Luke Smith

Go watch the show.







Seriously.

"You know how ground-penetrating radar can reveal the rock strata composition below the ground at a site to help you find ancient earth works and so on?"

"Yes."

"Well, we've managed to do something similar, but on a smaller scale. Actually scanning into these stones themselves. We have a computer suite, and I've dedicated a machine to each of the stones' scanes. They should be completing the analysis and ready to show us just what these stones are made of just in a few minutes."

---

All but one of the computer screens were arranged around the curved wall of one side of the room. The other screen was against the opposite wall, facing them. Each screen showed a progress ribbon inching its way across. Each was almost at the end, ready to display its results. There were thirteen screens in all.

"It's the same," Sarah Jane said. "Exactly the same!"

"Same as what?" Clyde asked. "Oh, don't tell me you've got a set-up like this in your cellar."

"You don't want to know what I have in my cellar," she told him.

"You're right," Luke said, turning slowly to look all around the room. "Exactly the same."

"Oh, the screens are arranged just like the stones out in the main dome," Maria realised.

The Professor that had let them into the room smiled at their astonishment. "That's right!" She tapped at a keyboard, and the ribbon strips disappeared to be replaced by digital photographs of the stones themselves.

"Why go to all that trouble?" Sarah Jane asked.

"We feed the data on each stone to the screen in the same relative position," the Professor said. "Makes it much easier to cross-reference and tabulate the data."

Clyde, sitting in the chair by the screen showing the image of the King's stone, put his hand up in a mocking immitation of being in class. "Mr. Thicky over here has noticed something, too, actually."

"Something random?" Sarah Jane asked.

"Quite the opposite. Come over here!"

"So?" Maria said.

"Yes?" Luke asked. "What have you noticed?"

"Can't you see?"

"Course we can," Maria told him. "That's why we're asking."

"Look!" Clyde pointed at the screen on the other side of the room. "What do you see?"

"Screens," the Professor said, "in the same relative positions as the sentry stones. Forgive me, young man, but we know that."

Clyde swung annoyingly in his chair with an even more annoying smirk plastered across his face. "Those screens- they're all in the same positions as the stones, yeah?"

"Yes," the Professor said patiently.

"Angled the same way?"

"Actually, they are. The workbench was built that way. It seemed to make sense."

"Makes more sense than you think!"

Luke frowned, looking around at the screens. "They're all facing this way."

"Oh, you've got it!" Clyde raised his hand for a high five. "See here," he explained, "you see each screen full-on, exactly angled this way."

"You mean those stones-" Sarah Jane began.

"-Are all looking at this one!" Clyde finished. He turned and patted the side of the screen behind him.

"Centuries of watching the King," Maria said. "Spooky."




{...Same disclaimer as before!}

Some two or three hours after leaving Sarah Jane’s house, Luke returned to the moment he’d left. First, he threw away the note and returned his book to the shelf from whence it came. Then, he snuck upstairs to the attic.

The Sarah Jane at Milliways told him she was from an alternate timeline, and that made sense. But he had to be sure.

He opened the attic door very quietly, so he wouldn’t disturb her. It wasn’t quiet enough. She glanced up from her large stack of complicated computer read-outs and spoke with exasperation clear in her tone. “I just finished telling you to go downstairs, Luke.”

“I’m sorry,” he said and, after a moment of hesitation, shut the door. He wasn’t certain yet whether he ought to tell her about Milliways, but he could take his time deciding. With his immediate concern taken care of, he turned his attention to Sarah Jane’s large collection of books on the paranormal, the alien, and, most useful in this case, the multi-dimensional. He had research to do.