The Time of Change

The Vortex

Kate shows us that the portrait of the Tenth Doctor and Queen Elizabeth is concealing a hidden door. "This way," she instructs as she climbs through. The Doctor and I follow after her with Osgood behind us. Kate gestures around the dank, dark, cold concrete hall. My trainers make a strangely muted noise when they hit the floor, and upon looking down, I see a thick layer of sand coating the stones. Figures covered with faded white tarps stand against walls on either side of me, blindly watching over our group like unworldly sentries.

"Welcome to the Under Gallery," says Kate. "This is where Elizabeth the First kept all art deemed too dangerous for public consumption." She starts down a hallway branching off this main corridor but pauses when the Doctor stoops down to grab a handful of the fine powdery substance. In quite predictable Doctor fashion, he inhales it so deeply that there's no way some of it didn't go up his nose. "Stone dust," he observes shortly, clapping his hands together to clean them.

"Is it important?" Kate inquires.

"In two thousand years, I've never stepped in anything that wasn't."

I shake my head, and Osgood lets out a weak chuckle. The Doctor spins around to face her, excitedly exclaiming, "Oi, you! Are you sciency?"

The young woman's face flushes deep red, and she stumbles over her words. "Oh, well... I—um, uh—yes?"

He moves toward her. "Got a name?" he asks kindly.

"Yes," she says more surely. There's a brief silence in which the Doctor waits for her to introduce herself, but she does not. "Good," he quips after a moment, attempting to ease her tension by pretending he does not notice her nametag. "I've always wanted to meet someone called 'Yes.'" She opens her mouth, but he presses on. "Now, I want this stone dust analyzed, and I want a report in triplicate," he adds, starting to wave his hands around with a mischievous smile on his face, "with lots of graphs and diagrams and complicated sums on my desk tomorrow morning." He looks back at me and grins like he knows he's pushing it. "ASAP. Pronto. LOL. See?" he says to me. "Job! Do I have a desk?" This question is directed at Kate, who gives him a definite no. "And I want a desk!" he tells Osgood with a wag of his index finger.

I glance at Kate to see her reaction, and she rolls her eyes, though she's smiling. "Get a team," she says to the young assistant. "Analyze the stone dust." She turns swiftly to lead us down the other corridor. Behind us, Osgood begins breathing heavily, and a wheeze escapes her lips. "Inhaler!" Kate calls back to her. I hear the soft skshh of an asthma inhaler as we round the corner, and I look at Kate's back, filled with a new sense of respect.

"Do you even know what 'triplicate' means?" I ask the Doctor as we walk.

"Of course," he responds vaguely.

I smile to myself. "Can you explain it to me?"

"You mean you don't know?" he scoffs. "Wow. You've really disappointed me, love."

"I just want to make sure I've been doing it right is all."

He sighs dramatically. "Well, if you must know, triplicate is a very complicated process having to do with lots of numbers."

A few steps ahead of us, I see Kate turn her head slightly, eyebrows furrowed. "So it doesn't mean that you provide the same information in three copies?" I answer. "Y'know, hence 'triple' in the name."

My husband is quiet for a moment, then shrugs and says, "I've never heard it done that way, but I'm not saying you're wrong."

"Maybe later I'll tell you what mansplaining is," I laugh. At this, Kate fully turns mid-stride and grins at me. The Doctor furrows his brows, but the twinkle in his eye is lighthearted.

The three of us go around another corner, and this new hallway is filled with several glass display cases and countless more covered statues. I blink as dislodged dust threatens to make me sneeze, involuntarily glancing at the Doctor on my right only to see he's gone. I backtrack a couple steps to return to his side. He's standing in front of a clear vitrine and carefully lifting a red velvet fez off its display cushion. With a proud, ecstatic look he places it on his head. "Someday, you could just walk past a fez," I tell him, trying to make myself sound stern although I'm amused.

"Never gonna happen," he replies, pointing at me briefly. "After all, you never did find me one on the Internet. I don't even think you looked!"

I laugh a little too loudly.

We catch back up to Kate, who stands in the middle of a small room at the end of the hall. Her stare is focused on another pair of seemingly three-dimensional alien paintings. The room is pure white with no benches or décor other than the art. Broken glass litters the floor. Another scientist lingers off to the side and says to Kate, "As you instructed, nothing was touched."

She does not respond to his statement. Instead, she looks at us. "This is why we called you in."

I walk nearer to the frame directly in front of me, which shows a desert landscape. "3-D again," I say somewhat redundantly. The Doctor stoops and picks up a piece of broken glass, peering at it closely. "Interesting," he murmurs.

"The glass?" I ask as he moves to stand to at my side, cradling it so I can see. "No, where it's broken from," he clarifies. His voice is low enough that only I can hear him. "Look at the shatter pattern. The glass on all these paintings has been broken from the inside."

He places the piece cautiously in my palm, and my heart flips when I see the curvature of the glass. I hold it up to the light, examining how it's shaped, but there is no denying that what he said is true.

"As you can see, all the paintings are landscapes," Kate says. "No figures of any kind."

"So?" the Doctor replies.

Kate steps toward us and retrieves a tablet from the other scientist. "There used to be."

She shows us a photograph of the same painting that's hanging in front of us, but there's a very prominent difference. In the photo, there are a few dark-clothed figures hiking through the desolate land depicted. In the actual illustration, these figures are missing. And the glass was broken from the inside?

"Something got out of the painting," I state.

"Lots of somethings," the Doctor agrees. "Dangerous."

Kate gives the tablet back to the man and looks at us with wavering confidence. "This whole place has been searched. There's nothing here that shouldn't be, and nothing's gotten out."

Without notice, an explosion of light rips through the room, and I jump. Everyone whips around to face the far-right corner, where a swirling, spiraling mass of light and color hovers just below the ceiling. Its center is the calm azure one would associate with a peaceful summer day. I'm inappropriately stunned by its beauty. My husband's reaction causes me to raise my eyebrows in surprise.

"Oh, no, not now!" he whines.

"Doctor, what is it?" I shakily inquire.

He appears not to have heard me. "No, not now! I'm busy!" It's almost as if he's shouting at the thing for being off on its timing, which strikes me as odd, but not too odd for him. The vortex shudders, and the staticky noise it emits grows in decibel like it is arguing back with him in a language only it can understand.

"Is this something to do with the paintings?" inquires Kate dutifully.

"No, no," he answers, moving closer to it. "This is different. I remember this—almost remember..." His eyes rise to the fez on his head, and he removes it to cradle it in his hands. "Of course," he breathes. I see his head tilt up as he gazes at the vortex. His next sentence catches me entirely off-guard.

"This is where I come in."

He hurls the fez into the mass, and it disappears. Before we can say anything else, he takes a running start and jumps so that his head brushes the edge of the center, yelling, "Geronimo!"

"Doctor!" I scream as my heart stops, and Kate shouts at the same time, "Wait!"

But he's gone.