by Doctor Who
Suddenly Solin rounded on him furiously. ‘Will you just shut up, Doctor?’
This made the rest of them jump. Solin looked furious. His fists were bunched at his sides. His body was braced for violence. He had chosen the jabbering Doctor as his target.
The Doctor stared at him, and softened his voice, ‘Solin. . .
I. . .
You’re grieving. You’re in shock. Look, come on. Don’t lose your rag now.’
‘I don’t need to hear you wittering on and on. . . ’ the boy yelled.
‘I know, I know,’ the Doctor said. ‘It’s one of my worst traits, I think.
I get the verbal runs sometimes, don’t I, Martha? But I was just doing it to keep morale up. . . ’
‘Solin’s been through a lot, Doctor,’ Martha said. She approached them warily. She could see that Solin was near cracking point. And no wonder. Seeing his father go crazy like that. His whole home just about destroyed by the malign being at its heart. And, to top it all, to see his mother’s shattered, broken body dragged out of the wreckage.
It was a wonder he wasn’t a sobbing heap. ‘Come on, Solin,’ she told him. ‘You can do it.’
The boy’s eyes darted to her. ‘Martha, I. . . ’
‘I know,’ she said, and gave him a hug.
The Doctor stepped back and left them to it. He frowned at the robots. ‘Can you both hear that noise still? I think it’s getting louder, isn’t it?’
The robots tilted their heads and it was suddenly obvious. There was a steady kerfuffle of beating wings approaching their clearing in the twilit forest. Millions of wings. Millions of beating, leathery wings.
‘Birds?’ the Doctor said. ‘But they’re not singing or. . . ’
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They were making a shrill, piercing song.
‘Bats,’ he said, and looked up into the trees.
‘Oh dear.’ Toaster said, ‘They appear to be giant albino bats, Doctor.
Very nasty, from all accounts.’
‘Just what we need. Do you think they’ll attack?’ Barbara was trying to contact the data banks she was still connected to. The info-rush was sporadic, but: ‘They live deep under the forest. They were the last to realise about the Craw’s approach. And they are absolutely ravenous.’
Now they were having to raise their voices above the noise of the roused chiropterans. The Doctor could see their burning red eyes and their shaggy, yellowish hides. The leathery skin of their wings was almost translucent as they ducked and wove on the murky air.
Martha managed to disengage herself from Solin who, she found, was hugging her for slightly too long. ‘Killer bats?’ she said.
‘I’m afraid so,’ the Doctor sighed.
She glanced around for inspiration. ‘What about igniting rotten and mouldy fungus with your sonic and making some kind of explosion?’
He raised his eyebrow. ‘Good thinking! But it’s all frozen, not mouldy.’
She thought again. ‘What about. . . um. . . running away?’
‘I think it’s our best shot,’ the Doctor said.
‘Wait!’ Solin jerked into life again. He turned to Toaster. ‘Did you say albino bats?’
‘I did, young master,’ Toaster said. ‘They’ve come up from the Lost Caverns beneath the forest.’
They were starting to dive-bomb now. One or two of the hungriest came scything down into the glade. Their wings ripped through the air, whishing like razors. The bats were as big as toddlers and they had horrible, baby-like faces, haggard with hunger.
Solin told Toaster: ‘Then it’s up to you to get rid of them.’
‘Me, sir?’ Toaster said, appalled.
The Doctor jolted and grinned. ‘He’s right! Of course, he’s right!’
‘How do you mean, Doctor?’ Barbara asked, just as perplexed as the sun bed was.
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‘Toaster!’ the Doctor said. ‘Do what you’re best at. Do what you were made to do! Tan their hides! FLASH!!’
This was Toaster’s star moment, they all decided afterwards. He briskly took charge, and told his fellow travellers to hide themselves behind the bulk of a fallen log. Then he bravely took up position in the centre of the clearing and shouted to draw the attention of his enemies.
They were really nasty-looking things, Martha thought, as she peered around the edge of the frozen barricade. She had seen some pretty horrible alien nasties during her time aboard the TARDIS, but there was something particularly creepy about these pale and feral bat-babies dive-bombing them from above. They were shrieking with glee as they skittered and wheeled above Toaster. At first he merely waved his shaky metal arms at them, his joints clanking and groaning dreadfully. The creatures were wary and held their distance, before deciding that the old robot was no kind of a threat to them. He was just a nuisance, keeping them momentarily from the fleshy, blood-filled bodies hiding in the undergrowth. They would soon deal with the robot.
‘Shoo! Shoo! Get away! Avaunt and avast, demons from the deeps!’
Toaster was shouting gallantly. But the winged and fanged creatures were getting closer and closer to him. Their skinny claws were reaching out as they swept over his head and they were pulling at him, clawing him. With a sudden sickening feeling, Toaster realised that they had enough strength between them to tear him into pieces.
But he was here to protect the others. He had a very specific and important mission, and so he couldn’t lose his nerve now.
Martha hissed at the Doctor: ‘We’d better get over there and help him. He can’t withstand them much longer. . . ’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘He stands a better chance than the rest of us, with that metal body of his. And besides, he hasn’t tried his party piece yet.’ The Doctor coughed dramatically and raised his voice: ‘Now, Toaster! Do it now!!’
‘What?’ the sun bed cried back. ‘Ouf.’ One of the bats shoved 133
him sideways and clipped him with its scaly wing as they soared up again, laughing into the canopy of trees. Now all the bat-babies were treating Toaster simply as a joke. They were taunting him. Making him wheel about and stagger. They were enjoying themselves and his distress quite maliciously.
But then Toaster remembered what he had to do.
The bats came swirling around him in a tornado of white bodies with vicious wings. Toaster stared up into their burning eyes of pink and scarlet. And-
‘FLASH! FF-LLAAA-SSSHHH!’
He set off his light tubes at the highest possible setting.
Even his friends, hiding behind their log, had to duck and shield their eyes from that brilliant, incandescent blue explosion of light.
The whole forest clearing turned to searing white for a second or two.
And it took everyone’s eyesight a moment to recover.
‘Aha!’ Toaster bellowed. He was elated with his success.
His light bulbs had been far more effective than even he had expected. The bat-babies were wailing and shrieking and reeling, blinded, through the air. Some of the ones closest to the gallant sun bed had even had their delicate wings scorched.
‘I warned you!’ Toaster declaimed. ‘I’ll do it again!’ The bats gibbered and skittered. They tried to get away. Only a few foolhardy creatures snarled and tried, once more, to attack him, claws outstretched, wings unfurled. . . infant fangs gleaming. . .
Toaster did it again. ‘FFFLLAAASSSHHH!!!’
And, once more, the forest went white and black for an instant.
Bat screams filled the air. This time it had really been too much for them. There was a thump, thump, thump, as several specimens fell unconscious to the frosty ground. Others, luckier perhaps, managed to sweep themselves up, out of the clearing.
‘They’re giving up! They’re going!’ Barbara screeched, from her hiding place.
‘You did it!’ Martha shouted, jumping up.
‘Unbelievable,’ Solin said, shaking his head, with a rueful grin. The bats were really gone, apart from those few who lay with tattered 13
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wings on the ground. They were gruesome, white-furred things. Horrible, puckered faces. Solin tried not to look at them as he dashed after the Doctor, Martha and Barbara, who were racing across the glade to congratulate Toaster.
The Doctor had his arms right around the sun bed robot. He was just about dancing him round in circles. ‘You were magnificent!’
‘Mind his broken glass, Doctor,’ Barbara advised, as Toaster’s innards shook and clanked.
Toaster graciously accepted all their compliments. ‘I put everything I had into it!’ he told them. ‘Every last iota of my energy.’ He looked a bit tired as a result.
‘Never mind,’ the Doctor said. ‘It was worth it, Toaster! You’re a real hero!’
The sun bed tried to brush this off, but they could all tell that he was really delighted. ‘Who knew?’ he sighed. ‘All those years I spent, just giving people sun tans. And I could have been a hero! A great warrior!’
‘Maybe you still can,’ Barbara said. ‘Our lives are going to start anew, aren’t they? When the Doctor takes us up to Spaceport Antelope Slash Nitelite.’
Now the Doctor was looking serious. The dark and frosty air went still with foreboding. ‘We’d better keep moving,’ he said. ‘Time’s moving on.’
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The rest of the journey was a little less frightening than their encounter with the albino bat-babies. The deeper they travelled into the forest, though, the darker it grew, and the more chilling the air became. The Doctor led the way, advancing with his pen torch held aloft.
Toaster’s lights were feebler now, and only intermittent. The bright-est thing was Barbara’s interior, with her glowing bottles of fizzy pop.
They lent the frosty scene around them a very odd ambience.
Like a bloodhound the Doctor would occasionally sniff the air, and then alter direction slightly. Solin looked worried, as if he thought the Doctor was losing them in the wilderness, but Martha knew better.
She knew the Time Lord had a strange, almost symbiotic relationship with his vessel. It was very mysterious but, if he managed to get them safely aboard again, she wasn’t complaining.
Secretly, Martha was glad it was so dark. When she looked up the trees melted into the night sky. Even if the Voracious Craw had been sweeping overhead they wouldn’t have been able to see it. And that seemed like a mercy.
But how long did they have?
The Doctor pulled a face when she asked him this. ‘I don’t think that we can have more than a couple of hours left. Can’t you feel it in 137
the air? Can’t you smell it?’ Martha sniffed, and shook her head.
‘That tiny vibration in the ground?’ the Doctor said. ‘The woods around us are trembling and groaning. They know they don’t have long left to exist in this world. Everything around us is quivering. . . ’
Now that she concentrated, Martha thought that she could indeed feel the wilderness shivering about her.
Barbara needed to rest again. ‘I’m sorry, Doctor,’ she cried. ‘My joints are freezing up. I’m useless! Hopeless! Just leave me here! If you leave me here to be eaten along with everything else, maybe I’ll stick in the very craw of the Voracious Craw and choke it!’
‘No, no, no, no,’ the Doctor grinned, clapping her on the back. ‘You don’t understand. You’re with us on this trip, Barbara. You’re on our side. And that means we don’t abandon you. You come along with us.
And it all turns out nicely in the end. That’s what’s going to happen.’
In the pen-torch light he winked reassuringly at them all.
Solin, Martha noticed, simply glowered back at the Doctor. She realised what he was thinking. They hadn’t managed to save his mother.
Amanda had died and the Doctor hadn’t been able to prevent it.
Martha shuddered at the memory of Tiermann carrying that wrecked body out of the ship, and then lurching towards the Dreamhome.
I should have insisted on examining her, Martha was thinking, not for the first time. Perhaps I could have done something. . . But, no.
Amanda Tiermann had surely already been dead. And what had she been anyway? A cyborg? A Servo-furnishing herself? Now there was no way of telling, and it was too late to dwell on these things. They had to think of the living.
The Doctor was bouncing around again. He was so springy and tireless! At moments like this, Martha thought he was like Tigger the Tiger or someone. Absurdly, she found herself wanting to laugh at this thought. That was exactly who he was like.
‘Come on! There isn’t far! Just two shakes of a sabre-tooth’s tail!
Really! Come on!’
Martha glanced about at the dark. Luckily, all the animals seemed to be gone. No more tigers or bear-things. It would have been a much more terrible journey had it been watched by livid and hungry animal 138
eyes.
‘This is the clearing!’ the Doctor cried, drawing their attention ahead, to a gap beyond the thick-boled trees.
He played his narrow torch beam into the gloom. ‘I knew it! We’ve done it!’
Barbara struggled back to her feet. Toaster had to help her and, to Martha’s eyes, they looked like a couple of old pensioners tottering about. ‘Your ship?’ Barbara raised her voice hopefully, brightly. ‘We’ve really reached your ship!?’
The Doctor’s voice came back to them full blast. He was bellowing with joy. ‘YYYEEEEESSSSSS!!!’ he shouted, and the frigid air seemed to shiver. ‘We’ve made it! There it is!!’
His small party struggled up to stand by him and he trained his light beam straight onto the tall blue box at the furthest edge of the glade.
Martha sighed with pleasure and relief. There it stood: reassuring and solid and bright blue. Its windows were glowing a minty blue-white, very welcomingly, and Martha knew that, inside, the TARDIS would be warm and comforting and utterly safe. She grinned at the Doctor and hugged him, and almost kissed him.
‘That,’ Toaster said, frowning crossly, ‘isn’t what I would call a decent-sized ship. That’s hardly bigger than a linen closet.’
‘Aha!’ the Doctor said gleefully. ‘Just you wait, Toaster! Just you wait!’ He could hardly contain himself. He led them across the forest clearing at a tremendous pace, with his door key held aloft.
The TARDIS door swung open and a steady humming emerged from within, along with a warm, yolky light.
‘Is this really it, Doctor?’ Barbara asked. She was trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice. ‘Is this really your spaceship?’
The Doctor nodded manically. ‘It’s better than that, it’s the TARDIS!
Come along! Get inside!’
The robots and Solin shuffled through the doorway, which almost wasn’t wide enough. Their concerned expressions melted away into slack-jawed astonishment and murmurs of awe. The interior was huge, and contained a weird mixture of high-tech futuristic and organic devices. It looked, at first glance, like a ship found lost at the 139
bottom of an alien sea, fitted and kitted out with a plethora of unfath-omable gizmos. Wires hung in festoons like Christmas tinsel and the walls and girders themselves seemed to be made out of some strange material, more like coral than metal.
Proudly the Doctor skipped past them up the clanking gangway to the six-sided console in the centre of the vast chamber. ‘Welcome to the TARDIS!’ he said, and patted the controls happily. The very air around them was chittering and burbling with the minute, mysterious calibrations of a million sensitive instruments.
‘But this is impossible, Doctor!’ Barbara gasped. ‘It’s. . . ’
‘I know, I had the same thing,’ Martha laughed. ‘It’s a lot to take in at first. But he means what he promised. He can get us all away from this planet. Before the Voracious Craw comes down. We’ve made it!’
Toaster’s voice sounded hollow. The ancient sun bed seemed deeply impressed with the TARDIS. ‘Why, this makes the Dreamhome look like somebody’s garden shed. . . ’ he said.
The Doctor shrugged
carelessly. ‘Now. We’d better get on.’ He flicked a few switches and rubbed at his tousled hair. ‘What do you reckon? Should we just go, eh?’
The others looked at him. ‘Go?’ said Martha. ‘Just. . . leave the planet, you mean?’
His hands hovered above the controls. He was like a great pianist, poised before tossing off a tour-de-force. ‘We could, you know. We could just shoot off right now without a backward glance. And leave the Voracious Craw to all its spoils.’
‘But,’ Solin burst out, ‘what about Father?’
‘And. . . ’ Barbara perked up. ‘If we’ve time. . . I don’t know. . . there might be other Servo-furnishings in the Dreamhome. . . perhaps ones who can think for themselves, like we can. . . who aren’t utterly under the control of the Domovoi. . . ’
‘Can’t we make a short trip, Doctor?’ Martha asked. ‘Back to the Dreamhome, before we leave?’
The Doctor pulled a face. ‘It would be a shame to just let the Dreamhome be sucked up like so much pizza topping.’ He sighed.
‘Tiermann, too, I suppose. He might be crackers, but he’s quite clever, 140
as well. The human race out here in this benighted part of the galaxy still needs a man like him.’
Solin nodded. ‘It was when he turned his back on the rest of the human race. That was when things went to the bad. I can see that now.’ He looked shyly at the Doctor. He seemed to be in awe of him, now that he was aboard his ship. ‘Will you make the attempt to save him?’
‘Well, yes. But in a roundabout sort of a way,’ the Doctor shouted, and started pelting around the console at full tilt, flipping switches and levers as he went. ‘Actually, I’ve been thinking up a fantastic plan, the whole time. I’ve got a brilliant idea! An absolute humdinger!
Really! I think we can have a little go at distracting the Voracious Craw. . . ’
‘Distracting?’ Martha asked. ‘How are we going to do that?’
