You'd think that safeguarding Hitler
against time-travelling assassins would be the high point of any Time
Cop's career.
You'd be wrong.
Any Time Cop can guard Hitler.
The real Time Cops guard David
Tennant.
The thing most people – most
uninitiated people - don't understand is that, without time-travel
science fiction, there would be no time-travel real life. Hence there
are always positions for those who fancy a real challenge, to guard
any one of the several hundred influential people whose works
inspired science to stick two fingers up at Einstein and say 'Back to
the future we go!'.
The Grand-daddy, Herbert George Wells,
has his own squad of covert officers watching his every move – or
rather watching the every move of everyone around him. The same goes
for the Whovian trinity – Sydney Newman, Verity Lambert and Terry
Nation. With all the security those three have, only a complete
craze-pot would go after the creators of Doctor Who. Those in the
know, the real sneaky sons-of-bitches go after the actors, especially
the high-profile ones like Pertwee, Capaldi or, in this case,
Tennant.
Anyway, I digress. I was on Tennant
duty in the middle of London, A.D. two thousand and five. David had
just been to a meeting with some BBC producers and seemed in pretty
fine fettle, he walked with a slight spring in his step and the
vaguest hint of a smile on his face. I watched as he popped into a
coffee shop and emerged five minutes later with a small paper bag and
a tall latte. Then my warning bells started ringing. Someone
approached from the east, a face that didn't quite fit the time.
Allow me to explain – you can always
tell someone from the future as they tend to be a little paler, a
little taller and a lot more psychotic. Something to do with living
in an age of limitless information, limitless opinion and very little way to tell one from the other. The guy had
a shambling gait, nervously shuffling his way through the crowd
toward Tennant.
My training kicked in. He seemed to be
favouring one leg over the other, occasionally pausing to readjust
something – a gun probably – in his pocket. Classic
stalker-killer profile. He closed in on Tennant.
“Excuse me, mister Tennant?” the
man said, nervously brushing the back of his left hand against his
nose.
“Yes?” Tennant seemed surprised to
be recognised under his acting name – this was when he was still
making the transition between stage and screen, so he wasn't used to
being spotted in the streets.
“I'm... I'm a fan of yours, big fan,
and I wanted to know if...” his right hand, still dug tightly in
his pocket started to come up. I made my move.
Now, a Wade A. Newton Device is a
wonderful thing. It's one of the few pieces of 42nd
century technology that was allowed to be issued to Time Cops on
account of it being so damned useful. A slim metallic rod, only
twenty centimetres long, it could do anything from stun someone to
obliterate them totally in a heartbeat. I pulled mine and swiftly
tapped the potential assailant on the small of his back with it,
lightly enough that the device issued a stun charge that dropped him
like a stone. Within moments, my backup had taken the man into
custody, bundling him into the back of a passing 'ambulance' where he
would wake up in a cell. Tennant looked at me, confused.
“Sorry about that,” I said, “he
gave his carer the slip, good job I managed to find him before he had
another fit. Well, he did – that's why the ambulance thing.”
Sensing that my explanation was not going down too well, I reset my
W.A.N.D. and tapped Tennant on the forehead with it. The 'memory
wipe' setting can also be very useful in that it saves on trying to
explain awkward situations.
A moment later, mister Tennant regained
clarity, shook his head and smiled at me. “Hello.” He said.
“David Tennant?” Improvisation was
never the best of my talents. “You were in the RSC a few years ago,
I saw you in Stratford and thought 'that boy's going to go far'.”
“Very nice of you,” Tennant smiled.
I asked him for an autograph (technically against the rules, but what
else are you going to do?), which he signed dutifully, if still a
little confused.
As I walked away, I turned. “By the
way, I loved you in 'Casanova'.”
“Thanks very much,” he smiled again
as I turned to go. I'd got three steps down the road when I realised
exactly what I had just said.
“Hang on a minute,” I heard his
voice tinged with a note of confusion, “we've only just finished
filming, it's not on for another six weeks.”
THE END.
