Disclaimer: Doctor Who is, to the best of my knowledge, copyright of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and I'm just having fun in the Whoniverse, which was and is the work of many wonderful and talented professional writers. This story has also been influenced by my recent readings of the novels of Linda Nagata.
Doctor Who and the Joy Hunter
Chapter 1
Whatever it was, it existed. A thing that was. And it was alive.
It could not see, smell, touch or taste, neither did it feel hunger, pain, or any such sense. Neither did it sleep. Its existence was such that it had no need of these things. Yet now it stirred – chemical activity that had long been sluggish and almost dormant increased as the gradient of its metabolic rate tilted upward – a tangent to a climbing curve – sparking communication between the tiny individual particles that the living thing was made of. For so long it had been inert in the silence and dark of the void through which it sped. Now it lived, it felt, it thought.
Only simple thoughts. All it knew was that what had aroused it was a possible source of what it needed. Though it didn't hunger for food or molecular sustenance, it craved nourishment of another kind – something unique and rare in the Universe. And although in this vast emptiness there was no other living entity, and so no being to provide it with what it needed, it now knew that a chance existed for it to find that which it craved. It knew that it must now act.
What had awoken it was the radiance of a great Hot Body. It felt that radiance in each of its millions of particles. Such was its sensitivity to that radiation that it could detect even an infinitesimal increase in it. The memories it held of the long-ago time before its great hibernation told of the Cold Bodies that orbited in circles around these great Hot ones, and on those Cold Bodies it could find what it desired.
Eagerly, the living entity – the Thing That Was - listened. Every one of its particles was a miniscule sense organ that could map the most delicate and barely perceptible radiation emissions – the telltale signs of the Cold Bodies.
There! A spiritual thrill swarmed through each one of its particles like a choir of a million voices singing one single note in joy and harmony. The creature for one moment sang to celebrate its existence at the prospect of satisfying its great need. It praised its thanks to its Maker who had programmed into it this capacity to find its way through the horrible wilderness of space.
In its strange mind there was no doubt about what it must now do. It was happy.
It was spring, and the wind carried little particles of a very different kind through the air. Cynthia sat back against the trunk of the tree in her garden, and looked at the dandelion clock seeds she had just blown away as they floated on the spring breeze, tiny dark things suspended from the white filaments that spread up from them and caught the air. She laughed as she blew again "Two O'Clock!" she giggled, and in a white, fluffy explosion, more seeds were released and drifted away in dreamlike cloud. "Three O'Clock!" and still more were stripped away from the head. She kept going, until by "six o'clock" only one or two stubborn seeds still clung relentlessly, and all that remained of the dandelion clock was the green stem and the head.
She lay back dreamily, and bored. It was a "pupil free day" – which annoyed her mother, she knew – because they had to stay home to look after her. She looked wistfully at the line of woodland that extended just past the bottom fence of her back garden. She wasn't allowed to go there without an escort.
"Hello Cynthia!" came a voice. She looked up. Over the next-door fence a friendly brown face with beautiful dark eyes was looking at her. "Jim!" she squealed. She jumped up and ran to the fence, putting her hands on the flakey tops of the palings. Jim was one of two brothers a couple of years older than her. They were her neighbours, and she was very fond of them.
"You want to go out, don't you?" Jim asked.
"Yes!" she sighed. It's so boring at home!
"I know," Jim replied. "How about I ask my mum to ask your mum if me and Nichu can take you for a play in the wood?"
Cynthia clapped her hands, her face aglow. Maybe she would have a day of adventure after all, on this beautiful spring day!
Miles away, in a huge country residence, a man with a helmet of plentiful and slightly unkempt gray hair wearing a dark green smoking jacket with curious frilly sleeves protruding from the cuffs sat bent over a desk where he fiddled with an oddly shaped device. The object of his concentration was roughly spherical, and consisted of several spokes radiating in three dimensions from a central core – like a dandelion clock with only a few seeds left. The thing was slightly bigger than an orange.
Wearing a sky blue sleeveless blouse and a short white skirt, sitting on a work bench with her legs crossed and an impatient look in her pretty face was a blonde girl in her late teens. She fidgeted and drummed her slim delicate fingers on the bench she sat on.
The older man seemed oblivious to the mood of his young companion, and muttered to himself, "Now if I just reverse the polarity of the neutron flow…"
Unable to bear it any longer, the girl leapt to the floor and marched across the room to the window under which the man sat. She flung open the window and cried, "Oh Doctor look!"
The Doctor looked up indignantly. "Jo please!"
"But Doctor, it's Spring!" Listen to that!
Outside the walls of the seemingly innocuous country residence that formed the headquarters of the British contingent of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT), starlings twittered. The sun poured in and flooded the Doctor's workbench. Despite his irritation, the renegade Time Lord could not help but smile. But only for an instant. He turned his attention from the peculiar object in his hands to Jo's glowing yet frustrated face, meeting her bright eyes with a patient yet imploring look. "Jo, don't you see? I've seen a thousand Springs on a thousand different worlds. And now I'm trapped to seeing just one Spring on one world. Unless I can unlock the secrets trapped by this."
He held up the dandelion-clock device. Jo's surge of youthful exuberance was dampened by a deep sense of sadness for her friend. He had explained to her before what the device was. It was the dematerialization circuit from his crippled, Earthbound TARDIS. She cast a furtive glance at the tall, solemn police box that sat in the corner of the combination workshop/laboratory that UNIT suffered the Doctor to enjoy in return for his services as their Scientific Advisor. Getting his dimensionally transcendental spacetime vessel to live again was the Doctor's always present and ever-burning obsession.
Although he was surrounded by friends, on the planet he loved more than any in all the Universe, the Doctor was still a prisoner. His imprisonment had been imposed on him by the High Council of the Time Lords, as punishment for his disobedience of their law of non-intervention.
The Time Lords were watchers. Immensely powerful, with the capacity to wipe out entire planets if they so desired, they chose not to. Knowing how horrendous the consequences of the actions of a race who could command Time itself could be, they sat motionless in their Capitol, always watching the struggles of the Universe's myriad races – Humans, Cybermen, Daleks – always watching and never intervening – except in the most extreme circumstances. Yet there were a few – a very few – Time Lords who disobeyed this directive. They were known as Renegades. And the most notorious of the Renegades, with the exception of the Master, was the Doctor.
One time – only once – had the Doctor been faced with a terrible choice. Either contact the Time Lords for help and risk their punishment, or abandon thousands of Humans so that they can never return to Earth. Being the Doctor, he had chosen the selfless option. He had tried to escape – but they had caught him. Caught him and put him on trial – a trial that could have ended in his execution. But the Council's sentence had been softened by the fact that the Doctor had always attempted to do good wherever he went in the universe. They had chosen not to execute him, but to exile him. They had forcibly regenerated him, causing him to take on his present, and third body, and had imprisoned him on 20th century Earth.
From the point of view of an outsider who did not know the Doctor as someone as close to him as Jo did, the sentence might have seemed to be a very lenient one. The Doctor was on the planet he loved the most, surrounded by members of a species whom, though they frequently irritated and frustrated him with their ignorance, arrogance and stupidity, he nevertheless held a tremendous affection for. And he had been allowed to keep his TARDIS. But perhaps that was the most ironic cruelty, as it gave him the constant feeling of freedom just out of reach. The TARDIS operated by dematerializing, then traveling through the Time Vortex to rematerialize anywhere else, anywhere in the Universe and at any time in its history. To make a journey, the TARDIS must dematerialize. The Time Lords had removed that function from it by changing something about the dematerialization circuit which the Doctor held in his hand. And they had altered something in the Doctor's memory, so that he could not recall how to repair it.
The Doctor was a wanderer. An adventurer. A force for hope and justice in a Universe filled with war, cruelty, tyranny and evil. Jo knew that it was simply not in his nature to remain motionless in one time and place. He could never feel truly free until he could find a way to reverse what the Time Lords had done to his TARDIS.
There was only one thing that could distract the Doctor from this obsession – and that was the assignments of UNIT that he felt worthy of his attention. Before his time of exile, the United Nations had become aware (through the Doctor) that Humans were not alone in a completely benign and harmless Universe. They became aware for a need of an elite force that could combat the potential threats to humanity. And soUNIT had been formed. Immediately after his arrival on Earth, the Doctor had been found by Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart and integrated into UNIT's organizational structure, despite him having no official credentials or identification. In the few years since then, his enormous knowledge and experience of the extraterrestrial or the paranormal had been crucial to many of UNIT's investigations.
But of late, there had been very little activity, it seemed, on the side of extraterrestrial invasions, hostile ancient reptilian races waking up to discover in annoyance that their planet had been taken over from them by humans, or dangerous super-scientific schemes by mentally unstable Earthbound researchers. Even the Doctor's arch nemesis, the Master, seemed to have been unusually quiet in his schemes of late. Jo had even approached the Brigadier a number of times, asking him if UNIT had found anything capable of capturing the Doctor's interest. Each time the Brigadier had patiently and kindly had to tell her that there was nothing out there. Maybe, Jo wondered, the Doctor was just getting a bit too clever for all the evil aliens and geniuses, and everyone else just needed a break?
Jo was completely at a loss as she looked at the Doctor. He sat with an imploring and helpless look on his face as he held the broken dematerialization circuit in his hand like a little boy with a broken toy that he desperately wanted to fix and yet didn't know how to.
Just at that moment the door opened, and in marched a familiar, tall, moustached figure.
"Doctor," the Brigadier barked in his usual sharp, no-nonsense manner, "I think we're in need of your particular talents. We discovered something only half an hour ago, and it looks like it could be both urgent and dangerous!"
As the Doctor leapt to his feet, both his and Jo's faces were on fire with delight. Even the Brigadier could not suppress a small smile.
The Thing That Was amassed and prepared its resources – spurred on in a wave of motivation which its discovery of the Cold Body had brought it. It moved in its actions with single-minded determination – precise, focused and serene.
The Thing That Was surrounded a smaller, inert body – a core of rock and ice to which its living particles clung. They formed a shell around it, like algae that grew on a pebble cast into a great ocean. Except that in this case, the ocean was not water, but the vast empty space that separated the Hot Bodies. This stone was slowly rotating, so that the Thing That Was was being continuously disoriented in respect to the Hot Body and the Cold Body. But it didn't matter. The Thing That Was was deadly in its astuteness and precision. The millions of particles that it was built of and which formed its single brain communicated and interacted like the circuits of a great, living computer. It made computations based on the energy available to it – the time required to expend that energy. It knew that its initial attempts would have to be experimental – there were too many unknowns for it to be successful without learning. But the Thing That Was was a learning machine – not just a loving machine. It could adapt.
Time for its first action that would shift the trajectory of the pebble it clung to – sending that pebble on a new course to intercept the Cold Body, along the surface of which, hopefully, the Living Bodies crawled. It must succeed, for only those Living Bodies could provide it with the thing it hungered for.
It sent its metabolism racing. A million tiny fires blazed on one side of the rotating body as exothermic reactions skyrocketed - at an exact moment calculated to place that side facing away from the Cold Body. The heat from the millions of reactions caused the surface ice of the asteroid to boil. In the airlessness of space, that ice was transformed directly to a gas that issued in a jet from the surface of the rock. The Thing That Was had built its own rocket-motor to send the asteroid hurtling towards the Cold Body.
A clumsy attempt – just as all first attempts are, yet that tiny success was enough to set the Thing That Was gleefully working on a more refined action. It patiently waited for the great rock's rotation to bring it once more in the correct orientation to the Cold Body, and then once more it ignited its living motor.
Another movement! This time more accurate, more correctly aligned in the direction of the Cold Body. Once again, it waited for the rock to rotate around…
After a bit of gentle persuading, Cynthia's mother had kindly allowed Jim and Nichu to be Cynthia's escorts for the day. Cindy loved the family next door. They were the only Indians in the little village. Cynthia hated the way they always seemed so alone, and the way everyone from the local shopkeepers to the milkman would give them strange looks. They were the nicest people she knew, why did people treat them so unkindly?
Jim and Nichu's mother was a gentle, quiet, and understanding lady who had befriended Cynthia's mother. In her soft way she had shown her friend that it would be so much better for everyone if her two boys took Cynthia out to play in the woods for an hour or two. The two mothers could be free of the children, and go out and actually have a bit of fun! The clever South Asian lady had played on Cindy's mum's own compassion by pointing out to her that as a foreign woman alone in a sometimes hostile town, she really needed a bit of a break sometimes. Cythia's mother had relented, to the joy of the three children.
"But remember," she had told her friend's two sons, "don't let her out of your sight! You know she does all kinds of things that girls shouldn't do, and you have to watch her!"
The three children grinned as they prepared to set off. It would be a fun day!
"These are the photos taken at the observatory," the Brigadier said, as he carefully laid each black-and-white plate on the desk in front of the Doctor as they sat in the tactical conference room of UNIT HQ. The pictures were of a barely perceptible ghostly grey-white form – a tiny white pinpoint surrounded by an indistinct wispy haze. "They mean nothing to me, but the astronomers assure us that although this looks like a comet, it's…"
"Steered," the Doctor interrupted in the usual cheerful way that showed he was intent on a problem.
"How the Devil did you…"
"See these numbers, Brigadier?" The Doctor tapped three sets of figures printed in a corner of the photograph. "Time and space coordinates. Well, not exactly. Celestial coordinates, right ascension and declination, together with the time of photography. So we know the direction the telescope was looking in when it saw this phenomenon. Now at this time of year, those specific coordinates lie approximately ninety degrees to the coordinates of the Sun. In other words, if our mysterious friend were a comet approaching the Sun, then we would be looking at it from the same viewpoint as that from which one observes an express train while standing on a platform, just as the train rushes past you – that is, from a perspective perpendicular in relation to its direction of motion. Follow me so far?"
The Brigadier nodded. The Doctor continued:
"Solar radiation causes a the outer layer of ice on a comet to boil away, and the resulting gasses, along with any dust, are "blown" away from the comet's nucleus in a "tail" by the solar wind. The comet's tail has to point away from the Sun. And as the comet would be at right angles to us and the Sun, we would see the full length of the comet's tail – stretched out in front of us, across our field of vision. But that isn't what we see here, is it?"
The Doctor's long, thin finger traced the ghostly outline of the figure in the picture. "This ghostly halo around the object is what makes it look like a comet seen head-on, rather than from the side. You'll see it doesn't appear to have a tail at all, but rather a fuzzy halo around a central nucleus. If it were indeed a comet we were looking at, then for it to look like this would mean we were looking at it head-on, rather than from the side, as the coordinates indicate – and the halo would in fact be the tail – just viewed from a different perspective.
"So, if we are to assume that this object is really a comet, then these photographic plates present us with contradictory facts. We're given a picture of a comet with it\s tail facing away from us, and we know that a comet's tail must always face away from the Sun. But because its positon in the sky is perpendicular to the Sun, it's impossible for its tail to point both away from us and away from the Sun at the same time. So we can only conclude one thing. This isn't a comet tail at all - it's something else. By the way, how far away do the astronomers reckon our mystery object to be?"
"Five hundred thousand kilometers."
"Very close then, on the scale of the solar system! Not much further than the Moon! And how close?"
"They say it's fifty metres in diameter."
"Much smaller than a normal comet!" Another observation, although this is an academic one since we've already proven the object is not a comet – but if it were a comet, I'm sure that one so small would not be able to produce a sufficient quantity of reflective vapour to make it this visible, even in the most powerful telescope – even at such close range. This 'tail' is clearly an emission much more voluminous and powerful than a simple comet tail!"
Impatiently, the Brigadier heaped several more photographs in front of the Doctor. "The astronomers seem to think these are of significance," he said gruffly.
"By Jingo!" the Doctor whispered as he snatched up this new collection. "Look at that Jo!"
Jo looked. "Hey! The tail to the comet-thing or whatever it is keeps disappearing and re-appearing!"
"Exactly Jo! We know this is most definitely not a simple comet! Look at this photo. There's what we're erroneously calling the tail. Now in the second one, instead of the ghostly shape, we see a much more clearly defined white disk, with no tail at all. Very very faint. This tiny, fifty-metre diameter object is hardly discernable now on account of the fact that there is no vapour tail any more to reflect sunlight. Even though from it's position we know it has to be the same object! But the third photo – see – it could almost be a facsimile of the first photo – that spectral tail's back again!"
"It's almost as if something's switching the tail on and off!" said Jo.
"Jo that's exactly what's happening!"
The Brigadier's usual impatience in the fact of scientific investigation finally got the better of him. "This is all very well Doctor, but what I want to know is; is this thing dangerous? Is it a threat? Is it the kind of thing that UNIT is supposed to protect humanity from?"
The Doctor smiled patiently. "Brigadier, I just don't know. How can I know? All I know is that some intelligence is at work here!"
"Intelligence?" The Brigadier's already considerable frown deepened.
"Yes Brigadier! Don't you understand what these photographs show? Each frame is taken at an interval of 20 minutes, according to the clock times shown on them."
The Brigadier said nothing. Neither did Jo – both apparently saw no significance in this observation, so the Doctor continued. "This is only a hypothesis – there is no direct evidence to prove it – but let us suppose for an instance that it's not an external influence that's producing what we are calling a comet tail. We've already demonstrated that it cannot be the known mechanism by which comet tails are formed. Suppose there is some mechanism, either natural or artificial, somehow installed on that ball of rock and ice that produces heat to vapourise the ice. Matter escapes from the body in a jet of vapour – gas and dust - every time that mechanism is activated. Think Brigadier! Think Jo! What happens when you make a jet of gas or vapour issue from something? What happens when you blow up a balloon and let go of the end without tying it?"
Jo's eyes shone in sudden realization. "You mean…"
"Yes Jo! What we are seeing is a propulsion system! Now, consider another thing, and the explanation for the intermittent, on-and-off behaviour we see in this series of photos will become clear. We know that objects in space are notoriously difficult to keep oriented – inertia is a stubborn thing and things will rotate about their centre of gravity. Suppose you had a rocket-propulsion unit installed on a rotating object, and you wanted to use that rocket motor to propel your object in a particular, fixed direction. What would you do?"
Jo exclaimed, "Wait until…"
"Yes Jo!" the Doctor continued for her. "Wait until your motor was just correctly oriented – fire the motor, quickly switch it off again – then wait the required time for one complete rotation of the object to bring your motor to the correct orientation once more. Then fire again…"
"Doctor!" The Brigadier's voice was clearly raised in thorough exasperation. "What are you telling us? That this comet has a rocket stuck in it?"
"Not a rocket as we know it, Brigadier. But some device that serves the same purpose. An intelligent entity, Brigadier, whether it's human or non-human, organic or inorganic, corporeal or non-corporeal, is timing the activation of a propulsion system on this comet – timing it so that upon every activation that propulsion system is directed away from Earth. Meaning…"
"Meaning it's a missle aimed right at Earth!" Jo cried.
No sooner had she said the words than the Brigadier had seized a radio microphone. "Calling all Greyhounds, this is Greyhound Leader. Standby alert!" He turned to a woman at another console. "Get me Geneva – maximum priority!"
The Thing that was was tiring.
It had been an arduous, grueling act of labour to push this heavy hunk of rock so far. Each burst of propulsion consumed more of its resources. The entity's millions of particle components tunneled deep into the rock – mining whatever elements there were that it could metabolize. The asteroid's mass was shrinking, as its useful elements were consumed and the waste components excreted along with the dust and gas into the propulsion stream. The projectile was slowly becoming lighter, and thus easier to shift.
And yet it taxed the Thing That Was almost beyond endurance. After so long in hibernation in the great emptiness, this new activity was the near-ultimate test of its determination. The Cold Body was its target – there, hopefully, it would find the Living Bodies that it so desired – so needed. The rock's velocity increased with every propulsion burst, and yet the Cold Body seemed ever so far away. It was a slow, slow, agonizing crawl. The periods of rotation during which the Thing That Was waited for its living engine to be re-oriented were scarcely enough time to re-compose itself – to take a figurative gasp of breath before pushing again. Millions of tiny voices cried their exhaustion. Many perished – burnt out by their fiercely bright metabolisms, and cast away to become a part of the propulsion stream, and thus performing a final act to drive their brothers and sisters along further – tiny martyrs to the greater, wonderous cuase. It was hard labour – but a labour at the end of which, the entity prayed, a wonderful thing would be found, like the birth of a living thing.
And so it pushed on, ever patient, ever relentless, towards the distant paradise it hungered for. That was what kept it going – the thought that sent joy singing through all of its particles in a symphony of wonder.