Chapter Two
"Doctor..."
The control room of the incredible time-space ship called the TARDIS was large and cheerfully lit, with a pattern of circular indentations in the walls, broken by computer banks and flashing lights. A large hexagonal control console occupied the center of the floor. One panel had been removed from the base and placed against the wall just under the main materialization lever, and varicolored wires trailed from there to an open roundel across the room. A middle-aged man in a frayed black coat and baggy checked trousers had his head and both arms buried up to the shoulders in the console base. From time to time there was a spark.
"Doctor..." Victoria's voice was petulant.
A few unintelligible but definitely negative noises worked their way up through the tangled wires.
Victoria Waterfield was young and ingenuous, with dark hair and blue eyes, and had been snatched out of her peaceful nineteenth-century England by an invasion of evil Daleks. The Doctor had managed to destroy the Dalek army, but Victoria's father had been killed, and his dying request had been for the Doctor to look after her. She was now stamping her foot.
"Oh, Doctor!"
This time a head emerged from the console. The Doctor's black hair was standing up in large tufts. His deeply lined face was streaked with some dark substance and there were ribbons of smoke spiraling about him. He also had a fat yellow pencil between his teeth. Looking over his shoulder at the girl he said some very patient and emphatic gibberish through the pencil and dove back into his repairs.
Victoria groaned. "Will you please come out of there, Doctor? I was talking to you!" The only response was a loud crackle of electricity and the smell of ozone. Victoria shook her head in frustration.
"What's the matter then, Victoria?" It was Jamie McCrimmon, a young Scottish piper who had met the Doctor during the Second Jacobite Rebellion in 1746. Not knowing what he was letting himself in for, Jamie had followed the Doctor through the doors of a small, unassuming police box, and found himself catapulted through space and time and into situations he had never imagined.
"Oh, it's the Doctor," said Victoria sadly. "He's trying to fix the TARDIS again and he won't even talk to me."
Jamie was about to reply when the lights suddenly dimmed. There was a sound like power building up and the control room swayed slightly, sending Jamie staggering into a wall and Victoria careening into him. They both grabbed the hatstand for balance: despite all logic and anything that had ever befallen the TARDIS, the hatstand had always stayed upright. "Doctor!" shouted Jamie. "What're you doin'?"
There was an inarticulate reply. Then the room brightened slowly and an object like a very large spark plug was tossed out of the console, bounced once, rolled along the floor with an odd metallic clatter and came to rest in a corner.
At this point the Doctor emerged from the opening, set his pencil on the edge of the console – over which it promptly rolled, bounced on the floor, and rattled away out of sight – and brushed off his hands. "There, that should do it," he said brightly and with immense satisfaction, stuffing most of the exposed wiring and circuitry into the hole in the wall and moving over to the console panel. "Here, Jamie, help me with this, will you?" Jamie hurried over to the other side of the heavy panel and between them they manhandled it back to the console. It fitted into place with a pleasant click.
"What were ye doin' in there, Doctor?" panted Jamie as the Doctor sealed up the hole in the wall.
"Making some changes, I hope," said the Doctor mysteriously. "You'll find out, if it works."
"Aye, like the last time," said Jamie under his breath.
"Now, now, Jamie..." The Doctor was well used to Jamie's eternal grumbling about the TARDIS's erratic citcuitry. The machine had been in for repairs when the Doctor had acquired it, and, although he hated to admit it, he still didn't have complete control over some of its functions – steering, for example.
He fiddled with some levers, and then pushed a button. The familiar wheezing sound of materialization filled the control room.
"Doctor, why are we landing?" said Victoria.
"To see if it works," said the Doctor, completely absorbed with his dials and readouts. His companions looked at each other resignedly, and then Victoria pointed and said, "Something's wrong with the viewscreen!"
The Doctor looked. Indeed, the usual static on the main viewscreen was even worse. Nothing could be identified. "Oh, don't worry about that. I thought that might happen. Anyhow, it's easily fixed... I think." He went around to the other side of the console to look at the environmental readouts. His brow furrowed. "This is strange. Extreme radiation on the high end of the spectrum."
"Oh, aye. What does that mean?"
"It means we're on a dead planet, Jamie. No life could survive in such an environment."
"Well, shouldn't we go somewhere else then?" said Victoria. "What's the use of landing on a dead planet?"
"It doesn't matter," said the Doctor. "We just have to go outside for a minute to see if my experiment worked. Get out the space suits, will you, Jamie?" As Jamie opened the large wooden chest where the lead-coated pressure suits were kept, the Doctor frowned, staring down at the console. "You know, I can't help thinking there's something awfully familiar about this system."
-
A blast of warm air riddled with reddish particles hit the travelers as the doors slid open. Behind them, the steady noise of the TARDIS's atmospheric generators grew into a loud whine, rejecting the foreign matter until the Doctor had managed to close and lock the doors. They had landed in a small valley. Beneath their boots the ground was cracked and brittle, mostly fine sand and stones fused together around a few petrified trees, running into glassy, hot craters and fumaroles that steamed sporadically.
The Doctor took a few steps backwards and examined the TARDIS critically. He walked around it and rubbed at the battered blue paint on its sides. Meanwhile, Jamie and Victoria were looking around at the stillness of the battered landscape. Jamie picked up a small stone and tossed it into a nearby bubbling pool. It hissed and spouted a small stream of liquid.
"What a horrible place," said Victoria, sounding tinny over the radio link. Jamie nodded in agreement. "Aye. The Doctor was right, there can't be anything left alive here." He looked around for another stone to throw. Something gleamed near one of the petrified trees. "Look at this, Victoria – I think it's metal."
The Doctor came up behind them. "What have you got there, Jamie?"
Jamie handed him the object. It was a rough oval of hard metal, half melted, warped and discolored. The Doctor turned it over and over in his hands. "Very interesting indeed," he said. "Part of a metal plate, I think. This must have been an inhabited world before the disaster. Just in their space age, it looks like."
"You can tell that from just a little piece of metal?" said Victoria.
"Oh, yes," said the Doctor. "You can tell a lot from a piece of metal. Here, feel how light it is?"
She took it. "Yes, I see. But shouldn't it be a lot heavier?"
"Not in this case. This sort of alloy is made by mixing molten metal – refined iron, in this case – with oxygen, or some other gas. The resulting metal is stronger and lighter at the same time. Such an operation can only be performed in microgravity, otherwise the lighter element would all go to the top and the heavier one would go to the bottom."
"What happened to the people then?" said Jamie. "If they were attacked, why didn't they just go off into space?"
"Well, if the attack came from space that wouldn't do very much good, would it?" said the Doctor, heading off toward the top of a craggy ridge. His companions trailed behind.
The ridge overlooked a long tortured plain that might have been a lakebed at some point in time, and beyond that was a brighter sunset than Victoria had ever seen. The far horizon seemed almost molten. Three small moons hung overhead; a larger one, a little more to the west, had an ugly dark gash across the light side, with deep red seething in its heart. It looked far too close to the planet. In the distance, on a tall hill, the skyline was broken by what might have been the remains of a city.
The Doctor took a step towards the burning horizon, his eyes fixed on the city. "Now I remember why those readings looked so familiar. This is the planet Efes in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, just outside our own galaxy."
"What happened here?" asked Jamie.
"I don't know," said the Doctor sadly. He hated destruction of any type, and that view certainly qualified as something extremely bad. "That new crater on the moon there: it looks like it was caused by a nuclear missile launched from the planet's surface, but that shouldn't have happened. Efes was a lovely place the last time I visited it, and that was over fifty years from now. This must be an alternate timeline."
Victoria murmured, "I don't think I like alternate timelines."
The travelers watched in silence as the sun dipped below the horizon. Distant fires burned. A cool wind whipped over the ridge, foretelling decades of nuclear winter to come. Finally, the Doctor turned back toward the valley. "Well. It's time we were leaving."
"But what about your experiment?" asked Jamie.
"Oh, that." The Doctor looked down at the familiar blue shape of the TARDIS, completely out of place in the devastated valley. "I don't think it worked. Follow me, everyone." The three clambered back down the ridge and filed into the TARDIS, which noisily vanished.
-
Don't worry, folks – this is not the end..….