The Doctor opened the Tardis door slowly and looked out. "It's dark," he whispered. "Too dark."
He took a step forward, and then another. Rose had been delayed in grabbing her coat. She heard a crash and the sound of several large, heavy items hitting the floor. She looked up in time to see a roll of paper towels rolling in through the open door. "What is it?" she called, looking out. "Doctor? Are you okay?"
"Careful there. That first step is a doozy."
Rose stepped out carefully and eased her way along the side of the Tardis between its doors and a tall set of wood shelves that rose up in front of her. She kicked aside several fallen bottles of various cleaning solutions that smelled of bleach and mold.
"Broom closet?" she said, reaching the corner of the Tardis and emerging into a larger, but still very cramped, space, lit by the blue glow of the sonic screwdriver. The Doctor stood among a small forest of mops and brooms, passing the device over the closed and, presumably, locked door. "Why is it always inside closets with you?"
"Hey!" he protested. "It is not always a closet." He turned back to the door. "Last time it was the pantry. Aha!" The lock on the door clicked open. "Now, let's see where we've got to."
"I thought you knew."
"I know that we are close to the source of the scream, but beyond that…" He began to step out, then stepped back and turned to Rose. "We should probably take extreme care with this one," he cautioned her. "A scream like that… anything could happen. That woman is probably in extreme danger."
"Probably," Rose agreed.
"Lots of guards," he went on, "who almost certainly will want to arrest us or kill us."
"Oh, without a doubt," she concurred.
"So, we must be very, very careful…"
He stepped out of the closet and into a long, broad hall. Rose followed him, looking left and right with curiosity and resisting the urge to laugh. The hallway was empty. Dim security lights shown on two long rows of closed doors and not much else. A green Exit sign indicated a stairwell at one end. The place was empty, but clean. The contents of the broom closet must have been well used by the housekeeping staff, but there were no guards. No killer robot armies. In fact, they style of the hall reminded Rose very much of a hospital's administration level.
The Doctor cleared his throat. "This is, well… rather disappointing, I think."
"Not to worry, Doctor." Rose patted his arm. "I'm sure we'll run into someone who wants to kill you."
"Now that is sarcasm. Don't think I didn't notice." He stepped across the hallway and tried the nearest door. Locked.
Rose looked around. "No people," she said. She tried a different door, also locked. "Storage Room 553B. Authorized Personnel Only," she read the sign next to the door. "All these doors, 'Authorized Personnel Only'. Even the broom closet." She frowned as she looked at the closet door. "I thought the Tardis was homing in on the source of the scream we heard. Shouldn't she be here, then?"
"It's not that simple," the Doctor said, training the sonic screwdriver on the door lock. "It's like fishing."
"Fishing?" she stared at him.
"Yes, fishing. The scream was the lure, you see, and the Tardis' sensors tried to bite, but we didn't realize that we were in the wrong pond. You see? You don't see?"
Rose sighed and shook her head.
"How do you manage to tie your shoes in the morning?" he said, saw her look and had the decency to look a bit sheepish. "Alright, Rose, you felt the Tardis shudder, yes? You felt her struggle. Something was preventing the Tardis from landing at the source of the scream. Something stopped her from biting. I knew something was wrong! The coordinates were too… too stable, so I materialized nearby."
"If we're the fish, then who is the fisherman?" Rose asked, confused.
The Doctor opened his mouth, then closed it again. "Right," he said. "Fishing, not such a good analogy." The lock clicked and the door opened. "Here we are." He stepped inside and turned on the light.
Rose followed. She expected the usual storage room, lots of dust and cardboard boxes, maybe a few filing cabinets; but this place was clean, full of shiny metal shelves and row upon row of white, plastic boxes each labeled with a white filing card and a number. The Doctor walked past the shelves to the far wall and opened the blinds of a window there. The glass panes were dark; it was night outside.
The Doctor opened the window and put out his hand. Rose watched him scoop a lump of snow off the sill outside and lick it. She had learned early on not to ask.
"North Dakota," he said. "2030… ish."
"Where?"
"Or was it Wisconsin? I can never remember. North America, certainly. Dull place, lots of snow." He made a face and threw the melting snow back out the window. He turned back to Rose. "It's the tannins, you see. I've only been in the area once before. Got lost on my way to Dallas, 1963. Worked it out eventually, of course."
"Of course," Rose said, shaking her head.
The Doctor wiped his damp hand on his trousers and took one of the plastic boxes off of a nearby shelf. He opened it, looked inside, then closed it and put it back again.
"Aren't landing coordinates meant to be stable?" Rose asked. "Isn't that what stops you materializing inside a wall or halfway hanging out a moving bus? You have to know where you're landing."
"Hm? Yes. I mean, no. The Tardis coordinates can never be that stable. Inter-dimensional coordinates take into account geographic movement, the speed of a planet's rotation, for example, or the gravitational pull of its sun, while the time coordinates…" He could see Rose's eyes glazing over again. "It's not like jumping onto a moving bus, it's like jumping out. For that split second while the Tardis is materializing, we have to remain in motion, just a little bit, matching the speed of both the physical world and the timeline that we are entering. We have to catch up or… SPLAT!"
Rose considered that for a long moment while the Doctor looked into several more boxes. "So the woman who was screaming, her coordinates weren't moving? They were stable, you said."
"The Time coordinates were stable, and there was something getting in the way of the dimensional coordinates, too… You felt the Tardis shift. It was fighting something, trying to… trying to jump out of the bus without opening the door. I had to put us down near the source of the scream but outside the range of… whatever it was. But that's not what's important right now. This is what is important right now. Will you look at this!" He had opened yet another box and took out a large, plastic sphere the size of a softball. On one side was a black battery casing with two blue lights blinking back and forth very quickly.
"Is there something inside." Rose squinted through the plastic casing. "It looks like a seed?"
"It's a... Yes, a seed." The Doctor shook the sphere next to his ear and frowned. He took out his sonic screwdriver yet again and aimed it at the battery casing. "It's in a stasis pod! A very powerful one, considering the size. Why would anyone put a seed in a stasis pod? And that's an atomic power cell keeping it running. Brilliant! But why? Something this strong could freeze Yosemite Falls! It could turn aside a thunder storm! What's it doing preserving a seed?" He turned up the pulse on the sonic and pressed it closer.
"Are you sure you should be doing that?" Rose eyed the sphere nervously.
"It's only a seed," he said, without looking up. "What's a seed need a stasis pod for? It's perfectly saf…"
And then the room exploded.
Rose shut her eyes against the flash of orange-gold and then everything turned green. She felt the air sizzle as her hair stood on end and heard a crash, much louder than the crash of the Doctor walking into a broom closet shelf; it was the sound of bending metal and breaking plastic being crushed under a hundred pounds of wood. Rose opened her eyes. She was standing in a tree.
It wasn't a very large tree, of course, or she would have been crushed, too. The thickest branches were less than the width of her arm, and her feet still touched the floor of the storeroom. There were branches everywhere. Some of them had broken through the wall two feet to the right of her and she let out her breath, grateful that she had not been standing there when the stasis field collapsed. She couldn't see anything but branches and leaves.
"Rose!" The Doctor's voice was muffled by the foliage. "Rose! Where are you?"
She spit out a mouthful of leaves. "I think I'm in a tree," she shouted. "Why am I in a tree!? What did you do?"
"It wasn't me! I just…" The branches shook indignantly. "How was I supposed to know they'd fixed a time loop into a stasis pod!? You stupid humans, always mucking about! Oh, what's this do? I don't know, let's stick it in the closet until we think of something! Those things are barely stable at the best of times. You don't just leave them lying around for anyone to…!"
"Still standing in a tree, Doctor!"
"Right. Sorry. Ah, meet you back at the door."
Rose sighed in frustration. "Alright. Back to the door," she said, and looked around, trying to guess which way the door was. She heard the Doctor rustling branches on his side of the room and followed him. Not far from her, she found a broken metal shelf and pulled a bent side support free to use to beat back the branches in her way, but a machete would have been more effective.
She reached an especially thick cluster of branches and had to climb over them. As she stood up on a particularly thick branch, she caught sight of the Doctor on the other side of the room, and called out to him, "Over here, Doctor."
He looked up and stopped short. "Be careful," he said. "There may be more stasis pods in here, on the floor. If you were to step on one of those and it were to break it open…"
"More trees," Rose said, nodding.
"Or something else."
She winced. "Right, careful. Understood." She eased herself down to the floor as gently as she could and for the rest of the way, slid her feet along the floor. She hated to think where any more trees would fit in this place.
The Doctor reached the door just as Rose arrived, and they burst out into the hallway in a shower of leaves, picking twigs out of their hair. The main trunk had broken through the wall and hung several feet into the hallway. The roots of the tree could be seen, digging into the floor and ceiling, searching for soil and water. The top must have broken through the outside window.
"They fit a whole tree inside that little ball," Rose said, amazed.
"Not inside the ball. Inside the seed. They took a whole tree and rewound time to force it back into a seed and then they put that seed into a bloody stasis pod to keep it that way. But why? Why go to all the trouble for a seed? It's not as if this is any rare or valuable tree, either. It's just a larch. There's billions of them, all over the universe."
"They've got larches on other planets?"
"Very common in cold climates." The Doctor grinned. "Mind you, I didn't need to get this close to identify a larch. I'm quite good at recognizing different types of trees from quite a long ways away…" She looked at him blankly, and he sighed. "Come on."
"Where are we going now?"
"To find the lab. This is just storage." He looked back at the tree thoughtfully. "The technology needed to do that is pretty advanced for this time period. Stasis pods, I might believe, but a time loop…" He shook his head. "Someone is playing with forces far beyond their understanding."
He turned away and started walking, but Rose hesitated. "You don't think anyone will notice?" she said. "You know, tree growing in a storage room…"
"I doubt it. Not until morning, anyway. But just in case…" He walked back and pushed the door shut. Rose looked at the two feet of trunk still sticking out of the wall next to the door and sighed. "Look at it this way," the Doctor said, "those stasis pods have a failure rate of at least .03%. That storage room was an accident waiting to happen."
Rose couldn't argue with that. They started down the hall, heading for the distant Exit sign.
"So, is that why the Tardis couldn't land?" she asked. "The time loops in those pods were getting in the way."
"I doubt it. Stasis pods are fragile, but the time loop was contained. Besides, a loop, even a hundred loops that small wouldn't affect the Tardis. No, there's something else."
Rose frowned. "The coordinates," she said, and he looked at her expectantly. "You said that the Time coordinates were too stable, so… if Dimension coordinates are physical, up and down, forwards and backwards… then Time coordinates should be… moving forward in time."
"Good! Yes, that's good. You're learning." They passed out the Exit door into a narrow stairwell. When he had looked out the window earlier the Doctor had noted that the building was only two stories above ground, but the stairwell went down deeper than that. He looked up, then started down the stairs, toward the basement levels. "Time coordinates, within a timeline, are moving either forwards or backwards."
"Backwards? The tree was forced backwards in time." Rose shuddered. "I'd hate to know what that felt like, but are there really things that go backwards in time? Naturally, I mean."
"Mostly lichen, fungus, a few simple animals. And these little purple worms that stretch out thin and live in the space between seconds."
"You're making that up."
"Am not! Back to the point. Time coordinates?"
"Right. Time coordinates show movement in time, and you said that the scream was human, not a fungus, so her coordinates were wrong because they weren't moving. Humans can stand still in space, but not in time."
"Not in space, either," the Doctor said. "You humans, you're always moving, spinning around the axis of a planet, planets spinning around the sun, sun spinning around the galaxy. Even out in space itself, your ships are always moving. You lot never stand still. Don't you get tired?"
"Not me." Rose laughed. "And you should talk! When have you ever stood still?"
They had reached the landing and another door. The doctor stopped with his hand on the knob and held up a finger for her to wait. Rose froze. The Doctor froze. After a moment, Rose grinned and shook her head. The Doctor smiled and opened the door; he glanced out, and then quickly closed it again, standing back against the wall.
"Now, that's more like it," he said, nodding to the narrow window that looked out from the stairwell.
Outside was another hall, much like the one they had left two stories up, only this was bustling with people, men and women in lab coats and younger ones hurrying after them with all the eager, anxious air of student interns. More and more, Rose would have said that the building they were in was a hospital, only there were no patients. A school then, she decided, or some sort of research facility.
The Doctor peered over her shoulder out the window. "And there is exactly what we need," he said.
Rose saw what he was looking at and sighed. She knew that it would be her job to get it.
.
Not long after that, the stairwell door opened and Rose stepped slowly out. She looked around anxiously, but no one was paying any attention to her. She looked just like any of the other students, nervous and uncertain, if a little more flamboyantly dressed. She crossed the hall and, after another quick glance around, took one of the white lab coats down from a row of hooks near an office. She rolled it up in her arms and hurried back to the stairwell.
When the door opened next, the Doctor stepped out wearing the lab coat and name badge that went along with it. Rose trotted along at his heels. She had no coat of her own, but no one gave them a second look. An official, older man with a pretty, blonde assistant trailing after him; there were dozens of those walking around already.
"I can't believe this is working," Rose whispered as they passed a small cluster of men and women huddled over a clipboard. She nodded to an Asian woman about her own age as they passed by, but the woman stared at her without seeming to see her. "It's never this easy," Rose said.
"No, it never is." The Doctor was less impressed. He knew that nothing was easy, and he wasn't comfortable until, half a dozen yards further, he looked up to see two security guards marching towards them down the hall with their guns displayed prominently in their ankle holsters.
"Ah, this is familiar. We are definitely back in America," he muttered. "Always with the guns!"
"Back to the stairs?" Rose asked hopefully, seeing the guards.
"Yes. Good plan. Tactical retreat."
They both turned on their heels and stopped short. Two more guards were already stationed behind them, hands on their guns, flanking a stern, older woman who had no gun but the look on her face was almost as dangerous. Her blonde hair was streaked with gray and tightly bound to the back of her head. A severe pair of glasses perched precariously on her small nose, and though her jaw was tense and tight, she smiled at them with the air of someone used to getting things done efficiently.
Almost like magic, the bustling hallway cleared of all but a handful of people and these, their welcoming committee.
"Ah... Hello, I'm the Doctor," the Doctor said, quickly stuffing his stolen ID badge into his pocket; he didn't think that this woman would miss the fact that his face did not match the photo. He held out his hand to her, seeing that she was very obviously in charge. "And this is Rose."
"Hello," Rose said weakly.
"How did you get into this building?" the woman demanded.
"Well, we, ah…" The Doctor gestured back toward the stairs.
"This is a secured building. We conduct classified, government research here, and no one is allowed inside without clearance, so how did you get in?"
"All these students are working on classified, government projects in the middle of the night?" the Doctor said, tut-tutting at her. "I don't think so. But that's not what we're here for. I don't suppose you've heard a woman screaming, somewhere in the near vicinity? Or, someone who looks a bit like a screamer? It may not actually have happened yet."
The woman stared at him for a moment and then shook her head. "I don't have time to deal with corporate spies. Not today." She nodded to the guards. "Take them upstairs and lock them up. We'll call the authorities in the morning." She turned to go.
Rose and the Doctor exchanged unhappy looks as the guards took hold of their arms and began to lead them away. They could hardly conduct a search and rescue mission while locked inside a jail cell.
Please forgive my completely made up sci-fi sounding technology. Everyone knows that stasis pods would never come with battery packs that small. Those suckers would burn out a Duracell faster than a smartphone streaming Michael Bay.
But fungus really do grow backwards in time. Never trust a mushroom.
-Paint
