Chapter Fifteen

And I felt dead inside, because the one man who deserved to be here wasn't.

I turned my binoculars back to the sky.

Two hundred metres up was a mass of black. Not a parachute or a hot air balloon, but something between the two. It was drifting down. Underneath it all was a man wearing a flowing bottle-green velvet coat, baggy tan trousers and a grin. With his free hand he waved down at me.

The balloons had slowed the Doctor down, but he was still travelling too fast. I tried to shout a warning to him, but he was still too high to hear. The shouts alerted Lethbridge-Stewart and the others, though. Tower Green began to buzz with excitement. Everyone was pointing up, gasping, some were even laughing.

Alan had swung his camera up, and was tracking the Doctor down as he fell.

'Do you really think those bin bags can support his weight?' Doug was asking. 'I reckon a few techos on the Net might argue with that. I like his style, though.'

I turned back to the sky. Barely clearing the walls now, the Doctor was clambering up, over the balloons. It was tricky going, but he reached the top of the pile just as the apparatus reached the ground. Now they acted like a cushion or a safety mat.

The Doctor and his improvised parachute crashed into the ground mere feet from me, bouncing slightly. As he tumbled along, his limbs surfaced and disappeared back into the mass of black plastic. As he rolled to a halt, he had reached the top of the bags.

I ran over, closely followed by Doug, the Brigadier, Lex Christian and Eve. The Doctor was lying on the pile of balloons, perfectly still. His eyes were closed, his head was bent back.

He wasn't moving.

'Doctor!' Doug shouted.

'Doctor,' Eve called over to the paramedics.

'Doctor,' the Brigadier called, clearly concerned.

I bent over him. 'Doctor?'