Doctor Who Page 2

  He had hailed the two figures he saw ahead. Now he saw them turn to watch his approach. ‘Sorry. So sorry,’ he said as he reached them. He now felt sure he must have had a head wound, hence all his absurd thoughts about the afterlife, for these were no angels. He had perhaps returned to his right frame of mind having wandered to a different part of the battlefield. A very different part. ‘I don’t suppose either of you is a doctor?’

  The two figures looked at each other, then back to him. ‘Are you trying to be funny?’ the taller one said. It seemed from his accent that he shared Archie’s Scottish heritage.

  Archie put a hand to his head. What did that mean? What did any of this mean? Suddenly, an impossible white light was shining over the three of them. It came from behind him. It spoke of pursuit. He spun around, and found himself backing away, past the two strangers, who, courageously or ignorantly, stayed there, facing the threat, looking, somehow, directly at the light that was blinding him. ‘She’s coming!’ he whispered. ‘She’s coming! It’s her!’ The reaction of these two gentlemen was astonishing. They visibly steeled themselves, the taller one adjusting his cuffs, the shorter one grasping his lapels. He wanted to yell at them that what was coming was beyond his understanding, but, hang on, so were they, and there was something terribly reassuring about what they were doing. But here she was, that terrifying figure, looming out of the light. Surely they would panic now? Surely they would turn and run?

  ‘Not human, I think,’ said the fellow in the fur hat, ‘but not a Cyberman either.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ said the Scottish one, ‘you’ve just been fighting Cybermen too.’ He glanced past Archie, who turned to see that standing there was … a police box, that was what his Glaswegian friends had told him they were called, when he’d popped up there for the family reunion. Only this one was ultra-modern in looks, bang up to date. Ah, the Scotsman must have brought it with him for some reason. Oddly, the tall dandy was now addressing the box, as if there was someone watching from inside. ‘Having fun with the parallels, dear?’ Had the Scotsman brought his wife with him as well as his police box? He must have a hell of a big sleigh.

  But the old chap in the furry hat was now calling out to the glass woman, who had slowed her approach, perhaps as puzzled by these newcomers as Archie was. ‘Kindly identify yourself! If you are not from this world, state your planet of origin and your intentions. This is Earth, a level five civilisation!’

  ‘And it is protected!’ snarled the Scotsman.

  Oh. Were these gentlemen perhaps Martians? So … Martian, Scotsman, police box, wife, sleigh … ? Archie decided he should probably stop trying to construct any sort of working hypothesis and just be glad these chaps seemed to be on his side.

  ‘It’s what?’ asked the one in the hat. ‘Protected?’

  To Archie’s immense relief, the light snapped off and the glass woman vanished.

  ‘Oh,’ said the Scot, ‘Okay. That usually doesn’t work.’

  ‘Protected by whom?’ the Englishman persisted.

  ‘Oh, it is early days, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, whatever that thing was, it’s still around. The snow, you see. Still frozen.’ The Englishman indicated the suspended snowflakes.

  ‘Yes, I think you’re probably right.’

  Archie jumped as the two of them suddenly rounded on him. ‘Sir,’ said the Englishman, ‘that creature, what is it, and what does it want with you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’ Still, it was only fair to warn them. ‘But it’s me it’s after. You’ll find me dangerous company.’

  The Englishman chuckled. ‘I flatter myself you’ll find me the same! May I suggest, for your own safety, you step on board my ship?’

  Archie looked around. ‘What ship?’

  ‘He means,’ said the Scotsman, with a worrying twinkle in his eye, ‘get inside the box.’

  3

  Inside the Box

  The Doctor, now in his twelfth incarnation, had no idea how he had got here, but he had to admit, in what felt like some strange release from where he had been … he was enjoying himself. The last thing he had known, he’d been on the battlefield, and had managed to get the remaining Cybermen close enough to … well, to sacrifice himself to save others. He had known that was going to be the case when he had set out that day. His only regret had been that his friend Bill – his lost, blameless friend Bill – had decided to share in his sacrifice. That she should have been put in that position, where that was the best result. He recalled the tremendous violence of the explosion, then somehow waking in the TARDIS, which had been in flight. He must have staggered from the scene, he thought, somehow managed to hit the controls. But … what a strange choice for the old girl to have brought him here. He had, in those few moments before he had glimpsed his other self, decided upon something, something very serious. It was, in some ways, a continuation of a decision made before he had set out to confront the Cybermen. That decision had set him free to laugh again.

  It was a decision that meant he no longer had to bear the pain of hope.

  He had only the slightest of theories as to why time had then stopped, that perhaps it had something to do with the TARDIS’s odd decision that he should run into his former self. He had equally little idea how this soldier had got here, but he was deeply in love with the concept of what was about to happen right at this moment. This was the sort of comedy he was free to enjoy now, right at the end.

  The First Doctor had taken out his ancient key and was unlocking the door to the TARDIS. ‘It may,’ he was saying, like a magician about to astound his audience, ‘look a little snug from this angle, but I think you might be in for a—’

  The Doctor quickly stepped forward to follow them both inside. He had just about resisted skipping. He joined the other two inside the console room of his TARDIS. The First Doctor was standing there, struck dumb by, well, a million brilliant design choices, all of them far beyond the old man’s comprehension.

  ‘My TARDIS!’ the old boy finally exclaimed. ‘Look at my TARDIS!’

  ‘This is impossible!’ To add to the delight, the soldier was doing the standard double-take.

  ‘Have I been burgled?’ gasped the First Doctor.

  The Doctor frowned.

  ‘It’s …’ began the soldier, ‘but it’s …’ Glorious? Awe-inspiring? Tasteful?

  ‘Hideous,’ finished the First Doctor.

  ‘Bigger on the inside than it is on the outside,’ finished the soldier, more aptly.

  The Doctor quickly closed the doors behind them. ‘You know, I thought it probably was. Glad it’s not just me.’ Still, the First Doctor’s lack of basic design sense had dented his mood a little.

  ‘What is this place?’ asked the soldier.

  ‘This place,’ said the First Doctor, ‘is, or ought to be, my TARDIS!’

  The Doctor decided to put the old man out of his misery. He bounded over to the console, brought up a live feed from outside, and spun the monitor into the First Doctor’s eye line. Another police box stood in the snow. The one in which he, as the First Doctor, had arrived all those millennia ago. ‘Technically, that is your TARDIS. It’s about seventy feet that way.’ He pointed. ‘See? Always remember where you parked. It’s going to come up a lot.’

  The soldier, meanwhile, was still gazing at his surroundings, utterly lost. ‘Is this madness? Am I going mad?’

  ‘Madness?’ The Doctor felt he had best be blunt with the man. It’d give him a chance to find his footing. Directness and honesty were always the best policies. That was something he had always been certain about in this incarnation. ‘Well, you’re an officer from World War One, at the South Pole, being pursued by an alien through frozen time. Madness was never this good.’

  ‘World War One?’

  The Doctor had realised that the First Doctor was making a slow perambulation around the console. He’d become distracted by the possibility that the old man, overwhelmed by the quality of
the dashboard, might fiddle with something. But now he glanced back to the soldier for a moment. ‘Judging by the uniform, yes.’

  ‘Yes, but … what do you mean … One?’

  Ah. The Doctor slowly turned back to the man, wincing at how he’d just trod on a butterfly there. Directness and honesty, he kept being reminded in this incarnation, were only sometimes the best policies. The soldier was now looking at him as if all the terrors of Earth’s history had suddenly been made real and immediate for him. What would the Doctor’s wife, River Song, say in these circumstances? She’d had a handy phrase, hadn’t she, for when horrors intruded on the dinner party? He remembered. ‘Oh, sorry … spoilers.’

  ‘Enough of this!’ called the First Doctor. ‘Who are you?’

  The Doctor was relieved to let the … Captain—yes, that was the man’s rank—withdraw to consider. He turned to his former self, with no more appetite for pretence. ‘You know who I am. You knew the moment you saw me. I’d say, “Stop being an idiot,” but I kind of know what’s coming.’ He couldn’t resist a little smirk at his own cleverness. His current cleverness, that was. Surely the penny was about to drop?

  ‘I assure you,’ the First Doctor said, dropping his cloak into the Doctor’s hands as if he were a bellboy, ‘I do not have the faintest idea who you are.’

  The Doctor dumped the cloak on a chair. ‘Well, I know who you are.’

  The Captain, meanwhile, had been rifling through, of all things, the video cabinet. ‘Is anyone going to explain what’s going on?’ he asked, holding up a VHS cassette on which the Doctor could just make out … ah, that was his recording of the Daleks’ master plan. They’d dearly love to get that back, having lost their own copy centuries ago.

  Enough was enough. The Doctor strode up to his former self and held up his palm to show him the light that burned there. ‘Snap.’

  There we go. Finally. The old man reacted in horror. ‘You … are me? No. No!’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m very much afraid so.’ And he couldn’t make a joke out of it any more. There was the horror again. The horror they were both facing individually, and, oddly, together.

  ‘Do I become … you?’

  ‘Well, there’s a few false starts.’ The Doctor grinned. ‘But you get there in the end.’

  ‘But I thought …?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I assumed I’d … get …’ The First Doctor suddenly seemed to decide that the best course of action would be to turn his confusion into something rather more pointed. ‘Younger.’

  ‘I am younger!’

  The Doctor only had a moment to regret that that had come out as a sort of anguished howl before the Captain stumbled back towards the console. He was holding a hand to his head. ‘You know, I really don’t think I’m completely following … Oh dear.’ He looked like he was about to collapse at any moment.

  ‘Oh, you poor fellow,’ said the First Doctor, ‘you’re in shock. Let me help you.’ He led the soldier to sit down on the steps that led to the upper deck. ‘Brandy,’ he ordered grandly, as if about to snap his fingers for service. ‘Get him brandy! Do you have any? I had a bottle somewhere.’

  ‘Hang on!’ The Doctor dashed over to the drinks cabinet.

  ‘Now you sit here, my boy, collect your wits.’

  ‘Who are you people?’ asked the Captain.

  ‘I am the Doctor, and this is my, umm …’

  The Doctor arrived back with a bottle of the Aldebaran brandy that River had liked so much, one that bad been buried at the back of the cabinet for … well, it probably wasn’t even one of hers. He was considering what would be the best policy here. Directness and honesty were always … no, perhaps not. ‘It’s complicated. Actually I am also—’

  ‘My nurse,’ finished the First Doctor, with a twinkle.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I realise that seems a little improbable—’

  ‘Well, yes—’ The Doctor wasn’t looking forward to having to play along with this.

  ‘—because he’s a man,’ finished the First Doctor. The Captain nodded in agreement.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘Older gentlemen, like women, can be put to use.’

  ‘You … you can’t say things like that!’ For goodness’ sake, this was like Christmas dinner on Gallifrey. What about Barbara, the Doctor wanted to yell. She was one of your greatest friends, brilliant in every way, and she wouldn’t have stood for a statement like that. What, is this you acting up because we’ve got company?

  ‘Can’t I?’ grumped the First Doctor. ‘Says who?’

  ‘Just about everyone you’re going to meet for the rest of your life.’ He shoved the bottle in the First Doctor’s direction. ‘Here.’

  The First Doctor took the bottle and examined it. The Doctor realised, to his annoyance, that there was a mark on the side, one that he had put there and forgotten about. But the old coot obviously hadn’t. ‘Hmm. Have you had some of this?’

  ‘Well, you know,’ hissed the Doctor, ‘I may have snuck a glass at some point in the last fifteen hundred years. It’s been rock and roll.’

  The First Doctor made a high-pitched noise of disapproval and poured a glass for the Captain. ‘There you are, get this down you, and you’ll feel a lot better.’

  The Captain did so, looking thankful for both the liquor and the familiarity of the experience. ‘Thank you, yes.’

  The First Doctor looked back to the Doctor, clearly troubled. ‘I don’t understand any of this.’

  ‘Of course you understand. I am your future self.’

  ‘Are you indeed? And I suppose this is meant to be my TARDIS?’

  ‘Our TARDIS.’ Now, there was diplomacy his wife would have approved of.

  ‘What’s wrong with the lights?’

  ‘The lights?’

  ‘Yes, why don’t you turn the lights on?’

  The Doctor recalled that the First Doctor hadn’t had the experience to change his TARDIS interior from factory settings. He must have gotten used to that brutalist glare. Which, of course, he’d then cluttered up with those so-called antiques he’d got from jumble sales. ‘The lights are on. It’s supposed to be like this.’

  ‘Why?’

  By the Rivers of Rassilon, the old man always had made a thing of the pointed question, hadn’t he? ‘I don’t know, it’s … atmospheric.’

  ‘Atmospheric?’ The First Doctor bristled. ‘This is the flight deck of the most powerful space-time machine in the known universe—not a restaurant for the French!’

  The most powerful? The Doctor couldn’t believe the cheek of the old man. He wasn’t talking to one of his ape hostages now! But his former self had gone to look at … Oh dear.

  He was pointing at the Doctor’s beloved Yamaha SGV 800, placed carefully on its stand. ‘Good Lord, what is that?’

  The Doctor winced. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘look what someone must have accidentally left there.’

  The Captain perked up at once more recognising something familiar. ‘I say, it’s some sort of guitar, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh,’ coughed the Doctor, ‘is it yours?’

  The First Doctor wandered over to peer closely at the instrument, like it was one of his antiques. ‘It appears to have been played quite recently.’ The Doctor remembered his former self’s pretensions to being the Time Lord answer to Sherlock Holmes. ‘It’s the only thing here that’s been cleaned.’ He went over to the console, wiped a finger along it and held it up. His gloved finger had perhaps got slightly dirtier. ‘In fact, this whole place is in need of a good dusting. Obviously,’ the great detective deduced, ‘Polly isn’t around any more.’

  He’s doing this just to make me feel awkward, isn’t he? Isn’t he? ‘Please, please … please stop saying things like that.’

  Which was, awkwardly, the moment the Doctor heard a woman’s voice ring out through the TARDIS. It was clear, cool, eerily serene. ‘Doctor?’ it said.

  The effect on the Captain was immediate. He looked around
in panic once more. ‘That voice, I’ve heard it before!’

  ‘Am I addressing the Doctor?’ asked the voice.

  The Doctors looked at each other. The Doctor decided he really should let the old man have a go at this. You know, give the intern a bit of on-the-job experience. He indicated that the First Doctor should proceed. The First Doctor grudgingly accepted his gallantry and turned to the direction the voice seemed to be coming from. ‘Doctor who?’

  The Doctor had to smile. How many times had that been asked of him?

  ‘You are a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey,’ the voice said. ‘You travel in a Type 40 TARDIS, with a defective cloaking mechanism. You formerly belonged to the Prydonian chapter, but have renounced your vows.’

  The First Doctor glanced back to him, worried. Whoever this was, they were very well informed. Which must come as more of a surprise to the old man, who’d kept his every move a secret. ‘Clearly, you have done some elementary research,’ said the First Doctor, turning back to the voice. ‘Am I supposed to be impressed, hmm?’

  ‘Your title of choice is “Doctor”, however your real name is—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ muttered the First Doctor, ‘well, that’s quite enough of that.’ The Doctors shared a look of alarm. She knew the name. That was the sign of a serious player. ‘You have the advantage of me, madam.’

  The Doctor went to the console, and ran his fingers over the scan controls, sending sensor waves throughout the ship and outside it, attempting to discover the nature of the threat. There came a sudden, enormous noise of impact. The Doctor was thrown from his feet. Something was smashing against the TARDIS!

  4

  Confrontations

  The Doctor hauled himself upright. That impact had sounded from close by the doors. And now a second concussion rang out, this one striking from the other direction. The First Doctor and the Captain were stumbling to and fro. But this was extraordinary. Nothing could attack the TARDIS like this. Nothing that didn’t have tremendous cosmic powers.