The Doctor had set coordinates for the Pleiades area, enthusiastically describing the bright blue clouds caused by the formation of the new stars. Jamie was skeptical about the Doctor's explanation of the life cycle of a star, and this led to a discussion that spanned a three-hour game of Aggravation, four rounds of Chinese checkers, and supper. Nobody mentioned the devastated planet they had just left.
Time passed slowly. The TARDIS was in transit for over four days. To keep her mind off things Victoria decided to try and map out the vast interior of the TARDIS. Her task was complicated by the fact that the spatial control was by no means stable, and doors deep inside would sometimes lead to a different room every time she went through them; but there was something new and interesting around every corner, and she got the idea that she could explore for the rest of her life and still not see everything. She and Jamie had a good laugh over a large room that was completely bare but for an antique cuckoo clock loudly ticking away on the far wall. The Doctor, when questioned, called it the Auxiliary Backup Time Room, and promised to show her some old maps made by previous companions, if she ever managed to locate the room where he kept his library.
It took him three days to track down the fault his repairs had effected in the viewscreen. One would have thought that it would revert to normal after the 'improvements' had been undone, but nothing involving the Doctor was ever that simple.On the fourth day Victoria wandered into the console room with a historical novel she'd found in her quarters and caught the Doctor fiddling with the controls, looking worried. "What's the matter?" she asked.
"We're still outside the galaxy proper," he said. "I don't know where we're headed, but it's not the Pleiades cluster." He picked a tattered book up off the console and leafed through it. The TARDIS repair manual was a very unassuming book, small and simply bound, but Victoria knew that there probably wasn't a more advanced technical book in the universe.
She peered over the Doctor's shoulder. The page he was looking at was covered in very tiny script and diagrams of one of the readouts on the console. The Doctor handed the book to Victoria and said, "Here, do you see the knob on that end of the console? There's another knob on the other side. When I say, we'll both twist our knobs to the right."
Victoria put her other book down, went over to the indicated knob and gripped it tightly. "What's it going to do?"
"The power should spike straight up, unless we run into an electron field, in which case we might be forced to land," said the Doctor. "But the odds against that are almost astronomical, and in almost any case it's perfectly safe. All right, ready? Turn!"
They both turned their knobs at the same time. For a moment all sound ceased, as if time were holding its breath. Then there was a metallic shriek, and a howling sound, and the control room seemed to spin wildly around the console. Jamie stumbled in. "Oh, not again!" he yelled. "Doctor–"
"We must've hit an electron field," shouted the Doctor. "Hold tight, everyone!" Above the howling the wheezing sound started. There was a jolt, and then the scanner came on by itself. A whining static added to the cacophony. The Doctor threw some switches and thumped the console. The noise died away, and the picture cleared.
"Now that's more like it," said Jamie.
"Oh, it's so pretty!" exclaimed Victoria, even though the small viewscreen only showed a little patch of blue sky and grass and a few trees. After their last stop, almost anything would be spectacular. "Where are we, Doctor?"
The Doctor looked.
"Oh," he said slowly. "We're on Efes."
"But Efes was destroyed! ...Wasn't it?"
"Not quite yet, I think. Look here." He pointed at the indicator that his granddaughter Susan (now married on Earth) had nicknamed the yearometer. "It's almost three days before the last time we came here. What a coincidence!" His eyes glinted with mischief. "Shall we go exploring?"
"But the planet's going to be destroyed in less than three days! What can we do?" Victoria's eyes flickered to the piece of warped metal that had been leaning against the leather armchair since last planetfall, a silent witness to an undesirable future.
The Doctor thought for a moment, and then pointed to the pastoral scene on the viewscreen. "That's the Efes I remember, not the wasteland we saw next week. Maybe we can stop the disaster. It can't hurt to try." Again he gestured to the door. "Shall we?"
-
The first thing Victoria noticed was the sweet odor of many flowering plants. The flowers were tiny, in sprays of white, blue and indigo-purple, scattered over a small field and under several trees: tall, stately things with bluish-green foliage and reddish-brown bark. The native flora ranged from these trees -- the tallest to be seen at over sixty feet -- to delicate moss on the large boulders ranged round the small hollow where the TARDIS had landed. The whole place looked like a carefully tended garden, and it grieved Victoria to think of the ruin that she had seen four days ago.
The Doctor had wandered off into the tall grass, twiddling on his recorder.
"Look at this, now," called Jamie, pointing at the ground on the other side of a large rock. There was a wide neat path, almost a road, paved with translucent, bluish-clouded stones and pebbles. It meandered around the stately boulders and through the meadow.
"I wonder where this leads?" Victoria said. But Jamie's eyes had followed the path up the side of the valley behind the TARDIS. "Hey, Victoria! Look there!"
The huge pointed domes of a Turkish-style palace loomed above the stand of trees on the top of the hill. "It's a castle," said Victoria wonderingly.
"Aye," agreed Jamie. "We'd better find the Doctor. Doctor!"
Victoria looked around for the Doctor, certain that he had gone off down the path and they would have to follow him, but he didn't seem to have noticed it at all. He was in a grove of trees some way up the hill, playing We Do Nothing All Day Long over and over again.
Just as she spotted him the music cut out and he stooped down to look at something hidden in the tall grass at the base of one of the trees. He blew a short questioning noise on the recorder, then straightened and called, "Victoria, Jamie, come and take a look at this!"
They hurried up the hill, Jamie taking the lead. "Look at these leaves," said the Doctor, indicating a bed of crumpled leaves under the tree.
"So what's so unusual about that?" asked Jamie. "Look, Doctor, there's this big castle there–"
"Oh, that's just the Emperor's palace," said the Doctor absently. "But this... this is the place where we found that piece of metal three days from now." He began tapping the ground where the leaves were thickest, and brushed some away. A bluish metal gleamed dully between two gnarled roots. "It's hiding something, see?"
"Yes, but what is it?" said Jamie.
"I think we're about to find out." Clearing the leaves away, they revealed a discolored metal triangle set into the soft loam, its vertex almost hidden under the tree's roots.
"It's like a trap door," said Jamie. "Hey, could that be what it is? A tunnel into the castle?"
"Oh, no, I shouldn't think so," said the Doctor, putting his recorder into his pocket and circling the thing. "What would they do with the leaves, eh? They would all fall through every time it was used." He rapped the metal sharply. "It isn't hollow either," he mused. "But in that case, there should be a control panel right about... wait a minute." Abruptly he turned to the tree, studied it critically and began to climb.
"Hey!" cried Jamie belatedly as the Doctor's boot heels disappeared into the dense foliage. "What are you doing? Doctor!" He and Victoria circled the tree and found a spot where they could see between the waving branches.
"Ha! See this?" cried the Doctor, clinging precariously to a limb. He had opened a small door in the bark, about the width of Jamie's spread hand. There was a sort of control panel set into the trunk itself, complete with flashing lights in several colors. The Doctor seemed to be poking at something on the panel with a twig. "It's just as I thought. This... whateveritis up here obviously controls that whateveritis down there."
"Careful ye don't set somethin' off!" called Jamie worriedly, remembering other times the Doctor had monkeyed around with alien technology.
The Doctor's voice filtered down through the leaves: "Don't worry, Jamie, I know what I'm doing... Ow!" A blue spark had arced out of the panel, and he jerked his hand back and shook it vigorously.
"Are you all right, Doctor?" cried Victoria.
"Perfectly," came the Doctor's voice. He sounded irritated. A few scraps of bark and twig fell from the hole, followed by a whitish cocoon. "Hm, this thing is filled with trash. So typical. Very untidy." Suddenly a spiderlike creature almost two inches across, striped purple and yellow with green polka dots, dropped to the ground and scuttled into the grass. Victoria screamed and jumped back, landing on the metal plate as the Doctor shouted, "Be careful, I think I may have activated something..."
A low humming sounded from the metal plate. Victoria felt a strange vibration beneath her feet. "Doctor?" she said nervously, and then a miasma of energy played around her, and she glowed and faded into nothing.
Jamie yelled in shock. "Doctor, Victoria's gone!"
There was a crashing sound in the tree as the Doctor half climbed, half fell, to the ground. "What happened, Jamie?"
"There were all these colored lights around her and she just disappeared!" Jamie stammered. "What's happened to her, Doctor?"
"Did she step on the platform?" demanded the Doctor.
"I think so. Yes, but where is she?"
"Well, don't worry then. I think she's just been transported. Watch this." The Doctor tossed a small stone over the plate. It landed unaffected in the grass on the other side, and he frowned, held another stone above the plate, and dropped it. As soon as it touched the metal it glowed and blinked out of sight. "It's pressure-activated," he murmured. "I think we've solved the puzzle of the trap door. Let's see where it leads, shall we?"
He stepped onto the plate, and the rainbow effect surrounded him. When it cleared, he was no longer there.
Jamie stared popeyed for a moment at the empty space. "Doctor...?" he said softly. There was no reply.
(Some distance away, a man slipped behind a large boulder on the top of the ridge. Peering cautiously over the edge of the rock, he started at the incongruous sight of the large, weathered structure in the valley below. He took out a battered pair of binoculars and focused on the doors. The legend POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX meant nothing to him and he refocused on the young fellow standing by the transmat platform, looking faintly ridiculous in his strange checkered skirt. The watcher pulled a small radio transmitter from a pocket in his khaki uniform, extended its antenna and started to speak...)
A chill wind ruffled Jamie's kilt. He looked around at the deserted garden, shivered and gingerly stepped onto the metal plate.
Nothing happened.