THE CRYPTOGRAMS ARE NOT MATHS AFFAIR Chapter One
“What are you doing?”
“Cryptograms, Tegan. Very relaxing. You should try it.”
“On paper? Not on the computer?”
“Paper is more... I don’t know. Maybe ‘intimate’ is the word?”
“And in pen?”
“Pen feels better against the paper.”
“Doctor, has anyone ever told you you’re weird?”
“Constantly.”
Tegan throws up her hands and laughs. I am not offended. It happens a lot. “All right. So... where are we going?”
“Do we have to go anywhere? Can’t we just relax at home for a while?”
“Doctor are you feeling all right?” She slaps the heel of her hand against my forehead, then brushes my hair out of my eyes. “You don’t feel warm.”
“I’m fine, ” I reassure her. “I just don’t feel like going anywhere.” Then I peer at her more than fleetingly. “Why? Were you in the mood to go somewhere? Did you have somewhere special in mind?”
“I don’t know, Doctor. I don’t know the universe the way you do. Well, probably no one does, right? But we’re always going somewhere. Suddenly you just want to hang out. I guess it’s all right. I could catch up on my reading.” She sighs. “Who am I kidding? I am not a big reader, never have been, probably never will be.” She thinks. “I suppose I could learn to knit.”
“You could do some cryptograms. I have an unlimited supply. You can do them in pencil if you like.”
“Um, no thanks.” She glances at the one I’m working on. “You really enjoy that sort of thing? It looks too much like maths!”
“Open your mind, Tegan!” I admit I do tease her sometimes. “Think of it as a new kind of adventure!” She makes a dismissive sound and turns to leave the console room. “No, really! And once,” I add, “it was a real live adventure.” She turns back, suddenly interested. “Shall I tell you about it?”
“Why not? There’s nothing else to do!”
“I’ll overlook that. All right, then. Um, this is a rather long story. Shall we go into the garden and make ourselves comfortable?”
Tegan doesn’t like to wander through the TARDIS interior, at least farther than our rooms, which are fairly near the console room, and the closet, from which she has astonished us all with how far removed from an airline hostess’ uniform her actual sartorial inclinations wander (but still in heels!) The garden, though, is worth the trek, even if one is diverted, sometimes, by an unfamiliar curve or the disturbing but compelling feeling one is retracing one’s steps. It’s got its own weather system (even its own sun), a fountain whose centerpiece is a once-shattered but deftly repaired (if I do say so myself) figurine of Hatshepsut, picnic tables, foliage ranging from colorful flowers to tall grasses, bushes and trees, including and most spectacularly, my friend Maggie, the Venusian magnolia.
We sit ourselves down at a picnic table, facing the fountain, into which I had forayed a few times and been steered aright by Tegan while, when I... let’s just say I was not quite myself, or perhaps I was much more myself than usual. “First,” I begin, sitting up quite straight and thinking that Tegan looks almost sweet sitting next to me, her elbows on the wooden table and her chin in her hands, her big eyes gazing up at me, her expression hovering somewhere between I am really interested and can’t wait to hear what you have to say and You’re not going to go off on one of those long sciency things where I can’t understand two-thirds of what you say and the other third is bafflegab, are you? “First,” I repeat, “you need to know that once you have solved one cryptogram, you have effectively solved...one cryptogram.”
“Huh?”
“They’re all different. The code is different. If any two are the same it’s because you have a finite number of letters, or characters, or syllables, so repeating oneself is inevitable. So for all intents and purposes, one cryptogram’s secret has nothing to do with another’s.”
Tegan is aghast. “You mean once you’ve broken the code, there’s another code, and another?”
“Well, it’s not progressive. It’s just that they’re all different.”
“Oh, brother.”
“Okay, okay, we were only going to do one anyway....”
“Doctor!” She looks at me as if I’ve betrayed her in some way. “We were not! You were going to tell me about the time you.... Actually you never said the time you what, but you did say it was an adventure. Let’s have it, Doc. No more delay. Crack the whip! Tell me your adventure!”
