.

"That was completely unnecessary!" the Doctor shouts.

"Oh, unnecessary, possibly," the Master agrees, "but hardly completely so.
I needed to determine exactly how deep my control over Dr Palnu was before
we continued any further.  I think it's quite clear now, don't you?"

"You don't need him any more.  Let him go."

"You're quite correct," the Master agrees, "I don't."  His eyes flick over
towards me.  "Nor do I need you.  I'm rather upset with you, Frank.  I
can't think how you came to resist my conditioning.  Still, it's a minor
failure.  You were never that important in the big scheme of things.  Now
that the accelerator is up and running, I think we can dispose of both
you and Doctor--"

There's a blur of motion and the Doctor is suddenly on the Master, grab-
bing the hand with the gun and forcing it against the wall.  The Master
snarls and strikes him with his other hand, but it's too late; the Doctor
whips his arm about and twists, and suddenly the Master's gun, the black
tube the Doctor called a tissue compression eliminator, is skating along
the floor of the control room towards me.

I've been watching it all, since the Master stepped into the room, as if
it's been somebody else's dream.  I haven't been thinking at all for
almost five minutes, and I'm not thinking at all now, when I simply reach
down, grab the tube, pick it up and point it at the two men who've sud-
denly stopped fighting and are looking at me as if they'd forgotten all
about me until now.

The Doctor is looking at me, calmly, non-committally, but it's the careful
calm you wear over top of another emotion when you're looking at an angry
pit bull terrier.

The Master's eyes are much easier to understand.  Simple exasperation.  He
pushes the Doctor away from him and stares at me.  "Very well.  It doesn't
matter who pulls the trigger, as long as it's done."

"You don't have to fire the gun," the Doctor says calmly.  My eyes flick
from one to the other, but his are steady on me.  "You can just put it
down and walk out of here."

"This is your chance to correct your mistake," the Master tells me.  "You
can kill him and have done with it now.  Remember your wife!  The trigger
is beneath your finger.  Simply press a single button and justice will
prevail!"

"He's lying to you.  You know he's lying to you.  I can see it in your
eyes.  You can see it in his eyes.  I'm not asking you to kill anybody."

"Push the button, Frank," the Master repeats angrily.  His eyes are...

His eyes are cold.  Shavings of cold blue ice.  I know what he is, then.
And I know what the Doctor is, and I know what I am, and suddenly I'm very
calm, and I know exactly what I'm going to do.

"If it was a boy," I say, "we were going to name him Kevin," and I fire
the tissue compression eliminator through the observation port into the
cyclotron.

I don't think either of them was expecting that.

I'm certainly not expecting what happens to the Master.  He screams and
clutches his head, and suddenly his chest seems to explode.  A sound like
the death of locusts fills the room and the Master's entire body expands
to twice its size and half its density, a blur of spinning black dots that
take on the form of a body.  His face twists into an appallingly different
shape, but somehow he manages to focus on me.

"You promised..." the Master slurs.  "You said you were going to *kill*
him..."

"I'm sorry," I answer.  "That was a bit of a lie.  I do that sometimes."

With a final scream, he glows red, expands into a cloud smoke, and vani-
shes, like an evil genie.

The Doctor blinks.  "Well, *that* shouldn't have happened.  Unless..."
He looks at me.  "Well?  Are you coming or aren't you?"  He turns and runs
from the control room without waiting for an answer.

I drop the gun and follow him.

The corridor outside is empty; with no minds of their own, the guards must
have been swept away by the gaggle of technicians fleeing from the control
room.  The Doctor is haring down the corridor towards the coffin closet,
and I race to follow.  Around the corner, a man dressed in a technician's
outfit lies slumped against the wall, eyes staring wide, mouth hanging
dumbly open.  The Doctor spares him a glance and darts on; I hang back,
checking the man's pulse.  It's still beating, but very slowly, and his
skin is chilly; the Master must have encountered him on his way to the
control room.  There's nothing I can do for him now, so I head off after
the Doctor once again.  "What did he want the acceleration ring for?" I
ask him as we run.

"Survival.  Survival and power..." the Doctor calls back over his shoul-
der.  "That's what you get for trying to rule the Universe; he used to be
a lord of time, now he's been reduced to a refugee from Darwin's control
group.  His body is decaying, you see.  It can't cope with the stress of
the life he leads.  Trakenite DNA doesn't carry the Time Lords' symbiotic
nuclei, and he tried to craft a substitute through biogenetic engineering
while he was connected to the Source.  But the Source was dying, and he
was weak, and now he's paying the price for his mistakes.  Travelling
unprotected through the Time Winds when he fled the Cheeta World just made
matters worse. Even the Tzun's genetic engineering can't put a stop to
chronomolecular decay.  He thought that if he could acquire the powers of
attotechnological engineering he could restructure his genetic makeup at
the fundamental levels of matter."  He sighs.  "Even with your sub-ele-
mental spanner thrown into the works, it's too soon to tell whether it's
worked or not.  If it has then eventually he may be able to survive even
the total destruction of his body..."

I nod in all the right places.  The Doctor isn't even looking at me; it's
as if he's trying to get it all straight himself.  It reminds me of Alice
trying to explain advertising to me.

The room he's looking for is around the corner and around the next corner
and another corner yet again, and when he flings the door open, the lid of
the coffin is gaping wide open and empty, wires hanging limply from the
body cavity and dripping hydraulic fluid like a tree of weeping spaghetti.
The Doctor leans against the door and curses in a language I don't under-
stand.  "Too late.  Again."

"But he wasn't here," I say, trying to understand.  "He left, he went into
the control room and we saw him die--"

"He was here all the time.  What we saw was an attotechnological phantom,
a physical extension of his willpower created by quark engineering.  Even
with the limited power at his disposal I was completely convinced it was
the real Master until you fired the tissue compression eliminator into the
acceleration ring and disrupted his control.  Think of what he could have
perpetrated if the cyclotron had reached its full potential--"

The Doctor breaks off, blinks, and slaps his forehead.  "Oh, that's right,
the cyclotron.  He started it up and killed the man who's supposed to be
operating it, and now it's going to destroy the city."  He scowls briefly,
obviously irritated.  "I keep forgetting these minor details."

* * * * *

I can hear the rising hum of power from yards down the corridor.  The Doc-
tor is ahead of me as usual, running like a hare who's suddenly discovered
that the turtle set his alarm clock back six hours on his way past.  I
notice that the unconscious technician we passed on the way out is no
longer there; at least somebody's thought to take him for treatment.

The Doctor runs quickly but silently into the control room.  Crouching
down below the instrument panel, the Doctor quickly manages to open the
inspection hatch.  Beneath it lie dozens of multi-coloured wires.  He runs
his fingers along each one to ascertain which was which.   "Alarm system,"
he mutters, tugging on a green wire.  He continues his search.   "And...
life support."

He savagely rips a white wire loose.  The ever present hum of the ventil-
ators stops instantly.  We can already feel the temperature dropping.
"That should make things difficult for them," he says with a mischievous
grin.

Alarm bells start a strident clamour.  An emergency evacuation of the
underground complex will be in progress now to get the people inside to 
safety before the air runs out.  He's getting the innocent people out of
the way, before they're caught up in the aftermath.  Saving their lives.

I remember my hands shaking, the Doctor wavering in and out of the cross-
hairs.  Even then, even when the belief in his guilt had been implanted
directly into my brain like ink soaking into paper...even then, looking
into his heart, I knew the truth.

The Doctor shakes his head and looks about.  "It doesn't matter.  We need
to shut this down before the reaction runs out of control.  Where's Dr
Palnu?  I need his help."

I look at the place where Dr Palnu was last standing.  It's difficult to
miss; his assistant's body is still lying close by in a pool of blood.
And as if the day wasn't already surreal enough, there's now a child's
doll lying next to him, a small lump of plastic that looks like--

The Doctor rushes forward and bends down to inspect the doll.  He turns
away with a disgusted expression.  "Petty.  Petty childish vendettas..."
He looks at me again.  "What did you say your name was?"

"Frank.  Frank Kelner."

"Frank, I need your help.  Do you see that modulated anion separation
filter against the far wall?  The one next to the bipolar nucleonic dis-
semination sequencer..." He trails off, looking at my face.  "Er.  Just
go to the far wall and press all the buttons that are flashing red."

I go to the far wall and press all of the buttons that are flashing red.
There seem to be a lot of them.  Even as I watch, a panel of lights blinks
over from amber to a blinking crimson.  I press all of them.

I can hear the Doctor rushing about behind me, and I hear him cry out in
frustration.  I turn around to see what's wrong, and he's standing in the
middle of the room, looking about frantically.  "I can't see it anywhere!
Blast the layout of this place!  It's so unnecessarily convoluted, no
wonder the Master chose it for his--"

He's running forward as he speaks.  I open my mouth to warn him, but it's
too late; he slips in the pool of blood left behind by Palnu's assistant
and skids across the room with a squawk of terror.  He trips and falls
forward, grabbing up his umbrella by the tip and flinging it out in a des-
perate attempt to grab something by the handle and prevent his fall.

The handle of the umbrella, I notice for the first time, is shaped like a
question mark.  It snags on a lever on the console beside the Doctor and
pulls it down as the Doctor falls.  He comes to a rest just a few centi-
metres above the ground, and very carefully relaxes the rest of the way.

The hum of power suddenly stops rising, and starts dropping rapidly.  The
Doctor and I look at each other, and then look at the Doctor's umbrella,
which is hanging from the lever.  The Doctor pulls himself up and stares
closely at the readout above the lever.  Then he looks back at me and
grins widely.  "It's always in the last place you look," he says happily.
"Well, that wasn't too difficult, was it?  Now..." he rubs his hands
together thoughtfully, "I think we should be getting out of here before
too many awkward questions are asked.  What about that unfortunate man
we passed in the hallway?"

"I don't know," I reply.  "Somebody's taking care of him now.  His pulse
was slow and his skin was cold; I think he was in shock or--"

But the Doctor is pushing past me, a look of horror and anger on his face.
He hesitates in the doorway, and then his shoulders slump.

I can hear it too.  Above the riot of the alarm klaxons and the dying hum
of the cyclotron, there's a distant roaring sound like the sea in a shell,
like the wind in your ears, like the machine of the Master's which took
me from my apartment to the gallery above the quad where I tried to kill
the Doctor.  Like the machine which is taking him away even now.

"It was filtered," the Doctor is saying.  "Even through a direct link to
the cyclotron the power from the TCE shouldn't have triggered a regenera-
tion."  His face twists in anger.  "He did it deliberately.  Regeneration
as a disguise, buying himself time to get himself to safety.  He's doing
it again.  Running through his lives like sands in an hourglass.  Nothing
ever changes."

"He got away," I say dully.  I'm completely exhausted and I can't take
this.  "He got away."

The Doctor sighs and pats my shoulder.  "At least we saved the city."

"He killed Alice," I hear myself say.  It's all going distant again, and
the alarms are retreating to the cottonwool distance of the last several
weeks.  "He killed Alice and he got away..."

But this time, when I burst into tears, the Doctor's there, to hold me as
I shake, and to tell me it's going to be all right.


* * * * *

I don't think much about the city any more.  The Doctor offered to drop me
off back home, except that I didn't have one any more.  He looked thought-
ful when I told him, and then smiled and said he knew just the place.

It's in a quiet little part of the country, somewhere called Allen Road.
The Doctor said I could take care of the house; he looked worried when he
said it, as if he wasn't sure whether or not he'd ever be using it again.
As he said, it must be the stress of the life he leads.

I hope he's all right.

So I take care of the house, and in some obscure way I feel that it's taking
care of me in return.  I clean the floors, keep the cupboards stocked, I
sleep in the caretaker's lodge and somehow, I exist from day to day, and it
feels more like real life than I'd thought would ever be possible again.

The stars, at night, in the country, spill out across the sky like jewels on
a beach.  I look at a distant diamond twinkling like the sparkle in a lover's
eye, and because there's nobody there to say that I can't, I name it after
Alice.

I lie on the ground, listening to the wind, watching the stars.

I wonder who designed the Universe.

It's very pretty.

                                THE END

-- 
== Cameron "The Lemming" Dixon ====================== bx996@torfree.net == 
== "I used to think I was indecisive, but now, I'm not so sure..."      ==
==========================================================================