Thank you very much for your kind reviews so far. Glad to hear that there are people enjoying this story. I still have ideas and a direction for this piece and will keep on going. I actually lost a section break line in chapter two. I have no idea how. It must have to do with the formatting on this site, and not allowing certain forms of lines. Sorry for any confusion of frustration that caused, and I shall have to look again and see how other writers make break lines that are able to transfer over, next time such a thing comes up.
The Doctor, Rose and Hailey walked away from the park and wandered for a while down the quiet streets in the area. They were silent, each thinking their own thoughts and each, for their own unique reasons, both confused and excited. They came back to the blue box, still of course parked where it had been left. The Doctor pulled the key from his pocket, and moved to unlock the doors. Hailey looked at it in curious puzzlement again, but kept her hands away from it. She stood with both hands behind her back, and gave a questioning look?
"What's in the box anyway," she finally asked, rocking slightly on her heels. "Why'd you leave some big wooden box just sitting on a street corner?" She read the sign over the door, and mused, "Police public call box? Looks like something that belongs in a museum. Weren't those all over the place in the fifties?"
"There were, yes," the Doctor said, "This one took on the appearance of one, one day back then, and it seems it got jammed and never changed back out of that form."
"I tried to fix it a few times," he mused, "Even found it to be very important to do at one point years ago. It's been a police box for so long though, it seems to make it unique. I like it that way now."
"So," Hailey said, now wide eyed with a kind of disbelief that strangely still remained within the realms of belief, "if it was working properly, it could look like anything at all?"
"Well not exactly anything. It couldn't be too terribly complicated of a shape or design. Something with say, a great amount of moving parts would confuse the system. Too small and it might not work so well either, because it has to have a door or normal size."
"That's insane," Hailey said. "I actually think I believe it, but it's still insane. What's the point of it though? Like, would you want with a box that can change shape and look like whatever?"
"It's a disguise for it?" the Doctor replied grinning. He slowly pulled open the doors. "This is my ship. If it looks like an everyday object, from wherever it happens to be, no one will really think much of it. It can hide in plain sight."
"A ship?" Hailey asked, shaking slightly. "You mean, like a space ship?"
"Kind of, yes."
"Wow. I still think this whole thing is insane but... wow!"
"Wait," Hailey said after a short moment's very tiny pause, "How can everything a spaceship must need to fly anywhere, not to mention people and supplies, fit inside there?"
"That's the amazing part," Rose said.
"No way to describe it really," the Doctor answered. "Come and see for yourself."
"You want me to go inside a box? With a locking door?" Hailey raised her eyebrows somewhat suspiciously at both of them. "You're not planning on locking me in there are you?"
"No, of course not," the Doctor answered as he and Rose both walked inside. He turned back to look at her. "You humans are so suspicious of everything sometimes."
Hailey, all the while wondering what in the world she was doing, slowly followed the others through the doors. She looked around, her eyes opening wider first in fright, and then when she realized that she was unharmed, in wonder. Still though, she kept her hands beside her and avoided touching even the inside walls. Her eyes moved up toward the ceiling, high over her head, trying to take in the hight of it. Then she looked from the far wall of the main room, back to the doors, taking in the distance between them. All the while she wore a look of confusion as her idea of reality was challenged in a way it never had been before.
"It's much bigger inside," she said slowly, as she walked a very slow circle around the outer edge of the console room. "How in the world can the space inside something be bigger than the object is outside? That goes against the laws of known physics."
"But what about not yet known laws of physics?" the Doctor said, grinning in excitement, as she only blinked at him a few times, becoming close to overwhelmed by everything.
"So, does your ship have a name?" Hailey asked. She finally dared to touch one of the curving support structures that reached from the ceiling high over her head, to the metal grated floor. She pulled her hand back quickly, after barely touching anything with one finger, but then realized that nothing at all had happened and slowly placed the palm of her hand against it. Finally she walked over and jumped backwards a couple feet up onto the little ledge along the wall, and sat on it with her feet several inches off the ground. "Every ship I know of has a name, but what about spaceships?"
"This is the TARDIS," the Doctor said. "Not really a name for just this one though. There were so many of them once. Never thought of naming this one specifically."
"Time and relative dimension in space?" Hailey said, making it sound almost like a question. Almost, but not quite. She swung her feet slightly and thought intently. "Nice and useful acronym. So, this is actually a time-ship then I suppose, and not just a spaceship."
"How did you know that?" the Doctor asked, after a speechless moment. He sat down near the controls, and stared at her with a blank expression on his face.
"I've heard it before," Hailey said.
"Does this relate to your father as well?"
"Yes. I suppose that trying to find out all about him, is why you brought me in here."
"Well that's part of the reason yes. The rest of it you will understand soon, if I am right."
"We aren't going to take off anywhere are we?"
"No," the Doctor said. He could tell she was afraid of the very idea at that time, of ending up anywhere else, other than where she had started out. If he had been thinking of moving his ship anywhere, which he hadn't been, the nervous look in her wide open eyes would have changed his mind about doing so. "We are still parked in the same place. We will just stay parked." He motioned for her to follow him and walked off up a winding staircase. With a look that implied a mix of confidant trust and also some fear, she followed. Rose went too, still curious about the girl, and sure that no one would mind.
"Wow, this place is even bigger than I thought," Hailey said as they all sat down in a comfortable sitting room, a couple of floors up from where they had started; and this after they had passed countless closed doors and a few open ones, on the way there. She flopped down into one of the soft red armchairs in the room, and folded her legs underneath her.
"Okay, about so my Dad. I can't tell you much. I don't remember him very well. I remember my early childhood better than most people, but I was still only two or so when he took off." Hailey looked at both the Doctor and his companion for a moment. They were each seated in other red armchairs, and were waiting to see what she had to say.
"My father as I recall, was a wonderful man. I remember how he used to throw me high up in the war over his head and catch me again. Both of us would laugh, but my mother would stand nearby with a horrified look on her face saying, 'don't you dare drop the baby.' One day he took both of us, my mother and me, I mean, to the beach and we built a sand castle. Then he carried me out into the water, and held me with my feet in the ocean but safe from downing and tried to explain to me at such a young age, that motion of the waves and the rising and falling of the tides, was like the events of time. predictable, yet so impossible to predict exactly. He said that anything, any tiny event, could alter the course of time, just like the movement of the water could be changed. He once showed me much the same thing, by dropping peddles into a puddle after a rainstorm, and then explaining that anything can make ripples in time, just like the smallest stone can make ripples in the water. He loved the idea of time as a non-ordered thing. He said all the time that time can be rewritten and that we all rewrite it every moment without even knowing how much effect we simple beings really have. My mother never understood most of what he said. She loved him so much, but laughed and said he was insane for trying to discuss the theories of time and relativity with a toddler. He said in all seriousness that I was smarter than one should be at my age, and that he thought I might actually be getting the idea of it. He said I was special and that she might never truly understand just how much I might learn." Hailey looked around the room sadly, and with a somewhat embarrassed look about her. "He was the last person who ever said I was either smart of special."
"Do you know what his name was?" Rose asked.
"James Andrews," Hailey answered. She looked saddened by saying his name out loud. "I've always thought it was such an ordinary name for such a far beyond ordinary person. My mother's name was Abigail. She was just an everyday person. A good person back then, but still just a typical stay home mother and housewife. My father though, he was eccentric and strange, and brilliant. He was so intelligent, but most people seemed to think he thought he was above others. I never saw that though, and neither did my mother." She stopped for a moment and sat trying to recall anything else.
"Oh yes," she said finally, "for some reason or another he didn't seem to sleep much. Of course that detail will not be of any help to you, actually I don't think any of it will be. It's something I remember though. I suppose I must have inherited my insomnia from him."
"Actually that bit of information is of more help then you might think in working all this out," the Doctor said. It's amazing how the little details that tend to go unnoticed or unthought of, can be important pieces of a picture. As I often say, notice everything, and discount nothing. So, you have insomnia then?"
"Yes," Hailey said with a look of surprise at how that could actually mean a thing. "I've had it for as long as I can remember. When I was a child I used to be sent to bed early every night and would in my bed thinking, or tossing and turning until the sun came up. Then I'd just get back up early in the morning and get ready for school. I used to worry about it. When I was younger I used to panic sometimes because I knew I had to be up in a short time, but I'd not slept all night. When I got older though I realized, I didn't seem to need the sleep anyway. I got that job at the pub last year, and I started working until two in the morning. I'd get home on the bus very night at night and stay up the rest of the night, doing artwork, or messing around with the computer, because I was wide awake. For a while I was working two jobs, plus managing to get my art done at home, while also taking care of my neighbor's daughter, until her mom got home from work. Of course all this while doing normal things like cooking and cleaning my apartment. Once in a while I will get tired and when I do, I'll go to bed and sleep for about eight hours like anyone else. Only a couple times a week though I actually get tired and feel I want to sleep. It was worse for my father. From what I can remember he seemed to be awake almost all the time. I once heard years later from an old friend of my mother's that he only slept a few hours now and again, but was not ill from his sleep troubles in the least."
"So," the Doctor said, he handed Hailey a cup of tea that Rose had just returned from quickly making in the little kitchen next to the sitting room. "Earlier you were right about the TARDIS acronym. But where did you hear it before, if you don;t mind saying."
"I don't mind, but should I be talking about this at all?" Hailey took a sip of her tea, after stirring in some milk from the little tray on the coffee table. She folded her legs back under herself once again, her tiny frame fitting perfectly that way within the width of the chair. "Last time I talked about this I was seven years old and someone hit me for it."
"Well this ship has a well enforced no hitting policy. I always did find that silly, not to mention a little too violent. Someone doesn't like what a child has to say so they hit 'em." The Doctor began to ramble on a bit as he tried to earn the trust of someone who was clearly starting to see, had a hard time trusting anyone very well. She was someone who, he had a feeling, would soon need to have more trust in him than she might be capable of having. The picture of her that he was forming in his mind was bigger and greater and more complex and tragic than he would ever have first thought.
"That's another thing I learned from my father," Hailey said. "This I barely remember at all, but he had this amazing vehicle that was not really just a vehicle at all. It was the only thing I had ever seen, besides this one, that was bigger inside than outside, and contained a whole little world inside it. His didn't look like a police box though. I don't ever remember seeing his look that way. His looked most often, like a small garden shed. I don't think the neighbors thought much of it parked in the yard. I hadn't thought though until now that it could have been disguised to look inconspicuous in the garden. I might have been so little but I remember how several times I would hear my parents talking downstairs in the kitchen while I lay awake in my bed upstairs. This will sound ridicules, but I am fully convinced my father might not have been human." She stopped speaking and looked around worriedly, For a moment she looked at the floor and sat very still.
"I have no idea at all, why I'm telling you two such things," said finally said. "It sounds such much more insane now that I've said it out loud. And to complete strangers nonetheless. These are thins that in my own head make perfect sense, but said out loud, I'll admit it does sound like I might be crazy." She shook her head,and gave a look of disbelief. "Of course he was human. He just had this crazy machine some some reason, and often spoke about some alien world. If I were to tell people much about him these days, people would probably say that my dad was mentally ill, and that I was only recalling many things incorrectly because I was so young."
"Why would people say that?" the Doctor asked. "What did you hear him talking with your mum about?"
"I used to hear him telling her sometimes about the plan he had in mind. My mother wasn't happy where we were then. They were in a lot of money troubles and could not see a way to get back on track. My father talked about how soon he would pack up her and me and travel back to a place he called Gallifrey. He said it was him home planet, once when I asked him about it one morning. Anyway, he heard him tell her that he thought, or at least hoped that we could all stay there, and that I could soon go to the academy. My mother was nervous about the idea of me starting school at only a few years old, but he said that was the way things were always done and that I'd do well at it.
"One day I woke up after sleeping for a good long while, and I went downstairs on my own because for the first time ever no one had come to get me and bring me down for breakfast. I found my father upset and my mother panicking and suggesting we pack up and get out of England as fast as we could. My dad said there was no way he could just run off. He said that he would be found and made to go away no matter where he ran to, and he would never dare to put us at risk. I think it was that same day, in the evening, that he left the house and I never saw him again. I learned much later from my mother, that he had gone off to fight in a war for from earth, against enemies so terrible that they could barely be imagined. Of course this was not until I was a teenager and had not seen her in a least ten years. The way she explained what had happened to my father, talking so seriously and straight faced about a far away planet and a war that had nothing to do with Earth, I thought she was far more insane than I had always been told."
Hailey shifted in her chair, and looked back and forth between both the Doctor and Rose nervously. "I suppose," she said, "I should let you in on the fact that my mother went into a mental institution when I was for years old, and was still in there when I went to see her about ten years later. I don't think she's even still alive now. God knows, I talk and think about her like she's dead. I don't really know and most of the time I hardly care. I haven't heard a thing from her in a long time, and the hospital has never bothered to contact me either way."
"Maybe you should give them a call one day," rose suggested. "Contact the front desk and inquire about your mum. They will be able to tell you if she's still a patient there, of if she was moved to a new hospital, or passed away."
"I've thought about that," Hailey admitted, "but to be honest with you two, I don't really think I have much of a mother to bother inquiring about. Where was she all the years I moved from home to home and never got a real family? Sure she was ill, but she could have tried harder to write to me or something. I never even got so much as a birthday card from her. And if she's dead, which is most likely is, why didn't I even learn where her grave site is?" She checked the time on her wristwatch and said that she really had to be going home to get ready for work. She was on shift for few extra hours late that night.
"I will figure all this out," the Doctor said as he showed her politely to the door. "You probably grew up hearing that there was something wrong with you for knowing things that people shouldn't. But I think this is bigger than you ever came to understand."
"Thanks for not thinking I'm completely insane."
"Insane? Oh I think you might be for from having that problem."
"So, who are you guys, anyway?" Hailey asked, as she stepped back outside.
"We will explain that to you next time we see you," the Doctor answered , with a look of excitement on his face. "This is if you ever want to come and talk with us again of course. I do think I might be able to help you. to figure a few things out, that you might never have even thought to wonder about before."
"I know we will find each other again," Hailey said, as she ran out the door and out into the street once again. "I shall speak with you again, when I am not about to be late for work." She looked backward, waved and took off running to catch a bus before it pulled away from the corner bus stop.
Rose closed the doors and both she and Doctor ran back inside and down to the library on one of the lower levels. The Doctor immediately began to fling books from a carefully selected shelf, onto a little table in the center of the large room. They landed in a small, but rapidly growing scattered pile. She picked up one of the books and tried to read the cover. She set the book back down carefully onto the table, when she realized that it was in a language she'd never seen before and could she could not read it. She knew that he had collected a massive number of books over the years in many places and for just as many reasons. But many of them were English books that he liked to keep on hand because he tended to have English speaking friends, and since he could read and understand many languages, it didn't matter to him in the least. However none of the books that he had pulled off the shelf were written in anything that looked like any Earth language, let alone anything she could read.
"Doctor," she said, momentarily interrupting his hurried search of the bookshelf. He went right back to his search though, and held up a clearly old, very big and heavy hard covered book, with a worn cover, before setting it down with the others.
"Found it," he exclaimed. He stepped away from the shelf. "Now, what were you trying to tell me?"
"I don't think Hailey is crazy at all, and neither were either of her parents. It's weird, and though you said before that their were no others, I think she may be one of your people. Doctor, what are all those books?"
"Some of them are my old academy textbooks," the Doctor replied. "The rest are books of higher levels of knowledge from my home world. Some of the advanced teachings are contained in these books, as well as a lot of basic information that we all learn by the age of seven. And as for Hailey, Rose I think you are right. Well, mostly right anyway."
"Mostly right?"
"Yes. You see, her father was one of my people. You are right about that. He has to have been. He told her all about my planet, and thought of going back with his family. There was a war of course, and there's no way he would have escaped that. I just wish she had been older when she knew him. perhaps she'd remember more and be able to narrow things down a bit. He probably married a human on Earth though."
"Can that happen?"
"well, I suppose anything could happen. It's a big universe, and there will always be people, of many societies who go against what they would consider typical. In others words, it's not a normal thing, no. But I don't see why he couldn't have done it anyway."
"Do Time Lords ever want to settle down have families and stay in one place?"
"They were not all like me, you know. Most don't spend their lives running like I have. Of course I hope I never stop running and I never have to stay in one place. But many never even left the planet at all. For one to come to Earth and settle here is not that hard to imagine. Perhaps wanted to travel a bit and found this lovely little world. He could have found love here and stayed, until he was called back to fight in the war. Everyone was called back, then."
Rose looked again at the pile of books scattered all over the table. The TARDIS should have translated anything written on the covers, she realized. She picked up the same book she had picked up before and looked again. This time she saw the title written in a way she could understand. Some very old and worn out school text book, dealing the theory of time and space. The Doctor was sitting in an armchair with his feet crossed in front of him and a book on his lap, reading intently. He was clearly busy with a more interest in the thing he had learned in his academy days, than, as far as she had ever heard from him, he had actually even had back in those days in the first place. This strange girl, with a great fondness for bright colors and a special talent for running and jumping and thinking on her feet, had made an impression on him so profound that he was taking the time to read through the old books that had never been interesting enough to inspire him to bother to pay attention in school.
"Why," Rose asked herself out loud as she walked her own room on board to catch up on some reading of her own, "do I have the feeling that if things go his way, we will have a third person traveling with us very soon? This is getting bigger and bigger than we thought."
