PERILS
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Doctor didn't dare test his bonds while the Master was watching, lest the latter tighten them; they were already painfully tight. Furthermore he was stretched out like Theseus on Procrustes' bed, his back unnaturally arched, and his head hurt all over, not just where he'd been struck. He had nothing to say to the Master. He knew that pleading for the lives of his new friends would make the Master more, not less, likely to murder them. He knew that his admitting he was in pain would give the Master pleasure. He knew, too, that admitting he was afraid not only would delight the Master but would be a paralyzing admission to himself; he had to think clearly and that was already difficult enough.
The Master had repaired to the end platform of the caboose and stood rather impatiently watching the Doctor; unlike the Doctor, the Master had a train schedule and knew he had to be patient for another half hour, even if the train was running on time. He leaned over the railing to see what, if anything, the Doctor's friends were up to. The woman who had gotten out of the lovely Rolls Royce was bending over the man the Master had shot, but sensing movement ahead, she looked up, pistol in her hand, and shot the Master in his left heart.
The Master fell over the rail and landed in the grass. Helen ran to the Doctor and Ruth got out of the car and ran to Francis and saw that he'd been hit in the shoulder, and that portions of Helen's petticoat now bound his wound rather neatly.
Helen quickly reached the Doctor, dropped the gun she barely knew she was still holding and knelt to untie him. The knots were too tight; she couldn't budge a single strand. "Doctor," she wailed. "I can't loosen these ropes! I don't know when the next train comes but it can't be long!"
"My pockets," croaked the Doctor. "Take out… wait. Carefully put, I mean I don't want to lose, carefully, must be some patch of just dirt, put, ow, my head…." For several moments, he could not speak.
"Go on, Doctor. Take… things from your pockets, put them on a patch of dirt not to lose them…."
"Many things," the Doctor was finally able to continue. "You are looking for a striped gardening glove with a pair of scissors in it."
"To cut the rope! Yes!" Helen began to empty the Doctor's pockets into her skirts, and when her skirts were full, she carried them a few feet from the tracks and emptied them onto a patch of dirt. Her second dive into his endless pocket space brought up the glove and the scissors. She set the scissors atop the Doctor's supine form, dropped the glove into her skirts, barely noting that both were made of strange materials, and carried her skirtful to the patch. She flew back to the Doctor and tried in vain to slide one blade under a strand of rope. "He tied it really tightly." She used the same blade to saw at the rope between his wrists.
The Doctor could feel the oncoming train's vibrations before its approach was audible. "It's coming," he said. As the rope snapped and his hands were freed, Helen helped him to sit up, thrust the scissors into his hands, retrieved the gun from where she had dropped it and crept to where the Master had fallen and now lay unconscious. "Don't kill him!" called the Doctor, bent forward and sawing away at the rope around his ankles. "Unless you must," he added, more softly. Helen didn't linger; she ran to where Ruth was trying to prevent Francis from sitting up. The two women could hear the train approaching as they carried the wounded chauffeur back to the Ghost and laid him down carefully on the back seat. Panting, they turned to see the train in the distance, then spun to see the Doctor still trying to free himself.
"No!" cried Ruth.
"Doctor!" screamed Helen.
The train bore down on the Doctor at 70 miles per hour. The Doctor stopped sawing and snipped the remaining thickness of rope, dropping the scissors as he rolled off the track, covered his head with his hands and lay panting in the grass. He quickly drew his knees up to his chest to fight the pull of the piston wind.
*0*0*0*
It took the Doctor, Helen and Ruth 45 minutes to collect all of the Doctor's possessions; the train's mighty wind load had scattered them. Ruth collected everything on the tracks, themselves, including the scissors, then helped Helen and the Doctor retrieve everything else. "What's this?" called Ruth, kneeling in the grass, holding up the TARDIS key.
"My freedom!" He took the key from her and slipped its cord around his neck. "Thank you!" He murmured, "I must never lose this."
"It unlocks that blue box, doesn't it?" guessed Helen.
When the three of them had scoured the area thrice and were fairly sure no treasure of the Doctor's had been missed, they took another look at the Master. He was still unconscious but, curiously, not bleeding. "He is healing himself," explained the Doctor. "He has two hearts."
"Two hearts!" The women spoke at once.
"As do I." The Doctor lifted the Master in his arms and placed him up on the caboose's end platform. Then he strode to the Ghost.
Francis was conscious and sitting up; Helen returned his pistol to him. "That fellow, did you get him?" he asked Helen.
The Doctor answered: "He's out of the way for now." He turned to Helen and Ruth, including Francis with tilt of the head. "Did I say 'thank you'? I sometimes forget to say 'thank you.'"
"All in a day's work," grunted Francis. The Doctor blanched. Adric had said much the same thing the day he'd died.
"Can you drive?" the Doctor asked the women. Helen answered: "Of course I can drive! This is the twentieth century!"
"I can drive," protested Francis.
"No," said the Doctor, firmly. "You can't. Helen, could you please drive up to the TARDIS? That's the blue box." He strode right back to said blue box, fingering the key on the cord around his neck, stumbling only twice and recovering immediately both times. Ruth rode in the back with Francis as Helen drove as the Doctor had instructed and parked in front of the TARDIS. The Doctor waited for the two women to join him, and then he opened the TARDIS door.
*0*0*0*
"Just like your pockets!" declared Helen. "All of this can't possibly be inside that blue box and yet here it is and here we are!"
"Admit it," said the Doctor. "You didn't really believe me. I can't blame you." Ruth hung her head. "It's all right. I wouldn't have believed me either, under the circumstances. But you trusted me anyway. You saved my life, all of you. I am forever in your debt."
"Doctor," Helen began, looking all around. "You have traveled in time and space. Time I understand. You've seen the past. You've seen the future. But space… do you mean all over the world or have you traveled in… outer space?"
"Yes. Yes to all of it."
"Are there… are there other people out there?"
"Well," the Doctor hedged, "in your future, earthlings do colonize. But there are planets populated by other species, with their own histories and their own colonies as well. It's a big, complicated universe." He hesitated again. "I love it. And my friends are stranded elsewhere in it, until I go unstrand them. I really must go."