MATERIAL WITNESS
The exhibits in M. Bertrand’s art gallery had passed a relatively peaceful night. Now, as dawn rose over Paris, the gallery’s newest and loudest exhibit returned with a happy thud.
Peering out through the door, the Doctor found himself exactly where he wanted to be. It was worse than he’d thought. For the TARDIS to end up exactly where the Doctor had asked it to go meant that something was very badly wrong with the space-time continuum.
The interfaces between the twelve segments of Scaroth were forming a causal link through planet Earth’s history. This meant two things. One, time travel was going to be a doddle so long as the Doctor didn’t mind meeting a lot of ranting lunatics in wigs. And two, Scaroth’s plans were drawing to their conclusion.
‘The centuries that divide me shall be undone?’ he muttered to K-9. ‘I don’t like the sound of that at all.’
* * *
Outside M. Bertrand’s gallery, he pulled the door shut behind him. He reached up to the alarm above the door, found the wires severed by the sonic screwdriver and twisted them back together, all the while looking like a child who definitely hasn’t done anything wrong, certainly didn’t break anything and has been very well behaved all afternoon.
‘The centuries that divide me?’ he muttered again, wiping his fingerprints off the door handle.
He set off into Paris at his most worried saunter.
* * *
The Doctor was still worried as he crossed in front of the Notre-Dame cathedral. He reached a corner, stood outside a café, and sucked the air. To the left the Louvre, to the right the Château. He wondered about barging in to confront the Count, teeth blazing and hope something brilliant sprang to mind. Or, he could just make sure that the Mona Lisa wasn’t still happily sitting smirking exactly where she was supposed to be. Perhaps that would be an idea.
Slightly sadly, the Doctor decided to do the sensible thing first. Feeling he was forgetting something, he set off, away from the café.
* * *
Inside the café, Romana’s eyes opened to find someone had placed a fresh cup of coffee on her table. She looked up blearily, wondered why the world hurt so much, and then noticed le Patron placidly moving between the tables, sweeping up the mounds of broken glass. She smiled at the old man. He gave her the merest of unconcerned shrugs and carried on sweeping.
She sipped her coffee tenderly and wondered if Paris did such a thing as a bacon sandwich. No sign of the Doctor. On the one hand, it would be nice to know she wasn’t stranded here for ever. On the other hand, she wasn’t sure she could survive his booming tones just now.
She looked over at Duggan, sprawled fast asleep at the next table. He was snoring. For once he looked almost at peace. Romana caught herself smiling fondly at him. Duggan wasn’t a bad man, she supposed, in his own blunt way. No. Stop that. You’re getting as bad as the Doctor. Next you’ll be asking if we can keep him.
She stepped over to the snoring detective. She noticed le Patron had also placed a cup of coffee on his table.
‘Wake up,’ she whispered. ‘Your coffee will get cold.’
No response.
She tapped Duggan gently on the shoulder. He leapt up, pulling his gun from his pocket, sending the coffee cup smashing to the ground.
Romana winced. Everything was rather louder than it needed to be today.
‘What?’ snarled Duggan, whirling around himself in a fighting posture.
Le Patron immaculately swept the coffee cup up from around his feet.
Romana handed Duggan her cup. ‘Here. Have some coffee.’
Duggan slugged it back, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then slumped back down at the table, dejected as a bloodhound. ‘That’s it. I’m washed up.’
He remembered the Chief had once told him scathingly, ‘Duggan, you’re the kind of chap who can’t fall out of his chair without missing the floor.’ Duggan had always thought that a little unfair, and yet, here he was. ‘I’m sent to Paris just to check if anything odd is happening in the art world. And what happens? The Mona Lisa gets pinched from under my nose. Odd isn’t in it.’
Duggan took another slurp of Romana’s coffee. He put the cup down. She reached for it hopefully. It was annoyingly empty.
‘Well,’ she said crisply. ‘When you’ve quite finished with that coffee we’d better go and get the Mona Lisa back, hadn’t we?’
‘Which one?’ growled Duggan, a trifle too loudly for Romana’s taste. ‘I’ve seen seven!’ His fist started to pound the table rhythmically. She wished he wouldn’t do that. ‘Seven! Mona! Lisas!’ Oh, he was going to do that. ‘What are we going to see today? A couple of dozen Eiffel Towers lying about?’
‘The real Mona Lisa,’ Romana muttered through gritted teeth. ‘We’ll go and find the original one.’
‘But how do you account for the others?’ Duggan was starting to whine.
Romana shut her eyes and thought about regenerating. Maybe that would make the pain behind her eyelids go away. Was this what it was like for the Doctor, always being followed around and constantly being nagged with obvious questions? Well, was it? What do we do now, Romana? What does it all mean, Romana? How do we save the planet, Romana? She counted quickly to ten million and then answered. ‘Oh, I expect Scarlioni located his seven buyers, popped back in time, had a chat to Leonardo, got him to rustle up another six, bricked them up in his cellar to age properly, stole the one from the Louvre and now sells the whole lot for enormous profit. Sound reasonable?’
Yeah right. Duggan made a sour face. ‘I used to do divorce investigations,’ he muttered glumly. ‘It was never like this.’
Le Patron shuffled over and brought Romana a fresh cup of coffee. Heaven.
‘As far as I can see,’ Romana continued, thinking aloud, ‘there’s only one flaw in my line of reasoning.’
‘Go on, surprise me.’
Duggan reached for Romana’s coffee. She swatted him away.
‘That equipment of Kerensky’s wouldn’t work effectively as a time machine.’
‘Keep on surprising me.’
‘Well . . .’ Romana held up two sugar cubes. ‘You can have two adjacent time continua running at different rates, but without a field interface stabiliser you can’t cross from one to the other.’
‘A what? You can’t?’
She bumped the two sugar cubes together. They remained, like Duggan, obstinately solid. Then she dropped them into the coffee and swirled a spoon around in it until the sugar lumps were firmly dissolved. ‘Something like that, I guess.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Come on, let’s get along to the Château, where at least you can thump somebody.’
* * *
While Romana and Duggan were making their way towards the Château, the Doctor was crossing a busy stretch of road on the other side of the Seine. Two tourists asked him to take their picture. He obliged, and then made his way past the Pont Neuf at a run.
* * *
Although museums are decidedly boastful about the things they do have, they are reticent to the point of shyness about the things they are lacking. The theft of the Mona Lisa was about to become the biggest news story across the world but, from the outside, the Louvre looked pretty much as normal. Perhaps a few more badly parked police cars than usual. On the inside, the Mona Lisa gallery simply read ‘fermé’ without further explanation. Someone had placed an easel nearby with a placard advertising some simply lovely Dutch paintings of rotten fruit that disappointed tourists might care to have a look at. On the whole, they did not.
* * *
Harrison Mandel had been feeling rather intimidated by Elena.
Like most Parisians, she didn’t seem to really have a job, or, if she did, it appeared to involve going into an office, pecking some people on the cheek, and then going out for coffee. She had a wearingly endless amount of time to drag him to art in the hopes that he would be enraptured by it.
Most of it had seemed nice enough, but he could really take it or leave it.
He’d frankly been dreading the Louvre. It seemed so big. So many things that Elena would say lots of clever things about and then wait for him to say something vaguely coherent. He’d only try his best, mutter awkwardly, and then be dragged on to the next thing. Somewhere inside the Louvre was going to be what Elena had taken to calling ‘that perfect moment of beauty in Paris that would change his life for ever’. And he had the nasty suspicion they weren’t going to stop until he found it. Actually, thought Harrison, I rather like things the way they are.
As they approached the Louvre, he couldn’t help but notice all the police cars parked up.
‘Oh, that’s probably the police on strike,’ Elena said, as though this were a usual occurrence.
As they got closer, he noticed a lot of worried people muttering outside.
‘Oh, that’s probably just the museum staff on strike,’ Elena said, as though these things happened.
As they got closer, Harrison saw a reporter standing with a camera crew.
‘Oh, that’s probably just the Mona Lisa being stolen again,’ Elena said, as though this was one less thing to worry about.
* * *
As the Doctor ran up, he noticed the police cars drawn up outside. A shrugging match was going on between the police and a traffic warden. The Doctor strolled past, overhearing ‘The Mona Lisa . . . stolen,’ and hurried into the museum.
* * *
As Madame Henriette would later tell her cats, she had had little to do that day. Sadly few people were interested in taking her exclusive, deluxe and select tours of the Treasures Of The Louvre (Excepting the Mona Lisa). She patiently explained to her furry darlings that this might be the last salmon they would see for a while. ‘If the Mona Lisa is not found,’ she sighed, ‘it will be tinned pilchards for all of us.’
The cats looked at her vaguely and carried on eating the salmon. There would be more salmon. They knew this.
For Madame Henriette, it had been a horrible and strange day, made more so by the sudden reappearance of that terribly odd man with the scarf. ‘He terrifies me,’ she told the cats. ‘You would not like him.’
The cats agreed. He sounded more of a dog person.
Madame Henriette had had little better to do than fuss anxiously around some detectives, trying to extract the smallest morsel of gossip from them. So far they’d been ignoring her birdlike attempts to talk to them. She was alarmed when the Doctor suddenly materialised at her elbow.
‘Excuse me,’ he bellowed to her in what was a dismal attempt at a whisper.
Madame Henriette let out a hushed shriek.
‘Did you notice two people trying to stop the Mona Lisa from being stolen last night?’
‘M’sieur?’ Madame Henriette gasped.
She noticed a detective turn, suddenly noticing them. This could be disastrous. It was one thing to want to know everything about the theft of the painting. It was quite another for an authorised conductrice of deluxe, exclusive and select tours to be accused of involvement in it. Disastrous.
If this hopeless eccentric had information, she hoped that he would impart it to her subtly. Instead he seemed to be trying to land aircraft. Looking like a portrait by Toulouse Lautrec sprung to life and fallen on hard times, the man clearly had no idea of being anything other than the centre of attention.
‘I say,’ he boomed, waggling his hands at different heights. ‘Have you seen a pretty girl who talks rather a lot and a young man who hits things?’
He mimed hitting. Madame Henriette squeaked. The detective watching them nudged his colleague. They both started looking in their direction, and Madame Henriette’s destitution edged a little closer.
‘I knew the painting was going to be stolen,’ the man informed her and the entire room. ‘As soon as I heard the theft was going to take place, I sent my friends along to stop it, which they obviously didn’t. I can’t rely on anyone.’ He pulled a face of dolorous annoyance. ‘I say. Did you see where they went?’
Madame Henriette was aware the detectives were nudging their colleagues. They were putting down their coffees and moving closer.
‘No, m’sieur,’ she ventured quickly. ‘But I think, perhaps, you had better speak with the police. They’re just over there, I believe . . .’
‘Pah!’ The man ignored her, making a dismissive noise that was quite marvellously French. ‘No, sorry, no time.’ He shook her hand, stepped back and suddenly gave her the most beautiful ‘it’ll all be all right’ smile she had ever seen. ‘I’d love to stop and chat, but there’s the human race to think about . . . Bye now!’ With a wave, he headed out.
Several detectives watched him go. One swigged the last of his coffee and followed at a run.
Much to her relief, Madame Henriette found herself standing alone in a completely empty gallery, vaguely aware that something much more exciting was happening just outside. For a moment she felt sad. But she had got used to loneliness.
‘That man,’ said Madame Henriette to her cats later. ‘He was in the Louvre yesterday talking about the universe, and today he was worried about the human race.’ She stroked a reluctant tail. ‘You know, I think secretly he must be a Frenchman.’
* * *
The Doctor weaved through the tangled streets of the Marais, unaware that he was being followed. As he marched through the bustling crowds, stopping to take the occasional photograph for a tour party, he little realised that his description (at each repetition a little more outlandish) was being relayed on police car radios.
One detective was sat outside a café watching the world go past over a brandy. He watched the third most wanted man in Paris saunter past and then strode inside to use the telephone.
He had a message for Count Scarlioni. The Doctor was coming.
* * *
The Doctor found the café without difficulty. The place was bustling with early-morning customers, some of them slapping each other on the backs in an early-morning bonne journée way, some of them smoking in desultory corners, and some of them crowded around a television which, the Doctor completely failed to notice, was relating the story of the theft of the Mona Lisa, accompanied by a picture of the painting herself, and also a very grainy picture of what looked worryingly like Romana and Duggan climbing over a wall.
The Doctor swept up to the bar. ‘Patron!’ he called. ‘Have you seen those two people who I was with yesterday?’
Le Patron stared at the Doctor, his old face completely inscrutable.
‘You remember,’ the Doctor cajoled. ‘We kept on being held up and attacked and smashing things?’
Le Patron shrugged unconcernedly. He picked up the neck of a broken bottle from the table, looked at it significantly for a moment and then slung it in a bin. But that was his entire comment on the matter.
‘Ah. I see,’ the Doctor pressed on. ‘Did you happen to notice which way they went?’
Le Patron shrugged once more, and, with the air of not having heard him at all, shuffled slowly and patiently away to a corner, where he rifled around amongst scraps of paper while puffing air through his teeth. The Doctor was thoroughly dismissed. The Doctor wasn’t used to being ignored, ever. And yet Paris was managing that quite well.
‘Thank you,’ said the Doctor to thin air. ‘Thank you very much.’
The Doctor looked around the café. Of course they’d come back here. Romana was sensible. They’d be here at any moment. Probably just doing some shopping.
‘They can’t have been stupid enough to go back to the Château.’
Le Patron shuffled over, sliding a crumpled scrap of paper across the bar to him. The Doctor read it.
‘Dear Doctor, we’ve gone back to the Cha—’ He groaned, crumpled the note into his pocket, waved his thanks, and ran out of the café.
* * *
Count Carlos Scarlioni faced Romana and Duggan at gunpoint across a vast dining table heaped high with French pastries. He sipped his favourite tisane and regarded them with benevolent amusement while Hermann gloried in relating the story of their capture.
Their clothing was tattered and they both looked utterly miserable. Hermann had marched them in with their hands up just when the Count had been expecting his three-minute eggs. Still, this was just as enjoyable. He helped himself to another croissant, slathering it with butter before popping it into his mouth.
‘. . . as soon as the alarms sounded, Excellency,’ Hermann was saying. For once even he seemed to be amused. ‘He was halfway through the window, she was outside.’ Romana and Duggan winced at the memory. ‘I thought you might wish to speak to them, so I called off the dogs.’ A trace of regret. ‘They cannot be professionals, Excellency.’ Hermann ended his speech with a chiding cluck.
Romana estimated that the croissant, a delicate combination of flour, egg, sugar and fat, would provide a good enough set of complex carbohydrates and protein chains. That should stop her head from trying to leave. She eyed Duggan scathingly. She’d found the low wall, she’d got them over the broken bottles cemented into the top of it, she’d got them safely through the overgrown ornamental jardin, past the peacocks, and she’d even found a small window with a catch that would surrender ideally to her sonic screwdriver. She was just reaching for it when Duggan had smashed the window and it had all gone horribly wrong.
She glanced at the table. Seating for twenty-four, at least 470 years old, bits of it had been revarnished in the last century, one of the legs had been replaced. There were two place settings. At one end of the table, the Count, and at the other, a plate with the remains of a single croissant sliced into neat slivers. The Countess. She was sat ignoring them magnificently.
The Count tore into another croissant, smearing jam onto it and cramming it into his mouth. He was in a delightfully good mood. He licked traces of jam from his fingers, and then drummed them happily on the table top. When he spoke, he addressed Romana with the sweetness of honey.
‘My dear, it was not necessary for you to enter my house by, well, one could hardly call it stealth. You only had to knock on the door.’ His smile projected seventy-three per cent bonhomie, mixed with the merest hint of social reproof. ‘I have been very anxious to renew our acquaintance. Indeed, I was on the point of sending out search parties.’
‘Listen, Scarlioni,’ snapped Duggan.
The Count wiped some crumbs from his velvet smoking jacket. ‘I was talking to the young lady.’ He smiled dangerously. He stood courteously, bowing Romana to take a place by him.
The Countess, with complete poise, turned the page of her newspaper and loudly ignored the whole room.
Romana sat down, hands still held wearily high.
‘Tush,’ clucked the Count, motioning that of course she could lower her hands. They were friends, after all.
Romana lowered her hands gratefully.
Duggan did likewise, but a vicious jab from Hermann convinced him that he was not included. Sourly, Duggan raised his hands again.
The Count offered Romana a plate and gestured to the table. Eagerly, she helped herself to the most ridiculous pastry she could find. Spoilt for choice, she eventually settled on what appeared to be a pastry galleon with custard cargo and glazed fruit sails. It was annoyingly wonderful.
The Count leaned forward. The Countess affected magnificently not to notice.
‘My dear,’ purred the Count confidentially, ‘I think you can be very useful to me.’
Do go on, thought Romana. She may be stranded in time having an adventure on her own, but she definitely got a better class of villain than the Doctor. Did Davros wheel out a fruit platter? He did not.
‘You better not touch her,’ growled Duggan from the wall. More for something to say, than anything else, guessed Romana. Bless.
‘Do be quiet,’ murmured the Count as one would to an ill-trained dog.
‘Thank you,’ Romana reassured Duggan. ‘But I’ll look after myself. I feel safer that way.’ He looked hurt, but Romana didn’t notice. She’d just discovered a slice of kiwi fruit. Delightful.
The Count was fixing Romana with an attentive gaze and a most welcoming smile. ‘Well, my dear?’
‘Well what?’ Romana spoke with her mouth full.
‘I do believe you have some highly specialised knowledge that will be of immense service to me.’
‘Who me?’ Romana looked the picture of total innocence.
The Count leaned even further forward, captivating and hypnotic. His smile was a perfect blend of respect and regret that she would not confide in him. ‘I am talking of temporal engineering. You are, I believe, a considerable authority on time travel.’
‘Look here, I was only joking about that!’ boggled Duggan desperately. ‘She knows nothing.’
‘Duggan’s right. For once I know as little as he does.’ Romana reluctantly put down her pastry and firmly pushed away her plate. When she spoke, her voice was cold as sorbet. ‘I’m afraid I really don’t know where you got that idea from.’
‘No no no, that really won’t do,’ tutted the Count’s smile. He paused, with the mild embarrassment of someone about to betray a confidence. ‘Your friend the Doctor let it slip.’
‘The Doctor!’ He was alive. But . . . ‘But he’s in . . .’ Well, could be anywhere.
‘Sixteenth-century Florence?’ The Count finished her sentence smugly. ‘Yes. That’s where I’—he coughed—‘we met him.’
The Countess pointedly failed to look up from her newspaper. If she was surprised at this turn of events, she somehow neglected to show it.
The Count and Romana gazed at each other across the table. Even though her eyes lacked their usual lustre, he could see that she was working things out frantically, slotting things into place and opening things up. Rather like his Chinese puzzle box earlier. Take your time, my dear, his smile said. We have a lot of work to do together and I should like us to start out understanding each other perfectly.
Duggan made some noise. ‘Can anyone join in this conversation or do you need a certificate?’
The Count winced, as though hearing an untuned violin in an orchestra. ‘Hermann, if the Englishman interrupts once more, kill him.’
Hermann assented happily. Duggan shut up.
The Count stood, and, with elaborate courtesy, pranced round and drew back Romana’s chair. The Countess watched all this without comment. ‘Now then, my dear, perhaps you’d care to come downstairs and examine the equipment in more detail.’
Romana stood gracefully. ‘And if I refuse?’
The Count hid a yawn. ‘Oh, do I really have to make vulgar threats? Let’s just say I will destroy Paris if it will help you make up your mind.’
‘Am I supposed to believe you can do that?’
‘Well,’ the Count smiled teasingly, ‘you won’t know till you’ve had a look at my equipment, will you?’ He swept Romana to the door, and then nodded to Duggan. ‘Hermann, bring him.’
Left alone, the Countess surveyed the remains of her croissant, slotted a cigarette into her holder, but did not light it.
* * *
For Professor Nikolai Kerensky it was the last straw. A few short months ago, there was a waiting list for his seminars. Now he was being made to stand at the back of his own laboratory while a schoolgirl marked his homework.
The Count had swept in with these two strangers. The man was crumpled and dejected, as though he was having a bad day with the first theory of relativity. The girl looked completely unbothered, as though she was popping in to have a polite look at a reupholstered settee.
Kerensky made to interrupt, but the Count smiled him his most dangerous smile and Nikolai remembered about the gun that Hermann was pointing at the man whose knuckles scraped across the floor.
When the Count had first entered, Kerensky had armed himself with all he had to hand, which was knowledge. He had reasons why he had not yet begun work on the Kerensky Accelerator. Not excuses, but reasons. He had valid questions, he had points of concern, he had issues and he had things that needed discussion. He had got no further than ‘But’. The Count had simply pooh-poohed him. That doesn’t matter, not now. This young lady is going to have a look at your work and tell me what she thinks of it.
The utter crushing humiliation of it all. Kerensky slunk dejectedly on a stool.
‘Can he?’ hissed the crumpled ape.
‘What?’ said the schoolgirl, poking at a compressor.
‘Destroy Paris?’
‘With this lot?’ she snorted.
‘Yes.’
‘No trouble.’ She stood back, her nose wrinkled in disgust.
Destroy Paris? What nonsense. Kerensky really must protest. He got to his feet, but the Count’s smile made him sit right back down again. The Kerensky Process, he still validly believed, held the key to the salvation of the human race. Chicken Experiment #1 proved it. Thanks to the Count, things had taken a worrying turn, indeed, but destroy Paris? What a horrific accusation, as though he, Nikolai Kerensky would ever permit such a thing! The girl must be denounced. Surely the Count could see the patent absurdity of her words.
And yet she carried on talking, her air a trifle dejected. ‘If he chose, he could blast the whole city through an unstablised time field.’
Well, yes, he supposed she had a point. But you’d have to try very hard. A rebuttal needed to be issued.
The bullish man sneered at her. ‘You don’t seriously believe all this time-travel nonsense do you?’
‘Do you believe wood comes from trees?’ the girl snapped.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s just a fact of life one’s brought up with,’ she sighed.
Despite his fury at her, Kerensky warmed to her. Perhaps, just perhaps, once he had entirely refuted her allegations, he might allow her to join his research team.
The Count cut across all of them. ‘You see the truth of my words, don’t you, my dear?’
The girl turned to him. ‘That you can destroy Paris? Yes.’
That was it. He needed, nay demanded, an explanation. ‘Why all this talk of destruction? What are you doing with my work?’
The Count coughed, as though covering a minor social embarrassment caused by a child, and then turned his most inviting smile on Kerensky. ‘Professor, tell you what, I shall show you. Perhaps you would care to examine the field generator?’
He’d used the exact same tone at their first meeting when he had invited him to examine the list of dessert wines. That seemed so long ago.
The Professor left his stool and walked stiffly over to the field generator using all the dignity he could muster. His work may have been called into question, but he was genuinely puzzled. Despite the crackling air of menace in the room, perhaps, just perhaps, between them, the girl and the Count had uncovered something, some weakness in the field generator that was possibly directly harmful. It was, after all, just possible that he, Nikolai Kerensky had overlooked something. The endless hours of work, the lack of sleep. Well, if there were some flaw, he would shoulder the blame. Some of it.
But no. Nothing wrong. Thought not.
Standing in the heart of the device, he tapped one of the three prongs over his head, just to make sure that there was stasis. Yes. The Kerensky Accelerator was working perfectly.
He straightened up, pleased to find the Count smiling at him.
Then the Count said something that would haunt Kerensky for the rest of his life.
‘You will now see how I deal with fools.’
And then the Count had flicked a switch.
‘No!’ screamed Kerensky desperately, ‘Not that sw—’
* * *
Itch.
For a moment nothing happened. And then, for many years, nothing happened.
It took Nikolai Kerensky the rest of his life to die.
Standing at the heart of his machine, looking out at those four faces staring in at him. All of them frozen, all of them unmoving. Watching him.
Once a year, one of them would blink. It would happen in turn, like the changing of the seasons. The stupid man, the clever girl, and then Hermann. The Count would never blink. It had taken Kerensky this long to realise that the Count never blinked.
He was a fool not to have noticed. But then again, he had plenty of time now to dwell on his mistakes. His biggest mistake had been never building a field interface stabiliser. The Count had asked him often enough, and he had always nodded and said it was on the list. The truth was that it was tricky and there were so many other things to do. After all, he had argued to himself, why would you need to cross between two time fields while the device was running?
Now here he was, trapped inside the Accelerator while it was running and completely unable to ever leave it. Outside the bubble, his life was racing past in the blink of an eye. He tried to imagine what that must look like, his features blurring, his limbs jerking, his hair growing long, his skin sagging.
But, inside the bubble, life went on at very much the same pace as usual.
Nothing happened.
Ever.
He had a long time to dwell on his mistakes. On the things that he had got wrong. What he could have done better. What he could have said. The irony was that he now had plenty of time to build a field interface stabiliser but no way of doing it. He went through his pockets on that first day. Two pencils. A scrap of paper. He spent ages working out a message, a formula to write on that piece of paper, something that could tell them how to build an interface stabiliser in time to save him. He waved it at them. But he knew, even as he did it, that, although he had managed a remarkable breakthrough in temporal theory all squeezed onto a single side of paper, it was fruitless. The time it would take to read the paper and react to it, the time it would take to talk about it, even to find a screwdriver, in that time he would already be dead.
His time passed so quickly for them. But for Kerensky so slowly.
He was so bored. He memorised the entire contents of the laboratory. He spent days just staring at the Mona Lisa casually propped up against a wall. No one in history ever looked at that painting in the same way that Kerensky did, squinting to perceive every element of the mystical city of domes and valleys in the background. What world was that, what fantasy of rocks?
Kerensky would never know, but he visited it in his mind. He paced the confines of his bubble, retracing childhood walks through the streets of Budapest. He tried to recollect songs, he thought of books. He begged for hunger to kill him. Or thirst.
But nothing did.
For ages, the sound of his last syllable echoed through the air. ‘Itch.’ A famous last word if ever there was one.
Sometimes he sat down on the platform. Sometimes he slept on it. Then stood up again. Regretfully. Starting another day. An endless day.
For a few years, he watched the girl stretch out her hand, trying to reach through the bubble towards him. Every day her hand got closer. It was something to look at. He knew what the end result would be, of course. Her hand took so long to get so far. And then, one month, it stopped.
No field interface stabiliser, he told her. He knew the exact week, the very day in which the stopping would happen and had prepared a speech. His hand was there, fingertips out to touch hers. Just in case the impossible happened and she broke through.
He then watched the years go by as the hand drew slowly back. Done. Finished, retreating. Leaving him there. Alone for ever.
He looked at his own hand, older now. The skin as frail as parchment. His bones ached. But not enough. There was still a lot of time ahead of him.
He remembered the advice of his doctors. Nikolai, you must eat less of this, you must drink less of that. You don’t want to die a young man. He bitterly regretted ever listening to any of them. In the end, it had made little difference.
It was taking so long.
He looked at their faces. He did so a lot. At the face of Hermann, impassive, curious. He had never in his life known exactly what the butler was thinking.
The baffled man, whose name he had never learned, stared at him in puzzlement for a couple of decades.
The young girl, the one who had reached out to him, stared at him, oh so slowly, in terrified horror and awful understanding.
And the Count beamed broadly at the entire room as though the horrible death of Professor Nikolai Kerensky was some wonderful joke. ‘You will now see how I deal with fools.’
A fool? Sometimes he argued at the injustice of the verdict, at others he accepted, bitterly, that perhaps he had been a fool after all. He screamed and raved at the Count. He composed epic poems, he wrote them on the other side of the scrap of paper which held Kerensky’s Final Equation. In the end he just screamed.
The Count’s only response was a surprising one. The man never blinked, he’d seen that. But, just once, he had winked.
In the end, Professor Nikolai Kerensky died of boredom.
The last thing he saw was the face of Count Scarlioni. And that smile. That dreadful lingering smile.