"You're not serious," Keesha said. "You can't be serious." There was no way there was an alien in the room. Aliens didn't exist. DA was right; there'd be research or some evidence, some real proof. Something substantial, not just tall tales or mistaken UFO sightings. Lights in the sky her foot; if people weren't just plain imagining things, there was some reasonable explanation for it all. There always was.
"I'm perfectly serious," the Doctor replied.
"But it's not…dangerous, is it?" Phoebe asked, looking a bit nervous. Keesha, frankly, agreed with what Arnold was mumbling: he should have stayed home today, and she should have, too. She certainly wasn't learning anything now.
"To you?" the Doctor asked. "Nah. Who'd want to hurt you? Now, if another alien was trying to hurt you, or even just another human, yes, I imagine this particular alien would have a thing or two to say about that, but you'd be perfectly safe."
"Where is it?" Ralphie asked, looking around eagerly. "I can't see anything."
"Right in front of you," the Doctor answered.
"Oh, brother," Keesha muttered. Why anyone even bothered believing the Doctor was beyond her. He'd already established quite plainly that he was nuts, or at the very least making everything up. He might know a lot of random stuff—Dorothy Ann had certainly confirmed that, seeing as the Doctor had reportedly rambled on quite happily about every topic she'd brought up—but she didn't think he needed to carry a silly charade like this so far.
"Is it a Martian?" Ralphie asked. "Or a Plutonian?"
Or maybe, Keesha thought sarcastically, it was a little, green, floating alien who was exiled to Earth from his home planet of Zetox and who only appeared to people who believed in him.
Well, that would rule her out.
The Doctor shook his head. "Nope. Gallifreyan. Not native to this solar system. Well-travelled, this one. You can't even see the Kasterborous constellation from here."
"I still don't see anything," Wanda said. "You'll have to show us where it's hiding."
"Who says he's hiding?" the Doctor asked. "I said before, he's right in front of you. You can see him. You just have to believe you're seeing him."
There was silence for a moment. "Is it just me," Ralphie started, "or are you…. Nah, you can't be."
"Can't be what?" the Doctor asked innocently.
Tim, however, had figured out what Ralphie was going to say. "You're not trying to tell us it's you, are you?"
The Doctor's response was the widest, silliest grin he'd given them yet.
"No way!" Wanda exclaimed.
"What, you thought I was fibbing earlier when I'd said I'd stood in a room full of aliens? No, I've done that plenty of times, all over the place. In more places than you can imagine, I'd bet."
"Come off it," Keesha scoffed. "If you're an alien, I'm the queen of England."
The Doctor frowned. "Oh, you're not going to exile me, too, are you? I've already been knighted and exiled. And, and Queen Elizabeth the First wants my head, for no good reason as far as I can tell. Still haven't worked that one out." He scratched the back of his neck. "You won't want me beheaded, will you?"
Keesha threw up her arms. "You're impossible!"
"Yeah, I'm told that quite a bit, too," the Doctor agreed amiably.
"But if you're really an alien," DA asked, "how come you look like us?"
"You're a shapeshifter, aren't you?" Ralphie asked eagerly. "You can change your appearance to look like the inhabitants of the planet you visit so that you can walk among them undetected."
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "And just how many comic books do you read?" he asked. The others snickered.
"So you're not a shapeshifter?" Ralphie asked.
"Not like that," the Doctor said. "I'm a humanoid, just like you and a good many other species in the universe. It's a common template. But, I don't need to employ a shimmer or any other tricks to appear human. This is what I look like, honest. It just happens to be a different face than I've had in the past, and, no, I can't change at will, it's just a funny little quirk of my biology."
"A funny little quirk of your biology?" Carlos repeated.
"You know how they say cats have nine lives? I've got thirteen, unless something goes wrong, and I change each time." The Doctor sighed. "But questioning me wasn't the point. You're missing the point."
"You're an alien," Carlos said. "How can we be missing the point?"
"The reason I told you," the Doctor said, "was so that you could drop your blinders, so that you don't have to look at the world with blinkered vision. You're young, but you're already building up a wall in front of you that'll block out anything that doesn't immediately appear acceptable." He looked pointedly at Keesha, and she had to consciously not squirm in her seat under his gaze. "You still don't believe me," he said bluntly.
"No, because it's ludicrous."
"See? Just the other day, I was called ridiculous, and now you're telling me that I'm ludicrous. I'll admit that I've been called a madman, and that I've called myself a madman a time or two, but, really, I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."
"What?"
"Oh, right," the Doctor said, tugging at an ear. "I suppose it'll be a few years before you read Hamlet, won't it? Point is, as mad as I may sound, I'm really not. Any madness of mine is finely calculated."
"You mean you act crazy on purpose," Keesha said.
"I mean I'm not delusional, and yes, if it suits my purpose, I'll act as mad as I like, but I've seen madness, real madness, and I'm not there yet." He paused. "Mind you, I certainly am eccentric, and a genius, if I do say so myself, and it is a fine line between madness and brilliance, so I may toe that line from time to time, but I certainly haven't taken any flying leaps across it and lost my wits in the process."
Keesha frowned, but she didn't bother arguing with him. It wasn't worth it; she had a feeling she wouldn't win, anyway. If he wanted to claim to be an alien, fine, but he certainly wasn't convincing her any. She'd thought, back when he'd first come, that maybe, just maybe, he really did have proof of alien life, and that aliens really did exist. Well, she'd since revised her opinion. He sure as heck didn't have any proof, and if aliens did exist, they weren't anywhere around here—certainly not standing at the front of the classroom.
"So if you're an alien, what are you?" Wanda asked.
"I'm a Time Lord," the Doctor replied, "from Gallifrey." He stuck his hands in his pockets. "And, in answer to your next question, I've been to Earth many times over the years, so I've become quite adept at your languages. Well, I'm quite adept at many languages, actually, not just the ones that originated on Earth."
"Where's your ship?" Ralphie asked. "Can we go look at it?"
"It's a bit of a hike from here," the Doctor said. "We don't have the time to go see it, I'm afraid. Perhaps a different day."
Oh, yeah, he was definitely making it up, Keesha decided. If she'd had any doubts, that got rid of them. A bit of a hike. Ha. It wasn't too far to walk to his ship; he didn't have a ship to walk to, that was the real reason. But there wasn't any point in trying to talk sense into anyone else, least of all Ralphie, who looked the most enthused of anyone. Ralphie was impossible once he got an idea into his head. He'd even thought Ms. Frizzle was a vampire once, and it had taken them half the night to prove him wrong, though the fact that it was night probably had had something to do with it.
"I'm not sure I understand what you were saying before," Phoebe said. "If you were right about everything, how could we not see something if it's right in front of us? Pyramids shouldn't be easy to miss."
"That, I'm afraid," the Doctor said, drawing his hands out of his pockets, "is not entirely my territory. Part of that comes down to your magic school bus."
"The bus?" Dorothy Ann echoed, surprised.
"The bus," the Doctor confirmed. He glanced at Ms. Frizzle. "Would you care to explain?"
"I think you're doing quite fine," Ms. Frizzle replied.
"Oh, all right, then," the Doctor said. He sucked in a breath through his teeth, then explained, "Near as I can tell, the bus can shield you from things. There're heat shields, oxygen shields, pressure shields, what have you. And, now, here's the thing. You trust Ms. Frizzle, every last one of you, but you don't trust me. I mean, I suppose I can't expect you to; you just met me, and I haven't been doing a very good job of earning your trust, now have I? Thing is, when I promised you aliens, you didn't entirely believe me. You didn't think I could deliver on that promise, certainly not when I intended to turn up evidence on planets in your own solar system. Certainly not," the Doctor added pointedly, "when I claimed something as ludicrous as the existence of pyramids on Mars."
Keesha crossed her arms and didn't meet the Doctor's gaze, staring instead at her desk.
"Now, the important part about your bus," the Doctor continued, "is that you believe in it, and in all the things that it can do, and in Ms. Frizzle when she teaches you all her lessons and the importance of taking chances, making mistakes, and getting messy in the process. Because if you didn't believe in it, you'd miss it. You wouldn't be able to see it, not really."
"That can't be right," Arnold said. "Janet didn't believe me when I told her about our field trips. She demanded that we prove it, and we did. If what you're saying is true, we wouldn't have been able to."
The Doctor inclined his head. "You've got a point, but that's the beauty of it, really. Every single one of you believed and wanted to prove to your cousin the truth of your words, didn't you? And, I'll bet that as much as she might have scoffed at you before, she wanted to know the truth, too. She wanted to know whether you were making it all up or not." He paused. "It was different with me. You all wanted to see the proof of alien life that I claimed to have, but you didn't believe I could produce it. Me, well, I never really expected that I wouldn't be able to produce it, but I was expecting something to go wrong, seeing as things usually do wherever I turn up. The bus, bless her, responded accordingly and let you see what you expected to see, and I was too focused on trying to figure out exactly how your magic school bus worked that I got caught up in her magic along with all of you without even realizing it."
"So we saw nothing, you mean, because we didn't really expect to see anything," Keesha said, risking a glance at the Doctor.
He smiled at her. "Exactly. Nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary, at any rate. No proof. But, I'd be fibbing if I laid the blame entirely on the bus. All she was doing was amplifying the walls you've already built for yourselves, and none of you, nor me, bothered to try to see through it. You see, all of you are already laying the groundwork for forgetting the magic of your school days. All of your field trips, I mean. They'll just be stories, not truths."
"But we're not going to forget our field trips," Phoebe said, sounding almost alarmed.
"No," the Doctor agreed softly, "you won't forget them, or the lessons you learned. You'll just explain the magic away."
Keesha swallowed. "Like I'm doing now, you mean. About you." She couldn't exactly deny it. She really didn't believe him. But when he said it like that, and knowing that everyone else obviously did believe him, well….
The Doctor nodded. "You'll invent excuses," he said, "and come up with reasonable, acceptable explanations. You'll ignore the impossible. You'll stick with the hard and fast rules of the real world, the adult world, the stringent, dull world that's based on accepted facts and theories and that buries or scorns or just plain ignores anything that doesn't quite fit."
"But how can we do that if we don't forget what we've done and all the field trips we've gone on?" Wanda asked.
"Oh, believe me," the Doctor said, "it's all too possible, and all too easy. It's worse if you're the sort of person who's in a rush to grow up. Then you will call all of this mere products of your imagination or detailed lessons taught in an inventive way rather than an actual adventure you went on for one of your field trips. People can discover entire worlds in their childhood and forget them if they're too eager to join the adult world. They push the memories away, calling it nothing more than fancy and play, and they refuse to listen to anyone who tries to tell them otherwise. But, the thing is, that adult world—it's not limiting in its own right. You can exist in it and not be bound by it." He grinned. "Look at Ms. Frizzle. She's certainly not bound by it, not like that principal of yours. She can still see if she looks."
"Always the flatterer," Ms. Frizzle said with a laugh. "You give me far too much credit, Doctor. I wouldn't be where I am now if it weren't for my wonderful students."
"Perhaps not," the Doctor relented, "but I highly doubt you'd be so different that anyone would call you unremarkable." Addressing the class again, he said, "And none of you need to fit the mould perfectly, either. No one really does, but so many pretend to. They pretend that they're exactly where they want to be, that they've done what society expects, that they don't have any skeletons in the closet or anything like that. They forget what's inconvenient, and in doing so, they usually forget what's important, too. Like your friends and your family and your faith in what you know is true even if no one's proved it to you."
"But you just confirmed that aliens really do exist," Ralphie said. "You admitted that you're not from Earth. That's not having us take it on faith."
The Doctor grinned at him. "No, it's not, is it? Well, not unless you look a little closer. After all, what proof did I give you?"
He hadn't given them any proof, Keesha thought. Not really. He'd just said he was an alien. And, as far as she could tell, everyone had believed him. Even her, in the end, if only because he was awfully convincing…. But that was silly, and she needed to keep things straight. The Doctor was as human as the rest of them. "You just gave us words," Keesha said, realizing that that just might be the answer he was looking for.
"Precisely," the Doctor said. "I just gave you my word. It wasn't enough earlier, but now that you've gotten to know me a bit better, it's worth more, isn't it?"
Wait a minute.
Keesha narrowed her eyes. "I thought you said someone's word wasn't really proof."
The Doctor shrugged. "It's proof enough if you take it as proof. It's worth just as much, I'd say, as anything else these days, and it's only going to get harder to pick out the falsehoods from the truths." He pulled out a coin from his pocket, showed it to the class, then enclosed it in his fist and opened it again to reveal that the coin had vanished. "Illusion," he continued, "plays an increasingly large role these days. Sometimes it's used to garner people's faith, and sometimes it's used to discredit it. It really depends who's behind it all." Another flick of the wrist, and the Doctor was holding the coin again. He showed it to them before pocketing it. "But, regardless of whether the intention behind the creation of an illusion is good, you still need to do a fair bit of digging if you want to uncover the whole truth."
"You're as good as admitting you lied to us," Keesha said, sounding disgusted.
The Doctor shook his head immediately. "Oh, no. No, not one bit. I told you the truth because you needed to hear it. I'm just trying to convince you that there's value in hearing it in the first place."
"He has a point, Keesha," Phoebe said quietly. "I spend a lot of time listening to things, and you hear a lot more if you take the time to listen to it." She smiled self-consciously then, adding, "Besides, I've tried acting on things before I knew the entire story, and I haven't been entirely right yet, have I?"
"We've all done things like that," DA admitted. "Remember the time Ralphie and I were arguing, and we ended up trying to play baseball without friction? We were so busy trying to convince the other that we were right that we didn't listen to each other. If we had, we might've realized earlier that we were better off working together because we each had different pieces right."
"Listening is good for another reason, too," Arnold added. "We have to pay attention to listen, and we probably won't forget about our assignment again, huh, Keesha?"
"I never said anything against listening," Keesha protested. "I just…. Listen to him, you guys. We're right back where we started." She glanced at the Doctor, saying, "No offense, but, really, no one's questioning the fact that when you came in here this morning, you said that you had proof that aliens exist and that you'd show us, and now we're back, and all you're doing is saying that you're an alien and expecting that that's proof enough for us when you haven't proven anything!"
"But he's saying that we need to take some things on faith," Tim reminded her. "This is how he's proving his point."
"But taking things on faith isn't science," Keesha said adamantly. "Back me up here, DA!"
Dorothy Ann looked apologetic. "I don't know if I can," she said. "Some things are taken on faith. It's just not called that. When people come up with theories, those theories aren't really accepted as facts. They're right until they're proven wrong, and people do a lot of research trying to prove them wrong so that they can come up with a revised theory which is more likely to be right. But we'll never manage to prove a theory right or it wouldn't be a theory anymore. It'd be fact then. But some theories are so old that people just do take it on faith that they're right."
"Not to worry," the Doctor said. "If you ever have doubts, you only need to listen to your heart. That'll tell you truths your mind ignores." He pulled out a stethoscope from his pocket in much the same manner that Ms. Frizzle always produced things from hers, though a stethoscope was, admittedly, quite smaller than, say, a giant light bulb or moulds for the bus. Granted, that stethoscope looked a tad large for the Doctor's pockets, anyway...
The stethoscope in question was placed on the desk in front of her. "There you go," the Doctor said. "Have a listen."
Keesha stared at it, then looked up at him. "You're kidding, right?"
"Course not," the Doctor said. "Go on."
Remembering all the times she'd played at being a doctor with her cousins, Keesha fitted the stethoscope to her ears and placed the disk over her heart. She listened to the steady rhythm of her heartbeat for a moment before moving to take the stethoscope off, but the Doctor stopped her before she had the chance, telling her that she might as well listen to his heart, too, to see if she could tell if he was telling the truth.
The grin on his face should have given her warning, but she was fairly sure nothing would have prepared her for the surprise she felt upon hearing the Doctor's heartbeat.
Either he had a very irregular heartbeat, or….
No. She wasn't going to go to the or. Not yet. She needed a minute first.
The Doctor neatly removed the stethoscope and pocketed it again. She heard him make some comment about doubting Thomases to the class, but she wasn't really paying attention anymore. Her mind was still trying to play catch-up with her ears, trying to accept what she'd thought she'd heard.
She'd seen a lot of things in Ms. Frizzle's class. She'd been a lot of places. She'd learned a lot of things.
And yet, somehow, it was harder to accept what she was realizing now than it had been to accept anything else she'd ever learned.
Ralphie was right.
Ralphie and his comic books were actually right.
Not about vampires, but….
Keesha took a slow breath. She'd been demanding proof right from the start. It had taken the Doctor long enough to offer it, so she shouldn't scorn it when she finally got it. She'd been told the truth the entire time, and now that unbelievable, impossible truth was proven, at least as far as she could tell, to be undeniably real.
Well, at least she now knew that it definitely had been worth coming to school today.
A/N: Yes, the little, green, floating alien who was exiled to Earth from his home planet of Zetox and who only appears to people who believe in him is the Great Gazoo from The Flintstones. Thanks to everyone who takes the time to review; it's nice to know when people are enjoying things!
