Chapter 5
He caused a big stir among the assembled colonists, by dematerializing the Tardis and then reappearing. A light flashed on top of the blue box, then they heard a sudden, rushing noise, almost like the opening of an airlock door, and it was gone.
Vanished. Astonished, they felt that what he had done was something of a betrayal, as if he had escaped what they could not. When the blue box reappeared aboard the freighter, two young men, each not above twenty, knocked boldly on his door. After he opened it, one of the excited young men accosted him.
"Did you have permission to leave, Doctor?"
He stepped out and calmly replied, "If I do not try out the ship's ability to dematerialize, how else will I know if it's ready to fly again?" He was met with disgruntled looks and scant understanding.
The youth signaled to the other one to go report the Doctor's 'escape,' then he turned and asked, "How did you do it?"
"Did what?" he asked the callow youth.
"Disappear. Then return, without ever going through the walls."
"That's the way I travel," he said simply.
"But it's forbidden to go out. You're supposed to stay in and fix the broken little box."
Hamstrung by the young man's lack of understanding, he asked, "By whose order?"
"By, by the order of Councilor Darvis!"
"Did he actually tell you I was to stay put, here on this freighter?"
The youth, knocking about for something to retort, grumbled. The Doctor cut into his woeful efforts by saying, "May I go back to work now?"
The favor, if hesitantly so, was granted. "Go on, but don't disappear again."
With a bit of warmth, the Doctor went inside and fell to again, but he was interrupted a second time when Gavilan came down and gestured for him to come out again. He decided to nip this in the bud right then, and oblige, arguing to himself that he could not finish his work while such suspicions existed.
"I would not leave for good," he snapped at Gavilan's pointed suggestion, "not while my young companion is still here."
"But after he is well," said Gavilan, "and comes back to the ship, would you then?"
"I plan to go as soon as he is able, yes."
"So you have not thrown in your lot with us, Doctor?"
A simple question.
"No, Turlough and I will be on our way soon, I hope. Any of your people want to come with us, we will relocate—"
"I can see now you've been sent here by our old foes to divide our people. For half of us to leave, it would cripple the rest of us. Frelia exists. And we shall find it."
"I'm not risking my Tardis on a fool's errand," said the Doctor, with tight lips. "I have to get back to work now."
"Will you leave us again, in the same way as before?"
"Most assuredly."
"Then there's only one thing I can do." Gavilan reached on his belt for what looked to be an old-fashioned set of manacles. "If you leave us, Doctor, these go with you. We keep the key."
"By heavens! My friend is still here. I don't need those."
Toying with the manacles in his hands, Gavilan asked, "Do we really know you, Doctor? You might consider leaving him here with us. How do we know you will remain true to him, and return, if your ship is fixed and able to fly again?"
The furious Time Lord said, bitingly, "Never trust a stranger too far, is that it, Gavilan?"
"We have no strangers aboard our vessel, but we are like children who must have guarantees before we shall believe and be content."
He might resist, but with Turlough in the infirmary, still battling fever, and the Tardis hours, days away from being fixed, he gave in, acquiesced to the humiliating spectacle of being bound in chains.
The manacles were made of the hardest material he'd ever come across. He would not be able to break a single link, by any means he knew, but he wouldn't have told Gavilan that. Chains, in any case, were not a part of his Gallifreyan upbringing.
Earth was fond of such things, he recalled. A wonderful planet, in a multitude of ways. However, he had not visited it for the executions and tortures, but to meet great scholars like Galileo, humane men with a high degree of understanding of the world. Some of them had been his friends.
Had he not stood by Shakespeare's elbow and nudged him into the weeping, dirgelike Seven Ages of Man speech? Or the line about the magistrate's 'in fair round belly, with good capon lin'd'? Had he not taken da Vinci home after too much wine, just at the moment when the carriage of Ginevra de Benci passed by? Her half-smile had inspired him to paint her portrait.
Or was it that other lady who had smiled at him? The dark-haired one with the thick, sausage-like fingers?
Turning away from the Doctor's disgusted expression, Gavilan said to the crowd, especially to his two young, beardless guards, "Watch him. Let me know if he doesn't reappear."
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Even though he was a prisoner in all but name now, he was true to his word and when he dematerialized the Tardis, he always, as he would have done without all of this bother, returned.
After one such 'jump' failing to go the way he wanted it to, he stood mystified in front of the time column in the center of the console. It was moving up and down, as usual, but he could sense a 'tic' in it, something not quite right. Scratching the top of his head, he thumped his eye with the chain. Had it not been a peck of trouble these last few days!
Thankfully, in regards to the chain, he had a shower aboard the Tardis that could wet, cleanse, and dry him off even in his clothes!
Not by choice, he had almost not returned to the freighter, so there was something going on with the materializing element. He'd have to take a certain section of the console apart—again—but being hungry for company, he decided to visit Turlough instead. Marco accompanied him.
On their way down in the elevator, the Doctor pleaded, "Marco, unlock these cuffs, will you? It's hard for me to do my work on the Tardis in these."
"Doctor, I have to admit something," said Marco, with some reluctance. "I don't know where the key is. I've looked in every drawer, nook, and cranny of the armory, but it hasn't turned up."
"Are you saying you can't get these off?"
"Not by conventional means, Doctor."
"By conventional, you mean a key?"
Marco nodded. "I believe that's what I said."
The Doctor, miffed that he might have to spend eternity in the manacles, asked Marco to keep looking. When he got to the infirmary, he was not ready for any more surprises, yet Turlough had made a friend: the girl of sixteen or so who had clung to Gavilan's arm when he and the Doctor first met.
Elana, curious about the younger of the two strangers, had come to the infirmary to meet him. She'd already had had the 'fever,' and survived, so she believed herself immune to it. And she had heard talk that his people were related in some way to the colonists, the future Frelians.
She stayed for only a few minutes after the Doctor came, and Turlough described her at length to him, even though the Doctor had just seen her with his own two eyes.
"Her voice, Doctor, is musical. Her eyes are big as saucers, and she could play the piano those long fingers of hers. I find myself falling in love with her."
He might not return—he had his new friend to court. He did not have to say as much, for the Doctor saw their looks at one another, their eyes in harmony of thought and feeling. It was as if they dwelt in a magical forest, with tall trees and wide meadows, instead of a dying ship with contaminated air, food, and water.
"What, in the scheme of things, does that mean, Turlough?" he asked, not sure he liked the trend of the conversation. Was he about to lose another companion? They didn't drop out of trees, you know.
"I'm not sure I want to return to the Tardis, even if it's repaired tomorrow."
"That's unlikely, given how the time column's acting up."
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The Tardis was a mule at times, an old, lazy Earth mule good for nothing but getting him lost. While at work on it, the Doctor had the most dreadful feeling that a particular part he needed was not to be had. It was a disk which he could not fabricate on his own, either.
Turlough was nearly well, his fever a thing of the past. This came at a time when Gavilan forbade Elana from visiting him, and he was restless. Finally, he threw aside his reading tablet, crawled out of bed, and went to the deck where the Tardis was.
He rapped on the door. Under the console, the Doctor peered out at the viewscreen and scrambled up to open it, glad that Gavilan had let him come. No guard was with him.
"Turlough!" he exclaimed, rubbing his forehead after he bumped it on the console's underside. The younger man sat down wearily and a bit dejectedly on a stool in the room, rubbing his red eyes.
"I think, Doctor, that I am bored. Elana has been forbidden to see me, so here I am."
"How's everything else out there?" asked the Doctor, nodding at the door. "I've been stuck in here for the past twenty-four hours."
"Not good. Everybody's moving about and sighing a lot. Gavilan stays mad at you. He says you've been stirring up the people to rebel."
The Doctor was astonished. "Even from in here!" Turlough laughed, but a look of pain came into the Doctor's eyes. "They never know what's best for them." All of his 800 or so years were wrapped up in that line. "Four green worlds … in this galaxy, and still we go on towards a myth."
He bent to tie a shoelace on one of his tall, white sneakers. When he stood up, he swayed, light-headed and giddy. He had been working long hours, and really had eaten quite little. He hadn't slept at all. In fact, all this long day, he had had a headache, soreness in his limbs, and a general feeling of malaise running through his body. Now he reeled. Turlough, standing near, caught his arm.
"Don't do that, Doctor," he said. "I'm not sure I could hold you up."
"No, Turlough, I'm not going to—!" But he did fall, and Turlough bent quickly under the weight of the Doctor's tall, broad form.
"Doctor, what's wrong?" he shouted down into an unhearing ear. The Doctor did not respond, but lay limp in his arms on the floor.
Wondering what to do next, Turlough struggled to lay him flat. He fixed him in a comfortable position, then got up and fled the Tardis, intending to find Gavilan and one of the medical doctors in the infirmary. His friend was ill, as he himself had been earlier. But the Doctor's medicine, which had speedily cured him, was now mostly gone.
When he had last seen the bottles—and he didn't know if more could be found on the Tardis, or where—each had been nearly empty.
When Gavilan came, it was only to complain in his way, to remonstrate with the prone Doctor for being ill. How could he fix his ship now? The Tardis was their only hope. The freighter itself was going down fast.
After such a tirade and only a cursory glance around the console room he had so much wanted to see, Gavilan said, "Take him to the infirmary." He signaled two of his men to put the Doctor back on his feet.
Once in a medical bed, it was a full day before the Doctor was awake enough to hold a conversation with Gavilan, who had uncustomarily left his bridge and made a special visit to the infirmary.
"The air is worse, Doctor. It's fouled, we don't even know by what," Gavilan said. Chiding the half-somnolent man in his sick bed, he said, "When will you be well enough to fix your ship? It's our only hope now."
"Disk—" began the Doctor. He put a hand to his head and couldn't finish his speech about that certain part he needed but didn't have to fix the Tardis.
Standing behind Gavilan, Turlough watched in deep concern as the Doctor trembled in a mounting fever, the same kind he'd had. He knew how bad he felt. On the freighter, more of the colonists were now very ill. The Doctor was just the latest one.
"Why must you go on when you can live here, sir?" Turlough asked, respectfully, much amazed that Gavilan would risk the colonists' survival in hunting a myth.
"Understand this, Turlough," said Gavilan, swinging around to look at him. "Frelia lies further on. It is to honor our escape from our old worlds, where there was always war, that we must find it."
Marco, not only the Head of Security, but also the freighter's chief armorer, hadn't confided to Gavilan that laser guns in the weapons stores had gone missing. Somewhere, those guns were in concealment, waiting to be discovered and, like the snake in so many stories, to bite the unwary.
"Wars are fought everywhere," Turlough said quietly. He looked down at the Doctor, who was trying to stay awake through the conversation. "The Doctor's people were once warlike. But now he is a man of peace." Turlough swallowed on his own giddiness, a leftover from his recent fever.
"Perhaps your myth ends here, Gavilan," said the Doctor, shifting about in the bed to see him better. "Find yourselves a home now."
"Both of you speak wisely. But if we choose to colonize another world, not Frelia, then we are bound to go back to our old ways. Frelia is a haven, not a field of battle. It is, and it is not, a myth."
Turlough wondered. Would Gavilan continue his quest until fuel, air, and all the other necessities of life had been used up, forcing him to stop? He was a slave to his myth, besotted with it. Frelia had become not only a place of hope, for a race of old warriors, but it was also a prison.