The Lonely Earth

A Detectorists / Doctor Who crossover

by Nicholas Nada

"What do you reckon?" asked Andy.

"Dunno," replied Lance. "Flytippers?"

Andy pushed back his cap and scratched his head. "It's just such a weird thing to dump out here."

"Perhaps it's from one of those exhibitions they used to do, back in the day."

"'Back in the day, '" muttered Andy. "All right, Tupac."

They stepped back to get a better look at the large, blue box sitting by the side of the overgrown path between two fields. Sunshine through the leaves of an ancient oak tree dappled light across the sign at the top of the object, which read: "POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX".

"I tell you what, though," said Lance. "It'd make a cracking shed, wouldn't it? I wonder how much it weighs." He leant forward and tried pushing the side. "Huh. Must weigh a ton."

Andy snorted. "Yeah, cos you couldn't move it. Right."

They paced around the box for a bit, running their hands over the wooden panelling on its sides, when Lance had an idea and fought to hide a mischievous smirk. He puffed up his chest, as he often did when he was about to impart some pearls of little-known information, and cleared his throat.

"What we have here, Andy," he said, "is a genuine Type 40 time travel capsule, or TARDIS. Obsolete almost as soon as they left the showroom, these were. I mean, we've come out here looking for treasure and look what we've stumbled upon, quite by chance. An actual antique!"

Andy was halfway through a sarcastic "har-de-har" when the door of the box was pulled open and a man poked his head out. He was tall and slim and looked a bit like a lanky Easter Island head brought to life and dressed in a bow tie and braces. He also looked vaguely outraged.

"Obsolete?" the man exclaimed. "Antique?"

"Blimey, where did you come from?" asked Andy.

"Saffron Alpha," said the man. "Why, have you been there?"

"Uh, no."

"Good, don't. Nearly impossible to get the stains out. I'm the Doctor, by the way."

Andy looked at Lance, then back to the Doctor. "I'm Andy, that's Lance. Look, what's this all about? Is it for Comic Relief or something?"

The Doctor frowned, puzzled. "Most of the things I do are for comic relief of some kind. I don't see the point of doing them, otherwise." He spotted the metal-detecting equipment that Lance and Andy were carrying and his eyes lit up. "Oh, brilliant! You're metal detectorists!"

"Detectorists," said Lance, affecting a weary smile which dropped as soon as he realised. "Oh. Right. Yeah, we are."

"You're going to love what I've been working on then," said the Doctor, disappearing back into the box. "Come in, if you're coming," he added, his voice sounding far away.

Andy and Lance looked at each other and then back at the open door for a moment, then Andy swallowed hard, pushed the door open and they went inside. There, they found a huge room with high, curved walls, a disorientating riot of orange and teal, with ramps leading down and short stairways that ended up at a platform with a hexagonal console on it, beside which the Doctor stood, flipping switches and tugging levers seemingly at random.

"Blimey," said Andy, taking in the enormous control room of the TARDIS. "I wouldn't like to see the heating bill for this place."

"This is mad," said Lance, shaking his head. "Here, what happened to the white walls and the whatdyacallem, the roundels?"

"That's going back a bit," said the Doctor, with a laugh. "Very retro. How do you know so much about TARDISes anyway?"

"Doctor Who," said Andy and Lance together.

The Doctor cocked his head, confused. "Doctor who?" he said. "I told you. I'm the Doctor. Doctor Me." With that, he ducked behind the console and started rummaging for something.

"You can't be the Doctor," said Lance, with a wry laugh.

The Doctor popped his head back up. "Why can't I?"

"Well," Lance chuckled, "because he's off the telly, that's why."

Andy gave Lance a nudge and nodded meaningfully at the very large room inside the relatively small box, in which they were both currently standing, but the Doctor looked delighted.

"I'm fictional in this universe?" he asked. "Oh, that's fun. That hasn't happened to me in ages! Popular show, is it?"

"Sorry, mate," replied Andy. "It got cancelled in the late eighties. You were played by a funny little Scotsman with a question-mark umbrella and then they axed it. The show, that is. Not the umbrella. I don't know what happened to that."

The Doctor was crestfallen. "Aw, it was just getting to the good bits. Well, then there was the Time War, of course. Not so good. But after that! Actually, I was pretty broken up after that, obviously… Ah well, maybe for the best, eh?" He went back to rummaging.

"So, er, how did you get here?" asked Andy.

"My fault, really," said the Doctor from somewhere underneath the console. "I flew through a nebula with the TARDIS doors open because I spotted one that looked really pretty and I wanted to find out what it smelt like - burnt paper with just a hint of shoe polish, if you're interested – and, well, the old girl must have taken in something that disagreed with her and we've been falling through the multiverse ever since. It's all the rage these days, travelling the multiverse, but I really should be getting back. A-ha!"

He stood up, triumphant, wielding a piece of equipment which looked like several fishing rods duct-taped together and attached to the handlebars of a Raleigh Chopper bike, the whole thing so long he had to brace one end against his hips. He struck a pose with the device aloft, the far end dipping slightly under its own weight.

"What do you think, eh?" he asked, proudly.

Something at the tip of the device emitted a little "ping!" and Lance and Andy sniggered.

"Oh, grow up!" snapped the Doctor. "Come on, let's get out there."

With that, he manoeuvred his unwieldy device down the steps from the console and out the door. Lance and Andy hurried after him.

They caught up with him as he was opening the gate of a nearby field. "I hope you're not up against the Cybermen, Doctor," said Lance. "Only, we haven't found any gold in ages. Unless they're allergic to ring pulls now, in which case you're quids in."

"I'm after something much rarer," replied the Doctor. "Did you know, this version of Earth has almost never been invaded or even visited by alien races?"

Lance laughed. "Yeah, I think we would have noticed an alien invasion," he started. "Hang on, did you say 'almost never'?"

"According to my scans, there was only one visit by extra-terrestrials, and that was in the late seventeenth century, somewhere in the vicinity of what is now this field."

Andy pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the TARDIS. "Isn't that thing a time machine? Why not just go back and check it out?"

"It is, yeah, but if I set off now I risk going multiversal again and ending up as a cartoon character or in a musical, although now I say that, both of those scenarios do sound like fun. And what drew you chaps to this particular field?"

Andy shrugged. "It's never been searched before, but the new owners gave us permission and we wanted to scope it out before the Dirt Sharks got to it."

The Doctor turned sharply and looked down at the ground. "Dirt sharks? Are they a common predator around here?"

Lance chuckled. "I'll say. Turn your back and they'll snap the field right from under your feet."

"Rival detectorists," Andy explained.

Lance shielded his eyes from the sun and surveyed the tilled soil of the field. "Andy, do you want to start down the far end and I'll start up this end and we can meet in the middle?"

"Like always," said Andy.

"Brilliant idea," said the Doctor, "and I'll start in the centre. I always like to be in the middle of things. It's why I can never finish reading a book."

He swung his detector in a wide arc and listened, waiting for it to make a noise.

"Hey! They should give me an award for this," said the Doctor, with a grin. "You know, because I'm – "

"Outstanding in my field," finished Lance and Andy in weary unison.

"All right," said the Doctor, sounding a little put out. "Every joke's new somewhere. No harm in trying."

"Knock knock," said Lance.

The Doctor stopped and glared at him. "If I say 'who's there' you're going to say 'Doctor', aren't you?"

"No harm in trying," replied Lance, with a little smile.

Andy and Lance lifted their headphones onto their ears and trudged off to their allotted parts of the field, sweeping their detectors over the soil and, for a good while, that was all that happened. The sun lent a golden glow to the surrounding trees from which a chorus of birds whistled gentle insults at one another. Andy worked his way methodically across the field in one direction, Lance combed the ground from the other, and the Doctor meandered haphazardly wherever he felt like checking next.

Lance stopped and cupped a hand over one headphone as he passed his detector back and forth a few times, then he knelt down and began digging through the dirt with a small trowel, finally plucking out something small and shiny.

Andy tugged off his headphones. "Find anything?" he called over.

Lance studied his find. "Ring pull," he shouted back. "Top Deck Shandy, unless I'm very much mistaken."

He tucked the ring pull into a little pocket and they resumed their searching.

In the half hour that followed, Andy found a rusted gate hinge, the key to an Austin Allegro, and was briefly excited to have found a coin, until he brushed off enough dirt to see it was only an Irish two pence piece from 1982. Lance found yet another ring pull – Panda Cola this time – and a couple of ancient horseshoe nails. Meanwhile, the Doctor's lashed-up detector hadn't pinged once.

"No luck yet, Doctor?" called out Lance, smirking because he already knew the answer.

The Doctor lifted his device and gave it a shake. "I don't understand it. I was sure there was something here."

"We all get those kind of days, doing this," said Andy.

"Yeah," agreed Lance, "but only on the days that end in a Y."

They walked back over to the Doctor, ready to call it a day, when Andy spotted a clod of earth and, on a whim, ran his detector over it. He got no response, but the Doctor's detector gave a tiny "ping!"

"Hey!" exclaimed the Doctor, lowering his detector. "Do that again."

Andy did so and the Doctor's device gave a louder "ping!" in response.

"Lance, you try it."

When Lance activated his detector, it had the same result: "Ping!"

The Doctor laughed. "You're boosting the signal! We need to work together."

"All right," said Andy, "but we do it our way, okay? None of this flitting about like a drunken butterfly. Methodical."

The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Fine," he said, like a little boy denied his favourite toy.

They all moved to one corner of the field and began stepping across the soil in a straight line, Lance and Andy on either side of the Doctor, sweeping their detectors left and right in a wide arc. The pinging from the Doctor's detector got louder and more frequent as they moved, until they reached a point about two-thirds of the way up the field where it began trilling like a fruit machine hitting the jackpot.

The Doctor beamed. "Do either of you," he said, "have a trowel that I can borrow?"

He dropped his detector, crouched down and dug deep into the earth, filling the air with the scent of warm, slightly damp soil. Whatever he was searching for was further down than Lance and Andy would usually dig, but at last the Doctor uncovered something and held it up in the palm of his hand for them to see. It was about two inches long, rectangular, and it glowed with a faint golden light. The Doctor blew the dirt off it, then pulled a plastic jar from one of his pockets and dropped the object in, sealing it with a screw-on lid.

"This is a sealant tab from an Ice Warrior cryo-canister," he explained, taking a cylindrical device from his pocket and pointing it at the container. The device gave out a high-pitched whine. "And it still has residual energy!"

Andy frowned in thought as he watched the Doctor. "A sealant tab…" he muttered to himself, "from a…"

Andy and Lance groaned in unison. "It's a bloody ring pull!" said Lance.

"Come on," said the Doctor. "Let's see if this works!"

He bounded back up to the TARDIS, Andy and Lance in tow. Once inside, he ran up to the console, flipped a few switches until a hatch opened, then he jammed the jar inside, slamming the hatch shut with a thump of his fist.

He grabbed a screen above the console and angled it towards them. "That's it!" he cried, as swirls of circular symbols filled the screen, meaning nothing to Andy and Lance. "The TARDIS can use this as an anchor point to find our way back!"

He turned to them. "Gentlemen, thank you," he said, shaking their hands. "Now, I'd better be off while there's still energy in the alien ring pull thingy or this will all have been for nothing."

Lance looked disappointed. "No chance of a quick trip then?"

The Doctor shook his head. "Sorry, no."

"But it's a time machine," said Andy, crestfallen. "I can't even begin to list all the places in history I'd like to see for myself."

"I would if I could," said the Doctor, "but if I don't get back now I might never be able to leave here at all."

Lance nodded, but had to ask: "Would that be so bad though? No alien invasions here, or so I'm told."

The Doctor allowed himself to dwell on that thought for just a moment, the thought of sunshine through broad, green leaves, of skies filled with songbirds and thistledown, of dewy grass, freshly turned soil and summer days spent in the warm satisfaction of idle pursuits.

He took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. "I'd always know there were alien invasions there," he said, "so that's where I need to be. Now, off you go. Quickly, quickly."

He ushered them out through the doors of the TARDIS, but stopped in the doorway.

"I wasn't going to say anything before because I wasn't sure if you'd think it was cheating," he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially, "but according to the TARDIS scanners, you might want to have a little look about ten paces west of that old oak tree there."

Andy and Lance looked at one another, then dashed off like children let out to play, yelling their goodbyes over their shoulders.

The Doctor smiled and closed the door and before long the TARDIS faded away to the sound of the shunting groan of its engines. If anyone had still been close enough to listen, they might also have heard the Doctor's voice, fading away along with his ship. "Or was it the yew tree…?"

Out in the field, Lance spotted something. "He's left his alien detector thing," he said.

Andy considered it for a few moments. "Want to give it a try?"

Lance wrinkled his nose. "Nah," he said. "I'll stick with my trusty CTX 3030, thank you very much. You can't improve on quality."

"I thought you said you'd modified yours."

"Ha bloody ha," replied Lance, pulling on his headphones and pointing his detector in front of him.

From then, the only sound in the field was the breeze through the trees, the buzzing of insects, the chirping of the birds and, above it all, the silent call of buried treasures.