Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 |
Turlough was desperate to leave Earth. He was bored and did just about anything to alleviate that boredom. Stealing a car was only half of it, the best part was watching Hippo's face while they drove off the school property. Of course, if he'd been watching the road, they wouldn't have been run off by the lorry.
While he was unconscious, a voice came to him, promising a way home. He had only to kill someone to do it. Although Turlough never saw himself as a killer, he thought that he might be able to escape in the ship of the person he was hired to kill. He wasn't to know at the time, however, that the man he was supposed to kill would turn out to become one of his closest friends.
Traveling with the Doctor and Tegan had started out rough, not the least of which was trying to placate his employer. But Turlough had evaded his duty enough to buy his freedom back and eventually earned the Doctor's trust. He enjoyed his time at first, but the longer he stayed with Tegan and the Doctor, the more he missed Trion, the more he worried about his father and brother. The more he remembered his mother.
Turlough was surprised to find that even among friends a person could still be lonely. After Tegan left, he realized even more how homesick he was. When he finally had a change to get home (and return a hero, at that) he took it. He remembered the first time he saw the main port at Trion after his exile. Even the maintenance yard smelled sweet. The sky looked brighter than he imagined it, the air was cleaner and the trees were greener. And even though his house was missing his mother and father, it was full of many wonderful memories. He was happy to be back.
As he sat on the sofa in the main room of the house, the lift chimed to indicate that he had a visitor. He welcomed his friend from Brendon, the new boy, as he still thought of him. He still couldn't see him directly, but he knew he was there.
"You can go home again," Turlough stated. "We just need to know where you are from." He was worried that the direct questions would make the new boy leave, but he was still there, silently "sitting" next to him.
At first he sensed nothing from the new boy. Then he started to dream again. (A dream within a dream...) Only this was one that he'd never had before.
He was happy with his siblings, all one hundred and fifty four of them. They were learning how to manipulate their environment, how to interact. The task was to move from point A to point B, normally a simple thing, but this was to be done with computations only. He was sure how to do it and requested his allotment of energy for the job. He had decided that a dimensional shift was the easiest method and set his calculations in motion. The ride was exhilarating. To travel as an energy matrix was the purest form of existence. But his calculations were not true. Shifting into the other dimension worked fine, but there was a problem shifting back out. He reached out to locate his teachers, but all that he felt in reply were strange sensations, nothing like communication. He wept in sorrow and seemed to reach out to some other children, but they must have been babes for all they could do was mimic his feelings. No one could assuage his fears.
He felt lonely, confused, and very homesick. Where were his teachers? Why could no one help him? How could he return to that which was familiar?
Turlough awoke to find that he was crying and that Liz was holding him. He wiped his eyes and cleared his throat. "I think I was right about the mode of communication. It's most extraordinary. I think I anthropomorphised most of his emotions, but I got the picture."
"I think I've found the 'engines' you were talking about, too. Do you think you can get him back?"
"Looks like it's a matter of a miscalculation. I think I might be able to if the entity can render the mathematics in a form that is familiar to me. It's doing everything that it can to understand us." Turlough got up and took the waveform meter from Liz. He nodded, impressed with Liz's work and moved to the center of the fissure. Liz followed him, asking about what he saw in his dreams.
When they arrived at the center of the void, things seemed to feel differently. Liz couldn't explain it, but she knew that they weren't alone in the room. Turlough waved to something to his right, but didn't look at it. At first, there was nothing in the room to indicate that it was a control room or engine room, but then some of the floor rose up to form a console.
Turlough was impressed by the new boy's attempts at making its control room accessible to him. He stared at the "control panel" and looked at the data going across the "screen" in front of him. He noticed that Liz was watching, so he concentrated a little more and the cumbersome alphanumeric characters that humans preferred filled the "screen."
"So somewhere in that mess is a mistake? And you think you'll find it?" Liz realized just how much calculus she had forgotten over the years as integrals and derivatives danced across the screen.
"I need to find it, Liz. The new boy, here, just wants to go home. And I can understand that imperative more than you can ever imagine." Turlough sat and thought about the values some more. It seemed to be something about the dimension that they were in that was throwing off the new boy's calculations. After a few minutes of concentration, Liz noticed a smile cross his features.
"I think I have it." He started to push "buttons" on the panel in front of him, fingers racing wildly. Liz knew that he really didn't need to push the buttons, merely think of what needed to be done, but it was probably helping him to think through. She was the same way with her dictation machine. She could use it and get her reports done faster, but she thought clearer while typing.
Turlough finally stopped typing and turned to look at Liz. "We'll need to get out of here before he leaves, otherwise we might find ourselves in the middle of a wall."
"After you, Turlough." She pointed to the way they came in.
"No, after you," he said, pointing in the opposite direction. Liz raised her eyebrow at him and walked through the wall in front of her. She was greeted by a pacing Burke.
"It's about time! So did you leave the twerp in the void?"
Burke turned at the cough behind him. Turlough was standing there, smiling. "Did you know that in the Regallan language, a twerp is a 10,000 duvat note. It's worth a considerable sum. So I should thank you for the compliment."
Burke merely grunted and Liz moved over to the wall. It felt solid enough. "Is it gone now?"
"It should be. I just hope that it made it home all right."
"I'm sure that it is. And it has you to thank." Liz smiled at Turlough and then gave him a hug. "Not bad for an alien."
Turlough hugged her back. "Not bad for a human."
Tegan had been ordered to bed by her doctor and by her fiancé, so despite feeling great, she had to greet her guests in her nightshirt and robe. Turlough came into her room with a flower pot. Liz followed behind carrying a box of something that looked evilly like chocolates.
"I thought you could use something to brighten your dreary bedroom," Turlough said as he kissed her on the forehead.
"Thanks," she said as she put the pot on her nightstand. "What kind of plant is this?" she asked.
"Corn, I think."
"You got me a corn plant. How, um, thoughtful." Tegan grinned at her friend. "And you were evil and brought me chocolates," she said to Liz.
"Of course. I know how doctors are. She's probably prevented you from having any fun for the next seven weeks. So I thought you could use a little bit of chocolate to make the incarceration more bearable. Turlough assured me that you weren't allergic."
"I'm not. I think I'll hide them in my dresser drawer so that Greg doesn't find them. He would probably eat them to keep me on my prescribed diet. So how are the others doing?"
Liz sat down in the chair next to the bed. "Cindy and Reynolds are doing fine. They're both being counseled for their nightmares, but I think they will get over it." She paused. "They don't think that Zimmerman will ever recover. He will probably get back to his former health, but his mind will never be the same. And the worst part is that we really can't explain to his wife why he's in the state that he's in. The cover story is that he suffered a major breakdown."
Turlough shook his head, appalled at the human ability to deceive. "So now his wife will wonder what she could have done to prevent his breakdown instead of knowing that it was entirely due to some outside influence."
"And worse than that was telling Alice Newman that her husband of only one month was now dead. No good explanation given," Liz added.
They sat in the room, not knowing what to say. Tegan finally broke the silence. "So how is your new housemate treating you?" she asked Liz.
Liz smiled at Turlough. "He's a great cook, but he's lazy as can be. I ask him to clean the kitchen and he fixes my radio instead."
Tegan laughed. "He's the worst kind of parasite, isn't he? A somewhat useful kind that whimpers when you put him out."
Turlough frowned. "Well if neither of you appreciate me, I think I'll go back to Trion." He thought for a few minutes about the boring meetings and all of the backlog that would be waiting on his desk for him. "Do you think that Greg would want a new roommate?"
Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 |