Doctor Who: Keeping Up With the Joneses Read Online Free PDF Page B

best day, flying cars and jetpacks brilliant. And this is brilliant. Just by the way: have you still got a hose, just in case?’
    She smiled. ‘Belt and braces, that’s the fire service. Mind you, better for Christina’s house to use the sonic, eh?’
    ‘Oh, yes. I love health and safety, I really do. Do you two know each other, then?’
    ‘Only in passing, Doctor, as they say. But it’s a small town here, even if it is bigger than it was. We keep up.’
    ‘Indeed, you do! The only thing you need to be the perfect fire crew is a time machine!’
    Arwen chuckled. ‘Yes, that would be handy. I’ll talk to the engineers, see what they come up with. Temporal and reactive deflammablisation inductive suppression. Right!
Allons y
, as they say in Tokyo. Just my little joke; that’s French, that is.’
    She trotted off, and a moment later they were gone.
    ‘Sonic firefighters,’ the Doctor said. He paused. ‘Well, all right, then.’
    ‘What?’ Christina hated herself for saying ‘what?’ She felt she was filling a role, doing what people always did around him, as if his personal gravity was so enormous that you just went into orbit around him until he chose to let you go again.
    His personal gravity.
    That didn’t sound like her at all. It sounded like him. She didn’t have thoughts like that. She should have thought ‘charm’. But she hadn’t, and this was the world. Perhaps she was just adapting very well.
    *
    Sonic firefighters were brilliant. And impressive. Adapting the technology of his screwdriver to achieve a fire suppression field was a teensie bit genius. It would have taken him days. Probably hours, at least. More than twenty minutes, anyway. And how had they got a look at his screwdriver in the first place? Because this was, in the best possible way, a derivative technology. As for psychic jackets – why didn’t he have a psychic jacket? He was exactly the sort of person who’d look great in a psychic jacket. He should have a psychic jacket.
    Well, all right, he did have a psychic jacket, from Spurrier’s of Jermyn Street, and he never wore it because it babbled like a lunatic, and when it wasn’t just endlessly wittering away it was telling people things he didn’t want them to know.
    But psychic firefighter jackets were brilliant, and the firefighters themselves must be more than a little bit psychic to project strongly enough to change the physical make-up of the cloth. Psychic firefighters! Marvellous. And as for time-travelling psychic firefighters… that would be even more brilliant. Not that it would happen. Cracking time travel was hard. Cracking time travel inside an operating time machine? Really very, very, extremely, completely impossible. You can’t travel in something you can’t touch properly in the first place.
    He looked around. Not-Christina was watching him. She was like that. She watched. He wondered if he should call her ‘Not’ for short. Then he wondered if she was psychic, too. Could she hear him calling her ‘Not-Christina’? He frowned and thought hard about things which would really annoy her. She didn’t react. Which didn’t prove anything, really, because she might have heard him wondering if she could hear him and then she might have heard him planning to zap her with annoyances and she…
    Focus.
    Focus, focus, focus.
    He looked around at the new Jonestown, at the familiar people and the old houses, and at the soaring city beyond, and humphed. ‘What we need,’ he said, ‘is a local data repository. Somewhere you can access everything that’s happening anywhere. Where information is in the air.’
    Not-Christina pondered. ‘There’s a library on Glyndwr Street,’ she said. ‘They have terminals there.’
    Terminals. Ten minutes ago she had been from the time before telephones, but now she knew there were terminals in the library. She probably knew how to use the internet, too. Little bit psychic, or he was an Ood. That was a thought: maybe they