The Truth Is Out There
...
Grissom knew this was a Doctor case the moment he saw the scorch marks on the body. He called up the lab, and, eventually, got through to the Doctor.
The Doctor took in a sharp breath. "Oooh, focused burns, bruises along the side of the torso… sounds nasty. Besides the burn marks, I don't see anything particularly non-terrestrial about it. Could be humans messing around with things they really shouldn't. You don't happen to have some sort of secret, well-armed alien hunting organization like Torchwood in the States, do you?"
"There's the X-Files Fan Club," said Greg. Greg was back in the lab, using the Doctor's help to solve a separate case.
"Well-armed, Greg. The key to that sentence was 'well-armed'," said the Doctor.
"Doctor," said Greg, pointedly, "the president of the X-Files Fan Club lives in Miami. Trust me, he's well-armed."
Nick, meanwhile, had begun waving Grissom over. It didn't take Grissom long to see why. "Doctor," said Grissom, "I think we just found your non-terrestrial evidence. The bruise marks along the torso seem to indicate a six-fingered hand."
"Six fingers?" asked the Doctor. He started muttering to himself, but Grissom couldn't quite make out the words. "Too much! Need to narrow it down. Thin out the possibilities! Anything more you can give me? Blood? Saliva? Footprints? Shoes? Fashion accessories?"
Grissom looked under the vic's fingernails—that was the obvious place to look for biological evidence. If the vic fought back, the DNA evidence under the fingernails was often enough to secure a conviction.
"I've got some skin," said Grissom. "It's blue."
"Blue…" repeated the Doctor. "Blue, blue, blue… okay, blue. Good start. Lots of blue people out there. The Kwazis, the Mistrans, the Jolly Blue Giants of the Gupiatra System, Harold Bluetooth…"
Nick pointed towards the vic's shirt. It looked as if something had eaten through it. Around the hole, it looked almost… pink? Was that right?
Grissom described it to the Doctor.
"Well, that doesn't make sense," said the Doctor. "That sounds like the Brateniol, but they're a peaceful race half a galaxy away. What would Brateniols want with Earth?"
The Doctor began muttering to himself, then stopped, and fell silent. Grissom waited nearly a minute, but the Doctor said nothing.
"Doctor?" Grissom asked.
"I'm still here," said the Doctor, but he sounded far more tired now than he had a minute ago. No, not tired. Worn out. The way he'd sounded back on those tapes in 2003. "And yes, I've worked out both your problems. Greg—think shoes. That bloodstain would not have stayed on the underside of that shoe for the amount of time she claimed to have walked on it. And Grissom—they're teenagers."
"I thought you said they were aliens," said Grissom.
"Yes, teenage aliens," said the Doctor. "They come from the planet Braxis, which is about halfway across the galaxy. Trouble is, they have only basic methods of space travel on Braxis—well, I say basic. By your standards they're pretty advanced. But it would take a few months to get anywhere on Earth from Braxis. Which means it'll probably be a while before anyone arrives to stop them."
"How do you know that they're teenagers?" asked Grissom.
"Bit complicated—part of the Brateniol biology," said the Doctor. "It all has to do with the acid—it's sort of a concentrated hormonal mix that they secret when they're first going through puberty. What I think you have here, Grissom, is a bunch of naughty schoolboys running around beating people up for their lunch money."
Nick gave Grissom a look that asked what was going on, and Grissom gave him a quick summary.
"So what do we do, just arrest them?" asked Nick.
"Well, what do you usually do when you deal with naughty schoolboys?" asked the Doctor, who really shouldn't have been able to hear Nick. Grissom knew the Doctor had excellent hearing, but he'd have thought that filtered through the box and the cell phone, the Doctor might be down to human-level senses. Not so, apparently.
"Call their parents," said Grissom. He felt that familiar tension of frustration that came whenever he worked with the Doctor. "You wouldn't happen to have the number for the interplanetary operator, would you?"
"Well, yes, actually," the Doctor admitted. "Not that it would do you much good, mind. Basic space technology, remember? It'd take at least four months for the parents to get here, and that's only after the years it would take for the message to arrive on normal three dimensional wave-length patterns. You want 7th and 8th dimensional wave length patterns—to bypass the Einstein-limit through quantum differentials."
Grissom translated this for Nick as, "Apparently, that's not going to work."
"Yeah, I didn't think it would," said Nick.
"However," said the Doctor, "if I am very clever, and I am, I might just have a plan."
Grissom really hated following the Doctor's plans. It was true that the Doctor was very smart, and certainly very good at solving puzzles, but Grissom didn't trust him. Not one inch. The situation was not unprecedented; there had been other times when Grissom had sought help from incarcerated criminals. But nothing those criminals did even measured up to what the Doctor had done. As much as the others seemed to ignore it, Grissom could not. Every time he looked at that box, he thought, "Therein lies the man who killed ten billion people. The man who destroyed his world." It was not the sort of thought that made you want to trust the man with your life.
And yet, somehow, Grissom kept winding up in these situations.
The Doctor had told Grissom how this was going to work ahead of time, and it had taken Grissom a while, after that, to finally agree. He and Nick had located the Brateniols lurking in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Las Vegas, and now, parked outside and with permission from the lot's owner, Grissom was carrying the Doctor inside the building. Or rather, he was carrying the small, palm sized box that contained the Doctor.
That was the other thing about this plan that Grissom didn't like. The plan involved the Doctor talking to these blue-skinned alien creatures in some sort of garbled alien language, and Grissom would have no idea what it meant. Would the Doctor be trying to arrange some form of escape, even at the cost of Grissom's life? It was Lindsey who had the solution.
"I can understand what he'll be saying," said Lindsey, "because I've travelled in the Tardis. That's what it does. It gets inside your head and translates for you. Keep a line open to me, and I'll let you know what everyone's saying."
Grissom might not trust the Doctor, but he did trust Lindsey. At least, he trusted her enough that he'd go along with the scheme. So here he was, walking into an abandoned warehouse with a box and a very discrete Bluetooth device in his ear. This had to be the nuttiest thing he'd ever done.
Nick stayed just outside, the way the Doctor had instructed, while Grissom made his way into the compound. There, standing around laughing, were the most bizarre blue blob-like aliens he had ever seen. They looked a little like blue sacks of potatoes, but with stubby little legs and beady eyes. They turned around to face him, pointing what must be guns at his head.
It was the Doctor who spoke. Lindsey, in Grissom's ear, began to translate.
"Hello, I'm the Doctor," said the Doctor. "And yes, you heard me correctly. The Doctor. That Doctor. The one who fought off the Yarxil and Somtarni Mi. I just popped in to visit some friends on Earth and found you lot, mucking about on a class 5 planet." He clucked his tongue in disapproval. "That's illegal, you know."
The leader of the blue-blob alien gang grabbed the cube from Grissom's hand, and hissed. He then uttered something that Lindsey said meant, basically, "where are you now?" Although, Lindsey added, it was sort of a roundabout way of putting it. Grissom wasn't quite sure what that meant.
"Oh, I'm back here on Braxis," said the Doctor, "just catching up with the local authorities… principals, policemen, space-lane patrols…"
The blue-blob alien gang leader turned a highly unflattering shade of turquoise. He gave the Doctor a snarl that Lindsey translated as, "Oh, yeah? What do they think they can do to stop us?"
"Oh, I know, I know," said the Doctor. "You think you've still got at least four months until someone shows up. But you see, I don't travel across space. I travel across time. And I can bring your parents round any time I want."
Grissom recognized the cue, and gave Nick the signal. Outside the warehouse, Nick played the recording they'd made back at the lab—a recording that sounded mostly, but not entirely, like the Tardis materializing. The turquoise shade on the gang leader's face deepened as he heard the sound. He screeched at his fellows behind him, and they scattered, running out the back exit (presumably) towards their spaceship. The leader threw the Doctor's box hard across the room, and zipped off himself.
Grissom's eyes grew wide. "Doctor?" he asked.
Outside, he could hear a sound like a cat on a piano, which he thought might be the sound of the space ship lifting off. Then, silence. There was nothing.
"Doctor?" Grissom called a little louder. The only sound was the echo of his voice, the quiet patter of his footsteps along the ground.
Lindsey began yelling frantically in his ear. "What's going on? What happened? Where's the Doctor?"
Nick entered the room, and Grissom handed Nick the earpiece. "Calm her down," said Grissom. "I'll find the Doctor."
Nick put the earpiece into his ear, and stepped outside to talk Lindsey down.
Grissom, now alone in the warehouse, began looking through the stacks of dusty boxes and the random items the aliens had left behind, looking for a small, palm-sized box. He kept calling out for the Doctor, but there was no reply.
After five minutes, he finally found the box. It was upside down. The masking tape which Lindsey had used to hold down the communication button had snapped, which explained why the Doctor had failed to answer Grissom's call.
Grissom picked the box up, keeping it upside down. He pressed down the button. "Doctor?" he asked. "Are you okay?"
"I'm still alive," said the Doctor, but he didn't sound so happy about the prospect. "Forever and ever and ever."
"You weren't hurt when they threw you?" asked Grissom. "The box is upside down. It must have been quite a trip in there."
The Doctor was very quiet for a moment. "Gil Grissom," he said, very softly. "Do you know what these boxes were built for?"
Grissom faltered. "You said they were built as interrogation rooms," he said. "I'd presume for dangerous war criminals."
"But they weren't," said the Doctor. Grissom heard a very faint pat on what sounded vaguely like a wall. But a padded sort of wall—as if it were made of foam. "They were torture chambers, Gil. Exercises in sensory deprivation. No light, no taste, no touch. No sound except for the questions from your interrogators. No links to the outside world. Just the raw, relentless, manipulated passing of personal time."
Grissom blinked. "So when they threw you across the room…"
"I couldn't feel a thing," said the Doctor.
Grissom turned the box right side up, expecting some sort of shout or yell from the Doctor. It didn't come. "Your enemies must have been very well trained to need those sorts of interrogation tactics," said Grissom.
"The stasis boxes weren't designed for our enemy," said the Doctor, his voice barely enough to trail an echo across the warehouse walls. "No, a Dalek wouldn't talk if they spent 10,000 years locked in one of these prisons. These were never built for Daleks. These were the prisons designed for innocent civilians."
Grissom felt his breath catch in his throat.
"Did you never wonder," the Doctor continued, "why I was the only Time Lord whose genetic code was unable to open the box?"
He had wondered. He'd wondered even at the very beginning. The Doctor had said he'd "abused the privilege." Grissom had assumed that the Doctor had been releasing the enemy behind the front lines—or something equally nefarious. After all, this was the man who wiped out his home planet. But now, Grissom wasn't sure what to believe. "What happened?" he asked.
"It was Carpharlio 14," said the Doctor. "The Daleks had taken it over. They killed everyone. By the time I arrived, they'd already primed the explosives and had mostly left the planet's surface. I was looking for survivors. I thought there was no one, but then I heard something—a sniffling noise in the distance. It was a little girl—no older than ten—who, somehow, had managed to survive. She was cold and shivering, half naked and severely malnourished. And she was sobbing, because the Daleks had gone through and destroyed everyone on the planet, everyone she'd ever known. That's what Daleks did, Gil Grissom. They lived to destroy, to suck a planet dry of its natural resources and erase it from existence. This poor child, this little girl—she'd been born into slavery to the Daleks. Taken away from her parents at birth, raised by other children. She began with next to nothing, and the Daleks had taken even that away from her. By the time I found her, she couldn't even speak, she was so scared." The Doctor gave a small sigh. "I saved her," he said. "I took her away in my Tardis while the Daleks destroyed her planet. I took her to the one place in the universe that the Daleks could not get to. Gallifrey."
The Doctor paused, his breath shaky. Grissom couldn't move.
"A week later, I came back to check on her," said the Doctor. "But she wasn't there. She was nowhere. I checked the entire Citadel. Nothing. Until I stumbled into Bob's workshop. And that's when I found her."
Grissom felt his fingers trembling. He gripped the cube a little tighter in his hands, as if he were afraid he might drop it.
"They trapped her inside a temporal stasis box," the Doctor continued. His voice had gained a hard quality, as if bitterness had burned away its edges. "And they'd worked every trick in the book to get her to talk. Do you know how long she stayed alone? How long that week felt to her? A hundred years. One hundred years alone—seeing nothing, feeling nothing, tasting nothing. And in that hundred years, she'd learned to speak one word. Just one tiny word, but she was shouting it—no, she was screaming it, screaming at the top of her lungs. Do you know what that word was?"
Grissom felt his mouth run dry. He could guess.
"It was my name, Gil. Doctor. She was shouting for me. A hundred years, screaming for the last hope she thought she had for rescue. Screaming for the man who had brought her there, the man who had doomed her to that fate." The Doctor paused. "I couldn't just stand by and watch it happen. All those people who had lost their homes, their families, who were too scared of the Daleks to say a word—they were being slowly tortured for scraps of information. Just scraps. I let them out. I let them all out. But that child, she wouldn't stop screaming, even when I told her I was there, even when I wrapped my coat around her arms and offered her sweets—she just kept screaming my name, over and over again. They noticed. The others. The Time Lords. They found me. The rest of the prisoners had fled as soon as they were released, but that little girl wouldn't move, and I couldn't leave her. Not again." He gave a laugh that was so dry and mirthless, it sounded more like a cough. "Stupid, stupid Doctor."
"What happened to her?" Grissom asked.
"She died, Gil Grissom," the Doctor said. "They killed her right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do. She died calling my name, and they wouldn't even let me hold her." The Doctor took in another sharp breath. "That's what happens when you fight Daleks for too long, Gil. You become like them. Ruthless and heartless. Devoid of all empathy, all pity, all thoughts of kindness or decency."
"That's why," Grissom breathed.
"Yes," said the Doctor. "That's why I'm stuck here. That's why my own people didn't trust me. Because I couldn't trust them—not even with the life of a ten-year-old child."
Grissom wasn't sure what to say to this. He was holding this box, this box of misery and suffering, this box that filled the Doctor with memories of pain and death and sorrow—and the box that now held the Doctor in a living hell for all of eternity.
And for the first time, Gil Grissom wondered if, maybe—just maybe—he'd been mistaken about the Doctor.
"Doctor," said Grissom. "These boxes—you said that little girl felt as if she'd lived a hundred years in only a week. Tell me. Honestly. Those periods when you lose track of time, when you can't follow the conversation. How much time has passed, for you, in those few seconds when we're not talking?"
The Doctor hesitated. "So far, never more than a day," he said.
Grissom held the box in his hands, his finger turning white as it kept pressing down that button. Ten minutes later, Nick found him there, in that exact same position, standing in the middle of the warehouse, with the Doctor's box gripped firmly in his hands. By then, the Doctor was humming quietly to himself—a piece of music that neither Nick nor Grissom had ever heard before. Nick told Grissom he was leaving, and Grissom accompanied him back to the lab, without so much as a word.
Besides Sara Sidle, Grissom never told another living soul what the Doctor had told him that day.