Chapter 7
The Doctor had turned back to the console. "I believe I can re-route power … here," he said, showing the place on top of the console to Gavilan and Turlough. Neither man understood what the Doctor was showing him, but they took his word for it.
For days, even while in his hospital bed, he had been pondering the ship's dual problem. It could only make short hops in space, and it had a total lack of ability to time travel. The spectrum spanner could have identified the cause, but without it he had had to just guess. And, lo, he had been right. Even where the Tardis was concerned, he sometimes was.
Now, through the mysterious means he had pointed out, he did what he said he could do, and that was to re-route the power. It took over an hour, but the Tardis at long last was off the critical list, but he, the Doctor, wasn't. As Turlough and Gavilan helped him put back most of the pieces he had taken out of the console, each man kept an eye on the Doctor.
All the while that the trio had been working, Gavilan's people had continued to file through the console room, some of them stumbling over the console's ousted parts. Since space was becoming a premium, even on this vast ship, with a thousand or so 'guests,' the Doctor dispatched Turlough to conduct them to the 'audience' room, a room titanic enough to house a sixty-man troop of horse, plus the horses, if it had to. Just like in the individual rooms, the 'guests' set up their particular shelters and moved among their neighbors helping out, if required.
That was the thing about living in close quarters and being self-reliant for so long, it made for a tighter bond between the colonists, than if they had been on a world the size of those in the galaxy.
Dozens had brought food, some had even conveyed over the threshold of the Tardis cages of chicken-like birds, squawking in protest. Without knowing if the Doctor's stores were any more palatable than the freighter's, these intrepid colonists had just decided to go the safe route and bring chicken.
Many other creatures great and small were brought in, too, sending up a Noah's Ark vibe throughout the Tardis. The Doctor blocked his mind out on the amount of cleanup that was going to be involved.
As he lay on the floor reconnecting some wires that he had forgotten about in the last go-round, he almost opted to stay there, but Turlough and Gavilan had other ideas and helped him up. It was not easy to stand. He swayed so, like a ship 'listing to port' in a storm. Much more of a list, and he'd go over entirely.
"You need to go to bed, Doctor," said Turlough, resolutely. "No more today."
Even though the Doctor believed that no one but himself knew of the secret passage leading to his chambers, and its thirteen doors, Turlough knew enough to get him there.
One night in the galley, he and Tegan had been playing chess. After finishing up a list of items he wanted to outfit the Tardis with, the Doctor had stretched, wished them good night, and retired. Curiosity being what it was, and without saying a word to each other, they followed him as far as the secret panel in the wall. Then, hiding behind a corner, Turlough looking over Tegan's back, they watched as the panel opened and he stepped into the passage beyond. When he was on the other side, the panel closed.
As the three men, he, Turlough and Gavilan, stood before the panel now, the Doctor said, "So you've known all along about my secret hideaway, Turlough."
"But not much more, Doctor, such as to how to open the panel."
The Doctor raised a hand over a certain section of the wall, a section appearing no different from any other, and the panel slid into the wall to reveal a long passage, lit by wall sconces and a few ceiling lights. Turlough looked in first and marveled at the number of doors on either side, and at first he did not know which room to maneuver the Doctor into. Then he figured it out. Thirteen doors, thirteen forms of the Doctor before he could regenerate no more.
With Gavilan's help, he led him to the fifth door on this side. Was he not the Fifth Doctor? Had he not regenerated four times already?
In passing it, Turlough cast a lowered eye upon the sixth door, where he knew the current Doctor's future self would someday lie. He felt a twinge of angst around his heart, of apprehension, much in the same way as the Doctor did every morning, and every evening of his life, of this life.
As if by some kind of Doctor-magic, the fifth door opened to him without the touch of a single handle. Neither Turlough nor Gavilan could guess that the Doctor's body temperature, much lower than theirs, was the key that opened the door of his quarters, as it had the panel outside. They stepped in, marveling at the gray-dominant space. Moving the Doctor over to his bed, they laid him on it.
His stark and colorless suite of rooms amazed Turlough, especially for a man who had not only lived so long, but who dressed so flamboyantly in orange and crimson and wore a celery stalk in his lapel.
After 'snugging' the Doctor up in his single coverlet, Turlough looked around and saw what appeared to be a closet in the room. He went over, found a button on the wall and pushed it. He fell back at the onslaught.
An outflow of 'stuff' had appeared—all of it important to the Doctor, no doubt, but useless to everyone else. Again, no doubt.
Laughing slightly, he recalled the Doctor chiding his companions, Turlough included, "All of you have too many bits and pieces for your own good. Live like me, the spartan life."
Spartan, indeed!
"Bits and pieces," Turlough repeated to himself, wishing he could hear the Doctor say it again, just once.
As best as he could, and to Gavilan's amusement, he stuffed it all back in, then turned back to the Doctor's bed. Crossing the gray-tiled floor, he pulled up a chair and sat close by, while Gavilan made his apologies.
"I must go back to my own charges, Turlough. I have some 'nursemaid' duties of my own."
He exited with a hand raised in farewell, but not before taking a thoughtful last look at the man writhing in the torment of fever. He smiled reflectively at Turlough and departed.
As Turlough looked down at his own 'charge,' the Doctor groaned, tried to raise up, then merely sighed, and lay back down again. He was all but worn thin, thin to the bone, and Turlough mourned that he could not re-route the power of those two hearts of his that needed it so much.
After a short, almost too calm sleep, the Doctor struggled awake and called, "Turlough?"
"Right here, Doctor," the young man said anxiously.
"Has Gavilan decided to go to … to one of the green worlds? E-space would destroy the Tardis. If he takes us there, his race will die."
"Gavilan will take us nowhere, Doctor. You will, after you're better. We're all fixed up now to leave this freighter, and if you tell me how—again, for I keep forgetting—we shall go."
"Help me to sit up," said the Doctor. It was a strain on the much thinner Turlough to lift him to a sitting position, so they mutually gave it up, and the Doctor lay where he was.
He mustered enough strength to talk, however. "The ship's programmed to go to XIB, the best of the four worlds."
Next, he filled Turlough in—haltingly—on the procedure to make a jump. Though it was a course he had taught him before, he spoke as patiently as if it were the first time. Turlough listened to the hoarse words carefully, his own heart breaking.
Groaning again, and shifting about to get more comfortable, the Doctor concluded, "Maybe someday, Gavilan will give it a proper name. Call it Frelia." He said this, and then nodded off once more.
Turlough, who now sat like stone, trying to keep his emotions in check, watched, powerlessly, the Doctor's life force ebbing away. Determined to fulfill the Doctor's last wish by going to the console room and making the jump to XIB, he reached down to put the Doctor's arms upon his stomach, more comfortably, and then looked around the room for something to wedge the door with.
No one could return to this passage or the Doctor's chamber if he was not there to open the panel and then the inner door, so Turlough was glad he had the foresight to think of wedging the doors open.
He opened the hidden closet again and chose a dented helmet from an antique suit of armor—the rest of it nowhere to be seen—and with that and his chair, he not only wedged open the chamber door, but the outside panel as well. He just hoped that some of the thousand 'guests' didn't need an extra chair and yank it out of the panel.
Together, he and the suitably mystified Gavilan made the jump to XIB, Turlough following to the letter the sleepy Doctor's instructions. As he could not be a less brave man than the Doctor, who was going to die for all of them, Gavilan had at last agreed on going to XIB.
When Turlough had gone, the Doctor lay on his bed—the most familiar part of the Tardis—and drowsily thought about what his next form would be like. Other forms had been older, shorter, taller, gray-haired. One even had sported a mile-long scarf wrapped around his neck like the ultimate in Antarctic gear. Would his new self be stronger than this one? Weaker? More studious?
Would he even live? He might die, as other Time Lords had before him who had failed to regenerate at their own deaths. It could happen.
With such a dire thought coursing through his brain, he slowly eased off the bed and crept by inches to the door.
"Funny, what's this helmet doing here?" he asked himself, and pulled it from the door, tossing it into the room. He'd put it away later, but he didn't have the gumption to face that closet again.
Once in the passage again, the hall which ran by all of those other doors, as well as his, he stood by his own door and looked down at the first door of all on this side. The First Doctor's. Then with a shy and baleful look on his face, he glanced left, at the Sixth Doctor's door, where his next self would lie.
He must go in there now. He must go through that door. He had to be prepared, his mind said over and over. For the end had come to this fifth form of the Doctor. He knew it, that he was breathing his last few breaths in this body. It would not be his own for very much longer, and he had liked it. Supple, graceful, and the youngest one yet.
He liked himself better this way than any other he could think of: what a cricketer he was!
Turning, he walked into his own room again, not the other one—number six—but his own, and wearily lay down again. He scolded himself for his haste—he was not done-for yet. His next regeneration would have to wait to use the other bed.
"No," he said, "I'm not changing places so soon!"
He head still quite muddled with fever, he slept. When he woke again, it was to hear the voice of his young friend, Turlough—Gavilan was with him. At his bedside, both seemed excited. Perhaps the new planet had turned out to be what Gavilan had wished, no, hoped it to be. Perhaps—they had found him … changed.
"Turlough," he asked, "am I still … me?"
Turlough laughed and nodded. The Doctor, his eyes closed, could not see a nod. He would have to wait then until he stood in front of a mirror to know if he had regenerated. But they had made it. So would he.
And even though Gavilan's people had used up all of the Doctor's medicine, the Doctor could not die now and sadden all of them. For they would be sad. It was the nature of a free people to feel compassion.
"Come outside," Turlough was saying, "and see the green world."
Supported by his two friends, the Doctor left his bed, still wearing manacles, but once outside in the sunshine and warm, breezy air of the new world, he forgot all about them. Well, almost.
In a torn pocket of his tunic, the penitent Marco at last found the key, in a way releasing himself too so that he could also enjoy the new world of XIB … renamed Frelia.
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