3. Following the Master.

Trekking After the Master.

The Doctor is concerned about the Master. He goes to Celeron where he finds the Master's Tardis still parked. He takes it to the Master's planning hut on Zantek Two and leaves a thoughtful note for the Master when he returns, Ensuring your wellbeing, Love from the Doctor.

He also discovers the previous place the Master's Tardis went to. It matches with Zeela's account at Petza. He resolves to go to Petza and toys with just when to arrive.
Whether he programmed the time incorrectly or if the Tardis didn't want to comply, the Doctor arrives a thousand years after Zeela left! But we know that that Tardis has a lot of good sense!

The tribes are much more civilised and refrain from attacking the Doctor, yet their history is written on stones, currently still kept from erosion in caves where the Doctor can now view them.

A guide tells the Doctor a story of an angry man who was pushed off a cliff and was never found again. As the Doctor views the stones, his guide leads him to the stones telling this story. A girl had been there, too. The Doctor has no doubt that was Zeela.

"Strange that no body was ever found," the Doctor says.
"Yes," the guide says. "They looked, but never found it."

"Has anything else strange happened?" the Doctor asks.
"We had a spaceship land," the guide says.
"Oh, interesting," the Doctor says.
"Yes, our first contact with anything off our planet," the guide says.

The Doctor recognises that something must have gone wrong for a spaceship to visit a fledgling community. Usually, a strict code of conduct forbade such contact under any circumstances. One that he frequently ignored. But then, he says, his Tardis isn't a spaceship!

"What happened before that?" the Doctor asks.
"There was a boy playing in the river below the waterfalls one day," the guide replies. "He disappeared."
The Doctor feels certain that it's linked. Sometimes he has a gut feeling about things.

"Any other odd happenings?" he asks. "Just around that time?"
"No," the guide says. "Just those."
"When was that?"
"About a year ago," the guide says.
The Doctor leans forwards to emphasise the importance of his next question. "Can you be a bit more precise?" he says urgently, he desperately wants to re-visit that occasion but doesn't want to hang around for days waiting!


About a year earlier.

The Doctor has stacked up some logs to sit on behind a bush near where the spaceship was said to have landed and just before it was said to arrive. He isn't disappointed. A small spaceship soon arrives and sets down neatly. A door opens and a uniformed crew man stands at the door. The light blue uniform colour matches the colour of the spacecraft. On some planets it might match the sky, but not here, the sky is light green.

"This is where the distress signal came from," the crew man says to someone inside.
As the Doctor watches, a boy approaches the spaceship carrying a small box. "I'm coming aboard," the boy says authoritatively and climbs a ladder. He faces the spaceship crew man who has no authority to accept a passenger.
"I'm sorry, we can't take passengers," the spaceship crew man says.
"You got my distress signal," the boy says, forcing his way past the crew man.
The crew man turns. "We only have fuel and air for the crew we have," he says.

The next moment he falls from the doorway to the ground. The boy appears at the doorway and says, "we have the right number now," and closes the spaceship door abruptly! The spaceship takes off shortly after that.

The Doctor steps from behind the bush and kneels beside the fallen crew man. He assesses his injuries. "I'm a doctor. I'll take care of you."

Three middle-aged women have seen some part of the event and step forwards. "Who's that?"
The Doctor can't answer the question as he has no idea who the crew man is, lying on the ground, but he does say, "I'm a doctor, I'll take care of him. Who was the boy who got onto the spaceship?"
"I didn't see a boy," the woman says. "Did you?" she asks her companions.
"No," one of her companion says. "I just saw a spacecraft go and this man kneeling over that guy on the ground. Attacked him, I should say."

This isn't going well for the Doctor and he must not leave the fallen man on the planet – after all, the fallen man is an intruder just as much as the Doctor is, and questions will be asked about him.

"Thank you, ladies," the Doctor says. "I'm a doctor, and he's my patient!" With that he almost shoos the women away. Then he carefully carries the fallen man to the Tardis and into the sick bay.

All the Doctor can do is to track the spaceship and see where it goes to.


What just happened? Who is the boy and what happened to him?