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Please let me know what you think, I am trying to do something different here with this story.
In this chapter, the Doctor and Professor Quatermass get to know each other, although they've got a long way to go.
Wrong Time and Rockets.
"Doctor….. Sorry, but you're about to make a very big mistake… Don't steal that one, steal this one. The navigation systems' knackered but you'll have much more fun…!"
"Grandfather!"
"CARE? NO…. WHY…SHOULD I…..CARE?….. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOU. THERE ARE PEOPLE DYING ALL OVER YOUR WORLD, YET YOU DO NOT CARE ABOUT THEM…."
"You have desstroyed our fleet!"
"SHALL WE DESTROY?"
"…ALL GONDS LEAVE THE HALL NOW…."
"You were told to keep away from the Quarks!"
"Exterminate!"
"YOU WILL BE LIKE US!"
"Doctor, it's more fun my way. I can make things happen ahead of their time!"
"You are wasting time, Doctor… Since you refuse to take the decision, the decision will be made for you!….SILENCE! You have tried the patience of this court long enough, Doctor. Now, which new appearance will you take if you are mature enough to even decide, that is…."
The Doctor's eyes snapped awake as she came prematurely out of her healing coma, though she winced as the…whatever it was….juddered around, but as she looked around to take in her surroundings she found that she was in the back of a very cramped van on a makeshift bed. Still shaken a little bit out of the memories of some of the beings she had encountered, from the Cybermen of both Telos and Mondas, the Daleks, the Krotons, the Dominators, among other things although the memory of the trial she'd had on Gallifrey before the Celestial Intervention Agency forced her and Serena to check out that dimly remembered, albeit convoluted mess of a game organised by the Countess and the rest of the Players, they helped her to recover some of her memory as she looked around. She saw she wasn't alone. Near her, looking concerned was the man who had introduced himself as Professor Bernard Quatermass.
Quatermass. I know I've heard that name before, the Doctor thought to herself, cursing her post-regeneration memory; she dimly tried to remember if it had been this bad the last time she had come out of the regeneration after that mess with Mondas and the Cybermen at the Snowcap base, but her mind was still fogged about the details.
"Are you alright?" the scientist asked her in concern as he leaned over her while the van they were in juddered around. "I'm sorry about the roads, they're not very well laid down."
The Doctor closed her eyes and forced down another surge of post-regeneration nausea.
"Miss?" Quatermass began, but before he could say anything else the Doctor was looking at him seriously all of a sudden. "Why are you calling me miss?"
Quatermass stumbled back when he saw the woman's eyes and the force behind them. "Erm….because you are?"
The Doctor's face brightened a little bit, remembering that she was indeed female in this new body, that moment where she had asked him why he was calling her miss was just one of those brief spells of post-regeneration amnesia which lasted a few seconds. "I am? Tell me, does it suit me?" she asked, looking at him hopefully; maybe this new regeneration wouldn't be so bad after all.
Quatermass looked at her in confusion. "I'm sorry."
The Doctor chuckled. "It's alright," she replied soothingly though inwardly she wished she was still in the coma. "I'm sorry; a few hours ago, I was a little tramp of a man with black hair. How long was I asleep?"
Although confused by what she'd just said, Quatermass checked his watch for a second. "About an hour," he replied.
The Doctor groaned. "Not even three hours," she muttered.
"What happened to you?" Quatermass asked as he leaned forward, his eyes bright with curiosity.
The Doctor recognised the scientific curiosity instantly, but she had no intention of telling the man anything until she had gotten some of her mind back from the regeneration. She once more cursed her previous self for not only getting her into this mess because, like their first incarnation, their knowledge of the TARDIS was so incredibly shoddy they had believed the damaged and heavily malfunctioning Type 40 - why they had to listen to that Time Lady the Doctor could only currently remember dimly as though she had been seen in a puff of smoke, and not take that Type 53, the Doctor did not know, though that stupid Time Lady who'd recommended the TARDIS and the faulty navigational circuit had made her first incarnation's choice easy since with a malfunctioning unit, it would be hard for the Time Lords to track. At first, it had worked, and her first self had considered the old Type 40 more than enough, and with it so badly damaged and their travels so random, the Time Lords would never catch up with them. But that mess where she had tried to get Ian and Barbara, and then later Ben and Polly home had driven home the problems she had with the TARDIS, to say nothing of that mess with the War Games when she'd needed to get those soldiers home, which had resulted in her calling in the Time Lords anyway.
Yes, while she still liked the old Type 40, no - loved was more the correct word, she just wished her previous self, who had gained just a better knowledge out of their first regeneration of how the older time-ship worked instead of just being content with the random nature of their travels through time and space had done some work on the old TARDIS and repaired it so then they could have avoided the Time Lords for good.
The Doctor, try as she might, understood the logic, but her second self had been so stupid during the trial, he had angered the Time Lords. The Doctor looked down at her chest (THIS will definitely take some getting used to, she thought to herself as she looked at her chest, the most obvious sign of her new gender; she had noticed it as soon as she had regenerated, but at the time she had put it down to post-regenerative jitters, but it was obvious that her new breasts, like the Inhibitor she had seen on the console, were a sign of how much things had changed).
Realising the human scientist had asked his question again, the Doctor looked up at him and sighed. "It's a long story," she replied; there were still some parts of it which she still couldn't reach, and that worried her; she still wasn't sure who this scientist was, even though it was on the tip of her brain, but she decided to throw him a bone, as the humans said, "My memory isn't one-hundred per-cent, but if you could tell me about that rocket, then it might help; I've heard talking is a good way of exercising the mind."
Quatermass sent her a sceptical look, but he seemed happy enough to talk. "Alright, the rocket was a probe, just like you deduced," he replied, though for a second he wanted to know how she had even known that little detail, but he decided to press on before the Doctor interrupted.
"Hold on, this is England, right?" she said, looking at him quizzically. "I didn't know Britain had rockets or did I?"
Quatermass looked affronted. "If you think you know me at all, then you'd know we had rockets," he replied indignantly, "its what the British Rocket Group does."
The Doctor gaped at him, and she felt some of her memory coming back to her. British Rocket Group… THE British Rocket GROUP!? Of course! Why am I being so slow? Oh, yes, regeneration….She slapped herself in the head to further loosen it.
"The British Rocket Group? I know who you are now, or rather, I know where I've heard of you," the Doctor said, correcting herself mid-sentence as she looked at Quatermass with a smile. "Professor Bernard Quatermass, rocket scientist."
Quatermass was overwhelmed by the reaction he had just received, so it took a moment for him to recover his composure. "Er…yes, that's me," he replied at last before he shook his head and looked at the Doctor seriously. "So if you know who I am now, surely I don't need to tell you what we do?" he added wryly with ironic good humour.
The Doctor laughed. "You don't," she smiled warmly at him before she clapped her hands together with the smile on her face still. "I have heard of you, Professor. I know you sent up one of the first manned flights into space, and it looks like you're continuing with your experiments."
When she had first arrived in Totters Lane two lifetimes ago with Susan, the Doctor had visited a public library and she had gotten hold of a library card. She had been fascinated with learning more about human history, and at the time she had felt the only way to do that was to go over everything that she could find. One of the first things she had done was to study the fairly recent human history from the old newspapers which had been collected by the library, and she had come across a rocket launch organised by Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Rocket Group. The newspapers had gone mad on the subject of space travel, but after that details of the event, of the crew of the manned rocket, just became vague.
The Doctor noticed very clearly that Quatermass instead of looking pleased that she knew about what he had done instead looked a bit sad, brooding about the reminder (I certainly have changed, the Doctor thought to herself; a few days ago she would have barely noticed if someone was depressed, but now she was truly looking. This new body is certainly going to take time to get used to, especially if I am more sensitive….).
"Did I say something wrong?" the Doctor asked.
"Hmm?" the scientist replied before he shook his head. "No, it's just the rocket I sent up…the crew were absorbed by an alien plant organism…"
"A Krynoid?" the Doctor interrupted, looking desperately at the scientist.
Quatermass again looked startled. "Sorry?"
"It's an…alien plant," the Doctor began to explain, deciding that because Quatermass seemed to have an open mind he would listen to her though she decided to give him a basic summary of what the Krynoids were and what they did, "they're essentially seen as galactic weeds, but they're much worse than that. They send themselves out in space, always in pairs, and when they arrive on a planet and take root, all animal life becomes extinct very quickly. They also have a habit of infecting other beings, and slowly taking them and turning them into a Krynoid."
"There wasn't another creature," Quatermass replied, looking at her with something like excitement that he was hearing about an alien lifeform, even if the basic summary of what it did was grim. "And in any case," he went on when he realised something which contradicted what the Doctor had just described, "the creature that came to Earth and absorbed those astronauts passed through the rocket's hull."
The Doctor was only mildly surprised. She knew of several forms of life out there that could pass through space as easily as a bird could fly through the air, but this was beyond her at the moment. "I'm sorry," she said at last, "I can't picture an organism that can do that at the moment. My mind is still sorting itself out. But tell me about that probe."
"After what happened with the planet organism, the government classified most of it and buried it quietly. I was disappointed about that because if we had more minds studying outer space and the organisms out there we would be able to learn a lot more. Anyway, when I wrote a report detailing the need for a government fund to be injected into the program to construct another rocket, several of the government who knew about what had happened with the previous astronauts put their foot down. They agreed to fund a rocket so long as no lives were put at risk," Quatermass explained.
"But the risk is a part of everything!"
Quatermass nodded. "I know. But personally, I think the government were wary of what could come back to Earth. They went to a lot of trouble to ensure no-one knew about what had happened with the last rocket. I don't know what they did about the witnesses when the plant organism which was a merge of the three-man crew from the experimental rocket, but I do know the government forced me into a corner. But I was alright with it. I was worried myself about the prospect of another friend, someone whom I knew, becoming an alien creature beyond our understanding," he looked down suddenly as the memories of what had happened to Victor started to haunt him, and he had to push it aside so he could focus on the conversation. "Sometimes I believe the British government are full of over-cautious idiots. Many of them look at my work into rocketry and they instantly see it as a war weapon, they refer to it as the 'ultimate weapon," he sneered the words. "Poppycock. There's no such thing as the ultimate weapon."
The Doctor was smiling at the man who earning himself more and more points though she had long since admired him from those half-remembered newspaper articles about the man that she had read with Susan in those months where the TARDIS had been in that junkyard in Shoreditch before Ian and Barbara turned up despite all the previous close calls in the past, but meeting a man who seemed he agreed with her about weapons it assured the Doctor was a kindred spirit out there.
But she certainly agreed with him about that stance on weapons. The humans were at a point in their development where the most powerful weapons they had available were rockets equipped with warheads and the nuclear bomb. How wrong could they be?
The Doctor took a moment to reflect on the weapons that she knew about, and how the humans had yet to discover the long term dangers out there in space.
They didn't know anything about the Daleks, who had created their travel shell technology to both allow their race a means to survive otherwise they'd be hopeless, crippled, stunted creatures whose ancestors were able to walk upright and handle technology, only to go on to become terrible weapons of war. They didn't know anything about the projects those mutated misfits had created in order to make their conquest of the universe simpler, from their plan to transform Earth into a massive spaceship when they tried to implement Operation De-Gravitate.
The Daleks had come up several ways of battering down the Earth to wipe out as many innocent human beings as they could, like with biological weapons or cosmic rays, or their time travel technology, like that primitive TT capsule modelled on Time Lord technology. There was no doubt in the Doctor's mind the Daleks would have used the same technology to conquer as much of the universe and at different points of history as they could, though how far they'd have gotten before the Time Lords got involved, she didn't know. Another example was the Time Destructor which had resulted in the deaths of four people whom the Doctor had liked, including two women who could have become long-term great friends.
The Doctor doubted she would ever truly escape from the memories of that truly sick project the Dalek Emperor had come up with to distil the so-called 'human factor' though the long-term goal was to isolate the 'Dalek Factor' instead and spreading it through time and space in the TARDIS.
What about the Cybermen? They had tried to use a Cyber-Megatron bomb to shatter a large part of Earth, wiping out millions of potential stock they'd wanted to convert. Or how about the time earlier, in the Doctor's own respective timeline, when the Mondasian Cybermen had tried to use the Z-Bomb to destroy the Earth because they'd underestimated just how much of Earth's own energy was being absorbed by their planet? Or how about the Cyber-matter/antimatter vortex bomb they had tried to use to destroy Voga and blast the Planet of Gold into atoms so it would never be a threat to the Cyber-race ever again?
And then there were the Krotons, who had turned the planet of the Gonds into a toxic wasteland. Granted, what the Krotons had done on the grand scale of genocidal weapons was rather small scale if you looked at it from a certain angle, but the fact that years after the wasteland had been created by the Krotons caused terrible and painful deaths was telling about the potency of the weapon.
The Doctor also remembered her struggle with the Dominators shortly after she and Jamie had dealt with yet another encounter with the Cybermen on the Wheel and had taken Zoe with them to Dulkis, only to discover the Dominators about to unleash that Atomic Seed Device into the planets core to transform the lava into a mass of radioactive material for their fleet.
How about the Ice Warriors with the sonic weapons they had invented, and what about that fungus they had unleashed on the Earth in the 21st century when T-Mat had taken over from every transportation system on the planet? The Doctor dimly remembered how she had been taken by surprise when Slaar (was it Slaar?) ordered her to examine one of the seed pods, only for it to blow up like a balloon and burst in her face, sucking all of the air from her vicinity and forcing her to spend a couple of hours in an automatic healing coma in order to recover from losing the air so quickly. She would also not forget seeing the fungus covering the surface of the Earth like a frothing blanket, bursting every few minutes and sucking more and more air away and turning the planet into a copy of Mars though all that was left were the inhabitants of Mars.2.
Her encounters with the Sontarans and the Rutans were limited in themselves, but the Doctor definitely knew of how, every few centuries, both sides came up with new weapons of warfare. She knew after Spectronic drive had been invented, the Sontarans had invented hyperdrive technology to counter the Rutan Host's probes before they had launched a fleet of war missiles through hyperspace to various Rutan worlds to break the stalemate they'd been locked in for 50,000 years.
The Rutans themselves had created that genetic weapon that swept through the galaxy like a virus that specifically targeted Sontaran DNA in retaliation before the Sontarans managed to beat the odds and survived. Weapon after weapon after weapon… both sides were locked in a stalemate while their scientific units devised new ways of destruction on different levels, but the most memorable conflict the Doctor remembered hearing about was when the Sontarans had dispatched a small fleet of cruisers carrying the building blocks to devise a vast new Sontaran army, only for them to destroy the entire galaxy by accident when they misjudged the potency of the Starbreaker weapon.
But the majority of those weapons were like stone clubs when you compared them to the weapons of the Time Lords. Look at the D-Mat gun that could erase beings or objects from history in a more potent example of Time Lord dematerialisation. One blast of the D-Mat gun and no-one would ever remember your existence. The Hand of Omega hadn't been designed to be a weapon, but if anybody got hold of it then they could destroy themselves since the Hand was capable of flying off into a star and then causing a supernova.
But the Doctor had heard legends of beings who had left behind weapons that made even those of the Time Lords look crude, but she had never been sure.
"You're right there, Professor, and it is foolish for the British government to be short-sighted; you have no idea just how close you are to taking your first steps into a whole new world," the Doctor smiled at the human scientist.
The Doctor's smile faded a little bit when the rocket scientist suddenly looked at her oddly. "Yes," Quatermass replied slowly, "but you haven't explained to me yet who you are. What that police box is. And what that…substance," he stumbled over the word as he tried to find the right term to describe the stream of golden particles that she coughed out earlier, "you breathed out when you came out, and what is wrong with you. Why you said you were a little man a few moments ago. And how you seem to have two hearts?" Quatermass tilted his head to the side as he looked at her pointedly though there was a concern that which was touching, really.
The Doctor wasn't surprised that she had been examined, although from the initial glance around the van there were no medical instruments to perform even the most basic examination. In any case, she had to admit the scientist deserved some explanation especially since he had won her respect even in her first incarnation, but at the same time, she wondered just how much she could explain without sounding like she was insane…In the end, she decided to just get it over with.
"I'm not human," she replied, though why she said that she truly didn't know, but she realised it was just a good idea to start with the basics, "I am an alien, that's why I have two hearts. I'm not like the creature you encountered. I also have no evil intentions against you or this planet. I'm just here now. As for who I am…. I'm the Doctor. I'm a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey," the Doctor crinkled her eyes for a moment before she looked down at her chest, "actually that should be Time Lady. When I said I was a little man a few moments ago I meant it. My people have a way of healing our bodies when we're subjected to traumas or illnesses. We call it regeneration and when it happens the old body dies before we enter a new life, a new incarnation. On the point of regeneration, our bodies are energised with an energy which rebuilds them. All organs are replaced, the injuries are repaired, and we change height, weight, appearance. For instance, I can go from looking like a short man to a really tall man in a flash. But we can change gender as well," the Doctor smiled and gestured to herself. "This is the first incarnation I've had where I have a female body. Both of my previous lives were male, so it will take time before I adjust and its too early for me to tell what's different despite the obvious."
"I see," Quatermass replied weakly, trying to get his mind around the influx of information he was getting before he moved on though he was in two minds about the Doctor's claim of being male twice and now she was suddenly a female, but after what he had seen , "And that substance you released..that's part of this…regeneration?"
"Yes," the Doctor nodded in confirmation, "it is. It's like a rush of adrenaline; even after the cause of the rush has subsided, the body still has an increased count of adrenaline. It's no different for Time Lords after regeneration. I've only just regenerated, Professor. My body is bursting with energy, and when I breathed it out I was trying to expel the excess energy."
Quatermass was fascinated by this conversation but he knew he had to move on. "And that police box?"
The Doctor laughed, partly because she had known the subject would crop up at some point but also because she knew this would be even harder for Professor Quatermass to accept. "The TARDIS. It's my ship," she replied, looking at the scientist to gauge his reactions.
She wasn't disappointed. "Your….ship?" Quatermass repeated sceptically. "It just seems….small."
The Doctor laughed again; Ian had annoyed her original self with his never-ending scepticism about the TARDIS and its capabilities, but once he had seen for himself that the TARDIS had travelled back to Stone Age times and then later to Skaro, he'd quickly changed his mind and his views about what he believed he knew about the universe. And ever since then the Doctor had learnt to take people's reactions to Time Lord technology into her stride. This was no different, and besides that Quatermass was more experienced and open-minded than Ian Chesterton. "It's not," she replied, though she wondered how she was going to explain dimensional transcendentalism, "Tell me some more about this probe," she said instead, wanting to change the subject.
It was extremely tricky to describe a TARDIS to a human, and it would be better for her to reveal it to Quatermass and any scientist he'd like although the Doctor was currently reluctant to have anyone inside her ship. Her TARDIS was her lifeline even if it badly needed an overhaul and work down to so many of its systems, to say nothing of removing the Inhibitor she had dimly seen when the regeneration was over, and the last thing she wanted was anyone getting any ideas about taking it from her.
Quatermass seemed happy about the change of subject, and the Doctor guessed that with so many different concepts cropping up in a brief three-minute conversation, he would need time to properly assimilate them. She only privately hoped when he saw the interior of the TARDIS, he was prepared for a lot more.
"I just do not understand what happened. The probe was sent out months ago to photograph and scientifically analyse outer space in the immediate vicinity of Earth. I was looking forward to studying the information myself, but I was also drawing up plans on constructing a new generation of space probes which could travel around the solar system, and come back with a wealth of scientific information. I was also hoping to present astronomical pictures to different groups, and arrange for funding for my experiments," Quatermass said and he spoke passionately at first, but with the last few words, he became more downcast as if he had already condemned the probe as a failure.
"Why do you think it hasn't worked? The probe looked fine to me," the Doctor asked mildly.
Quatermass lifted his head. "Because it wasn't meant to crash. You don't come from this planet, but I'm sure you're aware of how rockets tend to crash?"
"Yes, I do," the Doctor replied while mentally thinking especially primitive designs, but she didn't dare say it out aloud.
"I wanted to change that," Quatermass said, looking desperately at the Time Lady so she understood, "I wanted to design and build a probe that went up like a rocket, but when it returned, it would deploy wings and a rotor propeller system so it would fly like a conventional plane."
"Ah," the Doctor replied as she began to see the problem, "and because it didn't-?"
"It's a failure," Quatermass looked down. "All because of a malfunction with the radar, I can't find out what happened. I have worked long and hard to get Man into space, Doctor. A very long time. Years and years of work, frustrated by politicians who want rockets to be destructive instead of something more. And now my hopes have gone down the drain with the failure."
The Doctor leaned forward and gently petted Quatermass on the shoulder to soothe his nerves, the scientist looked at her in surprise as if surprised an alien would do something like that, but the Doctor quickly spoke before he said anything. "Professor, how about I take a look?" the Doctor offered, making the scientist look at her with surprise. "I can use the TARDIS to find out what really happened, and then we can really start to understand this mystery."
Author's note - At the top of the page are a number of quotes. The first is from Clara Oswald, though I had debated about using her. The next is Susan. Next is the Mondasian Cyberman in the second episode of 'The Tenth Planet' as it debates with Polly about emotion. The next quote comes from Slaar, the Ice Lord in charge of the Ice Warriors on the Moon in "The Seeds of Death." The next quote down comes from the Quarks from the story "The Dominators," while the one below comes from the Kroton automatic warning system in "The Krotons," while the next is a quote from one of the Dominators. The Exterminate is from a Dalek and the one below is that of the Cyber-Controller seen in 'The Tomb of the Cybermen.' The next one below is a quote from the Meddling Monk from 'The Time Meddler.'
But the one below that is from the presiding Time Lord from 'The War Games,' but while it is the same as the one in canon, the divergence where this universe separates is clear. There will be more about the trial and its differences later.
What did you think of the Doctor's conversation with Quatermass? How do you see it going?
Please drop me a line.
Enjoy.
