It is always an unnerving feeling to be praised for something you haven't done yet. That was what Lindsey Willows was thinking as she made the acquaintance of Martha Jones.
Not that Martha Jones was saying outright that Lindsey was going to become Karen Hollburn. Lindsey guessed that the Doctor had probably told her not to. But Lindsey could see right through it. It wasn't that hard to do, once you figured out that you were destined to become an incredibly famous historical figure.
"I'm betting you want to know how he got in that box," Lindsey said, cutting Martha off. She was hoping beyond reason that Martha knew of some way to get him out of there, but after a year of trying, Lindsey had to admit that she was running out of options.
Martha looked back at the Doctor, and Lindsey recognized the look in her eyes. Martha was trying to picture the Doctor locked away in that tiny little prison—a man who had been unbounded by the laws of physics, forced to live a single moment, over and over again for the rest of time.
Lindsey explained everything that had happened. When she explained the bit about the cult, she saw Martha wince. In exactly the same way that the Doctor had, which was interesting.
"It wasn't him," the Doctor chimed in. "He really is dead. I saw his funeral pyre."
"Who?" asked Lindsey.
"No one," said Martha, quickly. "Just this other Time Lord he knew."
Lindsey turned on the Doctor. "You said there weren't any other Time Lords left," she said. "If there's another Time Lord around, that means we can open the box. We can get you out!"
"Trust me," said Martha, "there's no way the other one would open the box. He probably would have put the Doctor in there himself." She shuddered. "That cult really called the Doctor their Lord and Master? That's just… wrong. In so many ways."
"Martha…" warned the Doctor.
"I'm not saying anything," Martha insisted.
"About me being Karen Hollburn, you mean?" asked Lindsey. She put her hands on her hips, as Martha stared at her. She figured the Doctor was probably staring at her too, or trying to, through the walls of his wooden box. "What? If you didn't want me to work it out, you shouldn't have made such a big fuss about my car."
"Yes, sorry," said the Doctor. "My fault." He let out a long, slow breath. "Probably shouldn't have told you quite so much about myself, either, come to think about it. Or my companions."
"You know what this means, Doctor," Martha said. "It means I was right all along. That middle section was written about you."
Lindsey gave Martha a mischievous look. "I get to write a book about the Doctor?"
"Oh, no," said the Doctor. "No, no, no, no, no. You do not get to write a book about me, Lindsey Willows. You are going to write a marvelous, brilliant, fantastic book that everyone agrees has to be about them because it is so wonderful and… did I say brilliant? Yes, brilliant. But about you. Not about me."
"Oh, come on," said Martha. "The man who carries the weight of worlds…"
"Yes, thank you, Martha Jones," the Doctor cut in. "I think that's enough spoilers for today."
Martha looked over at Lindsey, and gave a small shrug. Lindsey was furiously making mental notes about her future book. She really didn't consider herself an author, so she figured any advanced help would be a welcome relief.
"So, this box," said Martha, trying to steer the subject away from Lindsey's future. "How do we open it?"
"We can't," said Lindsey, collapsing onto the couch and placing the Doctor on her coffee table. "We tried everything."
Martha sat beside Lindsey. "Did you try…?"
"Yes," Lindsey interrupted.
Martha frowned. "You didn't even hear what I was going to say yet."
"It doesn't matter," said Lindsey. "If you've thought it up, we've tried it. Not even Dalek laser fire could penetrate that thing, and yes, Doctor, that was a snipe directed at you."
"It seemed like a good idea at the time," the Doctor said, sheepishly.
"Okay," said Martha in an authoritative voice that made the other two snap to attention. "When I'm trying to work things out, I usually start by listing what I know. So, what do we know about this box?"
"It was made by Time Lords during the war," said Lindsey.
"Just one Time Lord, actually," said the Doctor. "His name was the Builder. I called him Bob."
"As I said, they were made by Time Lords during the war," Lindsey repeated. "But not designed to imprison Time Lords. That's why the knobs on the side cause him physical pain. They're just supposed to be some sort of psychic manipulation but they wreak havoc with his time sense. Oh, and we know that the box has a number of failsafe mechanisms to make sure that Time Lords don't get trapped inside."
"And none of them work?" asked Martha.
"None so far," admitted Lindsey.
"Okay, what are they?" asked Martha.
Both Martha and Lindsey looked over at the Doctor, who couldn't see them. They waited a moment, realized that the Doctor wasn't going to continue, and both called out at the same time, "Doctor?"
"Hm?" said the Doctor. "Oh, you mean me? Sorry. Yes. Failsafe mechanisms, is that what we were talking about?"
"He does that a lot, too," Lindsey said to Martha. "Losing track of time and being unable to follow the conversation. Is that what usually happens when he loses his time sense?"
Martha shrugged. "I've never seen him lose it before," she said.
"Yes and no," said the Doctor.
"What does that mean?" Martha asked.
"I'll explain later," the Doctor assured her. Which meant that he would never explain at all. The Doctor clapped his hands. "Right, then. Failsafes. First, any Time Lord can open the box—from the inside or the outside. Well, any Time Lord except for me. They built that in after an… incident. And yes, I did try it just in case. The lid wouldn't budge. So, strike one." He gave a self satisfied cough. "I've been trying to pick up some American slang while I'm here. Do you think it's working, Martha?"
"The second failsafe, Doctor?" Martha encouraged.
"Ah, yes!" said the Doctor. "Second, when a Time Lord is caught inside of one of these things, it sends out a telepathic distress signal. Alerts all Time Lords in the area, along with the High Council of Gallifrey."
"Neither of which exist anymore," said Martha.
"Strike two," said Lindsey.
"Thirdly," continued the Doctor, "or is it thricely? Thricely thirdly—and this is the one I didn't know about before I got stuck in here, by the way—it appears that the box does not sever the telepathic connection between a Time Lord and his Tardis."
"Hang on," said Martha. "That sounds useful."
"That's what I said," Lindsey told her. "But he has explained to me, at great length, that it is completely and utterly useless."
"It helps to stabilize the time fluctuations," the Doctor told Martha. "And it keeps me from going utterly insane, at least in the short run. That way, I can stay sane and relatively unharmed until help arrives. If it were ever going to arrive. Which it isn't."
"He can't use the telepathic link to summon the Tardis. He can't materialize inside the Tardis, or use the Tardis to open the lid. He can't even open the Tardis doors," Lindsey said. "That police box has been sitting in the parking lot outside the police station for nearly a year now, and I can't even get inside."
"But I can," said Martha. She fished her necklace out from beneath her shirt, and at the end, revealed a silver key.
Lindsey sat up on the sofa, suddenly animated. "We can get into the Tardis," Lindsey said. She looked at Martha, her whole face glowing. "We can get into the Tardis!" she cried. "Did you hear that, Doctor? We can finally get in! There has to be something that can help us in there." She suddenly had an idea. "Doctor, how big is that cell you're in?"
"Oh, huge," he said, automatically. "Five star accommodation."
Lindsey sighed. They were back to this again. "Okay, don't answer," said Lindsey. "Just tell me this. Is it big enough to fit your Tardis?"
The Doctor hesitated. "Yes…" the Doctor said, uneasily.
"So all we have to do is figure out how to fly it, and then we can just land and pick him up," said Lindsey. "Does the Tardis have a manual?"
"Well, not anymore," said the Doctor. "You see, I sort of threw it into a supernova."
"You know what," said Lindsey, "I'm not even going to ask."
Martha, in the mean time, had a very grim expression on her face. She was still staring at her hands, which were clasped around the key in her lap. "I know how to get the Tardis to the Doctor," she said, very quietly. She was hoping the Doctor wouldn't hear.
"No," said the Doctor. "Absolutely not."
"What?" asked Lindsey.
"There was this one time, when he and Rose and Jack were fighting Daleks on Satellite 5. The Doctor decided he was going to die, so he sent Rose home in the Tardis without him."
"Told her to keep the car and pushed her out the window, eh, Doctor?" said Lindsey, with a tinge of bitterness in her voice.
"Well, the spacio-temporal equivalent," said the Doctor.
"But Rose got the Tardis to work for her again?" Lindsey asked Martha. "I mean, without the Doctor?"
"No," said the Doctor. "Martha, I said no, and I meant no. I'm not going to have one of you two dying to try and save me, and I'm not terribly eager to die again myself, if I can help it."
"Rose looked into the heart of the Tardis," Martha told Lindsey.
"She absorbed the Time Vortex," corrected the Doctor. "And it nearly killed her. I had to take it out of her, so it would kill me instead. I regenerated and wound up fighting Sycorax on Christmas Day in striped pajamas."
"So, not an ideal escape situation," Lindsey summarized.
"I'll do it, if I have to," said Martha.
"No, Martha, I said—wait…" The Doctor paused a moment. "Aha!" he shouted. "I thought of something. Something brilliant. Something so brilliant and fantastic that nobody has to sacrifice themselves for anybody else."
"I'm in favor of the no dying thing, if that counts," Lindsey put in.
"Emergency protocol one kicks in automatically when I deactivate one particular button on the console," the Doctor explained. "It's called the LTD button. Red button, lower section of the console across from the doors. It locates me anywhere in space and time based on my telepathic link."
Martha and Lindsey both looked at each other, a growing smile on their faces. "That could work," said Martha.
"Forget could," said Lindsey. "That's what I call a plan."
Martha leant down to pick up the Doctor from the coffee table, but Lindsey stopped her. "We're going to be materializing inside that box," she said. "So we better not bring the box inside the Tardis."
Martha realized that Lindsey had a point. She put the box back down on the coffee table.
"See ya, Doctor," Lindsey shouted at him as she and Martha piled out the front door. "Don't wait up."
"There isn't a red button," insisted Martha.
Lindsey was scanning the buttons on the other side of the console. She wasn't having any luck either. She slammed her fist against the console. The Tardis gave an annoyed hum.
"Maybe he got the color wrong," Martha suggested.
"Knowing him, I'll bet it isn't even a button," said Lindsey. "It could be anything. It could even be that rubber ducky over there." Lindsey kept pouring over the console, trying to locate something that looked even remotely suspicious. "You think it's labeled?"
Martha gave her a pointed look. "No," she said. "I don't think it's labeled. Nothing in here is labeled." She went back to examining the buttons on her side of the console. "It might be labeled in Gallifreyian," she muttered. "Not that we could read it."
Lindsey's eyes shot open. "Hang on," she said. "He taught me some of the symbols when he taught me that trick in calculus. I remember them."
Martha grinned. "So what's L?"
"Oh, it wouldn't be an L," said Lindsey, looking over the buttons on the console more furiously. "It's an acronym, you know? LTD . Like Tardis, but I doubt that his granddaughter came up with that one. The button will probably say whatever 'Locate the Doctor' is in Gallifreyian."
"How did you work that one out?" asked Martha.
"Ahem," said Lindsey. She pointed to her chest. "Human brain. Brings about universal peace." She pointed at the console. "Time Lord brain," she continued. "sends us looking for something that isn't red, isn't a button, and is labeled in a language we can't read."
Martha conceded that Lindsey had a point. "So what are you looking for, if you don't know how to say 'Locate the Doctor' in Gallifreyian?" asked Martha.
"I know the Gallifreyian equivalent of Delta," said Lindsey. "I'm going to assume that's the 'D' in Doctor. Failing that, I know that he was also called Theta Sigma at some point. Don't ask—he was being annoying one day while I was trying to do trigonometry."
"You had the Doctor tutor you in maths?" Martha asked, laughing.
"I had the Doctor tutor my calculus teacher," said Lindsey. "I think he found the whole thing highly amusing." She thought a moment. "I didn't let him near my history teacher, though. I figured there was no way she'd ever believe a word of it."
"And your calculus teacher did?"
"It took her about an hour," Lindsey said. "Although most of that time was just the Doctor trying to convince her that there was a fifth dimension, and the entire problem was much easier if you extrapolated the intersection point into that dimension. At the end, she just turned to me and said, 'Not on the AP test.'"
Martha laughed. She didn't know what an AP test was, but she assumed it was some sort of qualifying exam. "And he taught you Gallifreyian symbols?"
"Well, he taught me Delta," said Lindsey. "I mean, he sort of had to. It was calculus, after all." She paused a moment. Her whole face lit up. "Gotcha!" she said, and flipped a small green switch.
The Tardis heaved beneath them, throwing the two women across the floor. "That's a feeling I never thought I'd experience ever again," Lindsey admitted.
"Me neither," said Martha.
They didn't even have time to get to their feet before another lurch knocked them back down again. The Tardis kept bucking and jerking beneath them, even more than usual, Lindsey thought. She tried to grab onto one of the coral support struts as she slid past it.
"I guess it's not that easy," shouted Martha over the groan of the Tardis, "breaking into a Time Lord prison."
"But it's got to be possible," Lindsey shouted back. "The telepathic connection with the Tardis was one of those failsafes that was incorporated into the design. And it was the only one the Doctor didn't know about. If you were worried about the Doctor attempting another prison break, I'm going to bet you wouldn't tell him, either."
Martha couldn't argue with that kind of logic.
After a few minutes of chaos and groaning sounds, the Tardis finally came to rest with a final, resounding thud. Lindsey and Martha picked themselves up off the floor, looking at one another as if to ask, 'what now?' But there was a figure in the way.
"Hello again," said the Doctor, leaning his tall, thin frame against the console. "Fancy a lift?"