| "What next?" asked Inquirer, who was really wishing that she'd happened
to see this particular episode.
"Well," said Betty, "next was the 'easy as pi' thing. There was this
sort of red-and-white chessboard thing..."
"Like that?" asked Tegan, pointing ahead of them.
"Uh, yeah," said Betty. For, indeed, there it was, blocking the corridor
before them. "You have to step on the tiles in exactly the right pattern.
Otherwise, it lets you get halfway across and then zaps you with lasers
or something."
"Nice," said Sarah Jane, her very best "I am scared out of my wits but
am going to try and pretend to be amused" look on her face.
"The pattern is based on the digits of pi," said Ragan. "Although, I
must admit, I never did quite understand how. I would think that'd
mean that you should step on the third tile, then the first, then the fourth,
and so on, but I watched the Master doing it, and quite frankly, that didn't
look like what he was doing."
Several of the Doctors made thoughtful noises, and, much to the amusement
of the others, they all began fumbling through their pockets and pulling
out coins at once. As it happened, the Second Doctor was closest to the
deadly grid, and he began sort of elbowing the two next to him. "Excuse
me! I'll need some room to work. Thank you." This last was uttered as the
Third and Fifth Doctors moved aside, the Third with a look of annoyance,
the Fifth with one of tolerant amusement.
The Second Doctor cleared his thoat and began chucking coins onto the
grid. When he got to the middle row, they were treated to quite a light
show as lasers shot out and turned all the coins into smoking lumps of
molten metal. "Oh, dear," said the Second Doctor. "That wasn't right at
all."
Several people began to speak at once. The Third Doctor and Doctor Who
were both saying "Here, let me." Tegan was making some disparaging
comment nobody could quite make out properly. And Sigin was saying "You
know, we could just..."
The Second Doctor interrupted them all by yelling "Quiet!" at a volume
they would not necessarily have expected him to be capable of. "I think
I have it now," he continued in a soft, calm tone. He began pitching a
rapid-fire series of coins onto the "chessboard," landing each one precisely
in the center of a colored square, all the way to the final row.
They all waited for a moment, breaths held in anticipation. Nothing
happened. "Right," sang out the Second Doctor cheerfully. "Follow me!"
and he began skipping across the board in the pattern laid down by his
coins. There was much shrugging of shoulders and many uncertain glances
exchanged. Finally, B'elanna jumped onto the board after him, and seconds
later, they had all formed a line and were hopscotching across the board,
one after another, most of them trying not to contemplate how ridiculous
they must look.
-
 Much
to the surprise of several of them, they all made it across without being
zapped by anything.
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