'Do you ever get used to him?' Trix asked. She flicked her blonde hair out of her eyes in a way that suggested to Fitz that she was not expecting an answer.
So, of course, he replied. 'No. I've been with the Doctor for, well, for longer than I care to recall. But no, I still can't predict what on earth he'll get up to next. I mean,' he went on, pointing to the table by way of illustration, 'I thought we were going to have breakfast.'
'Lunch,' Trix corrected him.
'What happened to breakfast?'
'You slept through it.'
'Well, time doesn't really mean anything. Especially breakfast time.'
The large wooden table in the kitchen area of the TARDIS was barely visible under the electronic clutter and hi-tech junk piled on top of it. Looking round, Fitz could just see the top of the Doctor's head as he leaned into the pile, connecting together bits and pieces that had never been designed to be connected together. Probably, some had never been meant to get within a hundred years of each other, Fitz thought. Behind the hint of the Doctor's head, the window showed rolling hills and green fields, which existed outside the TARDIS just as much as breakfast time existed inside it.
A long metal prong emerged from the centre of the pile of equipment and disappeared into the top of a bag of granulated sugar. A similar prong spiked into a china cereal bowl filled with rock salt. A power cable snaked between the two before disappearing inside what looked like a microwave oven, but which had once done terrible things to a cup of cocoa Fitz had been looking forward to.
The Doctor's hand appeared framed by the window behind. It was clicking its fingers and beckoning. 'Did you get the cup of tea I wanted?' The Doctor sounded like he was holding wires in between his teeth. Again.
'Yes, it's over here.' Fitz turned to get the cup. 'Look, Doctor, I sort of understand about how the sugar and salt crystals set up empathic resonance or whatever it was so we can see if the crystal has a similar internal structure. Stuff.' He waved his free hand vaguely to show he really did understand.
Fitz almost dropped the tea as the Doctor leaped to his feet beside him. Fitz was still watching the point on the other side of the table where he felt the Doctor ought to be. 'But how does plugging in a cup of tea help?' Fitz asked.
'Oh it doesn't.' The Doctor took the cup from him, sniffed at it cautiously, then raised it to his lips. 'That's for me to drink.'
'And what about breakfast?' Fitz wanted to know.
'Lunch,' Trix said.
'Whatever.'
The Doctor frowned, sipped at his tea, smacked his lips together, and handed the half-empty cup back to Fitz. 'Oh not for me, thanks.' He turned to Trix. 'Do you have the crystal handy?'
The large diamond - if it was a diamond - sparkled as Trix held it up. She had been through a lot to get that diamond, Fitz thought. They all had. And now - perhaps - they were about to find out what it really was. With the help of a bag of sugar and a pile of techno-junk. Right.
The Doctor took the diamond carefully from Trix, and peered closely at it, as if trying to discover its mysteries by looking inside. Apparently satisfied, he then dropped it into the teacup that Fitz was holding. Hot tea splashed over Fitz's wrist and he gave a startled cry, almost dropping the cup before the Doctor relieved him of it.
The cup balanced on top of the pile of equipment, angled so it looked about to topple off at any moment. The Doctor took two trailing wires and hooked them over the top so they dangled down into the tea.
'A good idea, Fitz. Liquid, especially hot liquid, should resonate in sympathy with the vibrations of the crystal. With luck it will amplify those vibrations and make them easier to pick up.' He grinned. 'And then we shall know.'
'Oh good,' Fitz said.
'And then what?' Trix asked. She had managed to retrieve one of the chairs from beside the table and was now sitting down, her long legs crossed in a way that Fitz thought was unfairly distracting at such a serious moment. She was examining her nails as if unaware of the problem.
'Oh, I don't know. Depends what we find we know.' The Doctor traced the line of the wires down from the cup. 'Now the resonance is picked up and transmitted along the wires, two of them of course for triangulation.'
'Of course,' Fitz murmured, earning a huge smile from the Doctor.
'Then the data from the sugar and the salt are fed into the comparator. For comparison.'
'And why don't they need two wires, for triangulation?' Fitz asked.
'Di-polar sensors,' Trix said without looking up. Fitz assumed she was making it up. Hoped she was.
'And all the various data then gets passed to the TARDIS systems for analysis,' the Doctor went on, 'and we should be able to read off the results from the console in a moment or three.'
Trix stood up and followed the Doctor over to the control room area of the TARDIS. Fitz was still staring at the table, at the heap of what looked like a load of junk. 'Hang on,' he called. 'What's the rest of this stuff for?'
'Oh that's just a load of junk. To ensure the teacup and the sugar and the salt are at optimum height.'
Trix and the Doctor were peering at various dials, meters and displays on the TARDIS console when Fitz reached them.
'Hmmm,' the Doctor was saying.
'Ah,' Trix agreed.
'Well, well, well.'
'So, there we are.'
'Excuse me.' Fitz pushed between them. 'Resident thicko arriving, so explanations please. Preferably monosyllabic.'
'Octo, more like,' the Doctor said. He tapped at one of the small screens.
'Look, base eight. The crystalline structure, all organised round base eight. Not unlike silicon, I'd say.'
'Silicon as in silicon chips?' Fitz said.
'And base eight as in silicon chips?' Trix suggested.
'Computers work in binary,' Fitz said. That he did know. 'Base two.'
'You're talking bits, I'm talking bytes.'
'Oh. Right. Yeah, of course.' Fitz nodded. 'Good point.'
'And the frequencies it is emitting are all multiples of eight as well.' The Doctor pointed to a read-out that Fitz could not see because Trix was in the way.
'Emitting? You mean it's a transmitter? The crystal is a transmitter?' Fitz looked at the Doctor, then at Trix. 'Why are you looking at me like that?'
'The crystal,' the Doctor said slowly, 'is a transmitter. Yes, you know, you could be right. It is just possible,' he decided, tapping his chin with a long index finger, 'that your knack of stating the obvious is actually a talent bordering on genius.'
Fitz blinked. He was not quite sure how to react to that.
'But more likely,' the Doctor went on, 'it's just an annoying habit nurtured by your inability to grasp basic principles.'
'What is it transmitting?' Trix asked before Fitz could respond. 'And where to?'
'A data stream of some sort. Continuous information, so something that is variable and changing frequently. Not that it's getting past the TARDIS walls, mind.'
'And where is it transmitting this data to? Who's listening?'
'Well, since it isn't getting there, we have no way of knowing. And anyway, we couldn't work it out from just one crystal.'
'Because you need at least two transmissions for triangulation,' Fitz said, to prove he wasn't a complete dork. He thought back to the body stuffed with crystals - to the birth of the universe, the Big Bang. The crystals exploding outwards and being scattered through the rapidly expanding universe. 'But hang about, there were hundreds - probably thousands - of crystals. Are they all transmitting?'
The Doctor eased Fitz gently aside and leaned over to whisper loudly to Trix. 'He's doing it again, you know. I don't think it can be a coincidence.'
'Could be luck,' she said.
Then the Doctor was a blur of motion round the console. His voice seemed to come to Fitz from points he had already left, he moved so fast. 'We know there are thousands of these crystals out there in the universe - thrown out by the Big Bang, by the forces of creation. One day they'll all get crunched back together as the universe shrinks and implodes, of course. But for the aeons in between they are transmitting data, all of them. Logically, it is all going to the same point. Each crystal must have a different frequency or whoever's collecting the data wouldn't know where it's coming from any more than we know where it's going.'
'So?' Trix asked.
'So, we assume that each and every crystal is of the same family as this one. There are - or were - seven known crystal families. But this is totally new to me. An eighth family. And the whole of its structure is based round eight. So the frequencies being used are probably multiples of eight in base eight and since there are as we know thousands of these crystals we should be able to guess a few of the frequencies and detect the transmissions and trace them.'
He paused, and gestured at the vaulted ceiling. It was fading to darkness, tiny pinprick lights appearing in mid-air above them.
'How do we know which way the transmission is going?' Fitz wondered. 'We might just be finding where there's another crystal, not where it's sending stuff to.'
'So we plot a few, and we see if there's a point where the lines intersect.' The Doctor made a point of reaching down and flicking a switch. At once the air was cut across with a spider's web of white lines. 'And we find...' He looked up, lips pursed and hands clasped together.
'It's a complete mess,' Trix said.
'A complete mess,' the Doctor agreed. He was looking accusingly at Fitz.
'Maybe they meet somewhere off the display, where we can't see,' he said. 'I mean, that's possible, isn't it?'
'Two small points,' the Doctor said. His voice sounded artificially calm and reasonable. 'First, the lines are all going in very different directions in the three dimensions we can see from here. While some do cross each other, there is never going to be a point where they all, or even a majority of them, intersect at once.'
'And point two?'
'What we are looking at, is the universe. There is no "off the display".'
Fitz looked up at the lights and lines again. 'The universe?' He whistled. 'You know, it's not as big as I imagined,' he said. 'So where are we?'
The Doctor sighed. 'We are in the TARDIS. And the TARDIS is in the vortex. We are not there. We are...' His voice tailed off and his frown deepened.
'We're off the display,' Trix said quietly. 'You know, Fitz, I'm beginning to understand why he keeps you around.'
In an instant the entire display above them changed. The points of light flicked out of existence, the lines swung and shifted. They rearranged themselves into a shape - an almost solid cone. As the Doctor twisted a control, the tip of the cone seemed to grow, to rush towards them at alarming speed.
'What is that?' Fitz asked.
'It's a point in the space-time vortex. Out there.' The Doctor pointed his thumb in the general direction of the main doors. 'Where all the transmissions from the crystals I've managed to find meet.'
'Still looks a bit like a spider's web,' Trix said.
'Temporal isometry.'
'So what is it? What's there?' Fitz wondered.
'I don't know,' the Doctor admitted. 'Why don't we go and see?'
