by John Peel
Doctor Who
The Daleks’ Masterplan
Part II
The Mutation Of Time
By John Peel
Based on the BBC television series by Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner by arrangement with BBC Books, a division of BBC Enterprises Ltd
Content
Chapter 1 The Nightmare Continues
Chapter 2 The Feast of Steven
Chapter 3 The Toast Of Christmas Past
Chapter 4 Failure
Chapter 5 Volcano
Chapter 6 Land of the Pharaohs
Chapter 7 Golden Death
Chapter 8 Into the Pyramid
Chapter 9 Hostages
Chapter 10 Escape Switch
Chapter 11 The Abandoned Planet
Chapter 12 The Secret Of Kembel
Chapter 13 Beginning of the End
Chapter 14 The Destruction Of Time
Chapter 15 The Nightmare is Ended
Chapter 1
The Nightmare Continues
Sara Kingdom awoke with a cry, sitting upright in her bed. For a few seconds, she did not recall where she was. Her heart was beating furiously, and she was still shocked from her nightmare. Gradually, as she huddled in the blankets, the room began to make sense to her. By her bed stood the cabinet with the ornate Tiffany lamp – lit. She had reverted almost to childhood recently, and found she could not sleep in the dark any longer. The nightmares seemed to cluster about her then, and she couldn’t face that.
It was her old, familiar room in the TARDIS, the one she’d occupied for several months now – though in this erratic, wandering space and time-machine any measure of the passage of time was somewhat uncertain and subjective. Still, this room was the closest thing she had known to a home since her childhood, when she and Bret had...
She bit back that train of thought, not wishing to bring back the memories of her dead brother, or of the recurring nightmare. She knew she would never get back to sleep now, so she rose and showered. Feeling somewhat better after this, she paused to select her clothing. Despite the large wardrobe that the Doctor had found for her in one of his voluminous store-rooms, she dressed in the inevitable black cat-suit that she had worn since she had met the Doctor and Steven. The emblem of the Special Security Service was emblazoned on the shoulders, and she felt better wearing the old, familiar uniform of the SSS.
Both the Doctor and Steven had long since given up trying to persuade her to wear anything else.
She left her room, and walked almost silently through the corridors of the TARDIS. Her years of training as a special agent had ingrained the habit into her system. She moved like a ghost through the deserted corridors, back towards the main area of the ship. She paused in the small alcove that held the food machine long enough to dial herself a steaming cup of coffee, then moved on to the main control room.
As always, the Doctor was hunched over the controls, nursing them, clucking in mild irritation when one showed any deviation from what he believed it should read. It was ironic, really, since he had no idea how to control the ship once it was in flight. The Doctor had never bothered to settle down and learn how to operate this machine, claiming that he preferred the life of an idle wanderer. She often wondered of this was the real reason, or whether there was more to it. The Doctor let out information about himself as rarely as he could. His past was virtually a uniform blank both to Sara and to Steven Taylor, the other member of the TARDIS party.
The Doctor had little cause to criticize her wearing the same outfit continually, Sara thought - for his own virtually never varied. He was dressed in the chequered trousers, frock-coat and wing-collared shirt that he always wore, and the tie knotted about his neck was as irregular as ever. His long cloak and silver-topped walking stick were on the coat-stand by the exit doors, along with his silk scarf and furry hat, should they be required.
He glanced up from the console, and his brooding was forgotten as he saw her in the doorway. His old - yet somehow timeless - features creased into a sympathetic smile. ‘Up early?’
She nodded, and moved to join him at the mushroom-shaped control centre. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said, sipping at the scalding coffee.
‘The dreams again?’ he asked sharply.
‘It’s always the dreams,’ she sighed. ‘I can’t stop them. I keep seeing Bret die, again and again. I keep seeing myself shooting him down without pity.’
The Doctor placed a kindly hand on her shoulder. ‘My child, you really must learn to accept that what is past is past. When you shot Bret, you were convinced that he was a traitor to everything you held dear. You couldn’t have known that he was not. Mavic Chen - the Guardian of the Solar System, the most trusted man in the planets - had assured you of that. There was no way you could have known that it was Chen who was working with the Daleks, and not your brother.’
‘I wish I could believe that,’ Sara sighed. ‘But I should have known! Bret was my brother, and I should have known he would never be a traitor.’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘My dear, it’s not that simple. Better men than Bret have been corrupted by some hidden weakness in their souls. It could have been Bret who was the traitor. You did only what you had to do. The fault is not yours; it is Chen’s. He is the one who is to blame, not you.’
Sara shook her head. ‘You make it sound so simple - like I was just... just a tool he used to do the killing.’
‘And that is precisely what you were, to all intents and purposes.’ The Doctor’s eyes flashed in anger. ‘You had been trained for years, you were honed, polished, and then employed as a crafted tool. The SSS developed this in you. This is the end result of that kind of training; the conscience is blurred, and whatever you are told to do becomes the right thing to do. Such organizations are powers for great evil, or great good - but the people who work for them inevitably become less and less human. It’s ironic that the guardians of liberty and freedom should be the first to lose their own liberty and freedom, isn’t it?’
‘You’re just trying to make it appear as though I had no choice in what I did when I killed Bret.’
‘I don’t think you could help doing it,’ the Doctor said, gently. ‘You had been trained to obey, and you did as you were ordered. But – and this is what I see as your saving grace! – when you saw what you had done, you began to question. And then you rediscovered yourself – hidden away behind the barriers of the super-agent you had been shaped into. I can safely say that with my help and influence, you have become a productive and fine human being. The person who killed Bret Vyon was the old Sara Kingdom, the tool of Mavic Chen. You, my dear, are a new and better Sara Kingdom – a human being.’
Despite herself, Sara almost. smiled at this. ‘I’d like to believe that.’
‘Then try.’ He looked into the distance. ‘Mavic Chen is the one to be punished, child, not yourself. He plotted to betray the human race into their deaths. He sold out to the Daleks for power, and he led many good people to their deaths.’
Sara felt a burst of anger still within her heart, directed to the supreme traitor. ‘If only I could be certain that he met the death he deserved!’
‘Rest assured that he will have done.’ The Doctor brought his attention back to Sara. ‘He made an alliance with the Daleks, and as soon as they discovered no further need for him, they were bound to have killed him.’
‘I’d like to be certain of that!’ Sara cried. ‘If only we could return and discover what did happen after we left Chen and the Daleks with that fake Taranium core.’
The Doctor patted her shoulder. ‘I’ve often felt like that, you know. To see what happened. To just take another little look... but it cannot be!’
; ‘I just want to be certain that there was a happy ending,’ Sara answered. ‘To know that all the sacrifices were worth it.’
The Doctor smiled, somewhat sadly. ‘If an old man may be permitted to quote, I’ll give you a little Peter Beagle: “There are no happy endings, for nothing ever ends.” So, if you found out that the Daleks had killed Chen, then you’d want to find out something else, and then something else after that. There are no endings – everything continues to grow and to progress. One of the reasons that I never learned how to control this old ship of mine was to prevent myself from falling into that trap of yours - wanting to see happy endings.’
He moved away from her, and he stared into space again. ‘It is so tempting, you know. I often wonder what became of the people that I’ve met – especially those who travelled with me at one time or another. My granddaughter, Susan; I left her to be married on the Earth in the 21st Century. I often wonder what she made of her life. Was I right in what I did when I left her, um? Or Ian and Barbara! Oh, they were a troublesome pair, you know, when we first met! They burst into my ship, and forced me to carry them off. But, over time, we grew closer, and I was sad to see them go. I like to imagine that they got home and married, and raised lots of noisy children. It would be terribly tempting to just drop in, if I had that power. Or –’ He broke off, abruptly returning to the present. ‘You see,’ he said, somewhat gruffly. ‘If I could control the TARDIS, I’d be forever poking my old nose into the affairs of others best left alone to live their own lives. You try to do the same.’
Sara nodded. ‘Let the dead past bury its dead,’ she offered.
‘Precisely,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘Or, in our case, the dead future. All times are past in this curious life of ours – unless we enter into one era, for good or for ill.’
‘Isn’t it a bit early in the day for philosophy?’ Steven asked from the doorway. He was still stretching and yawning, and his hair was not combed properly.
‘Ha!’ the Doctor snapped back at him. ‘All times are a bit early in the day for you. I thought you’d gone into hibernation.’
‘Just because you can get by on virtually no sleep,’ Steven began, but stopped as the time rotor in the centre of the panel began to slow and to emit the deep, roaring noise that preceded materialization. ‘We’re landing!’ he exclaimed.
‘Most perceptive of you,’ the Doctor said, pushing him aside, and moving to power down the TARDIS. As the rotor slowed and fell back to its position of rest, the noise died away. Finally, only the background hum of the TARDIS was evident. The Doctor studied his instruments, flicked several switches, and busied himself.
‘Well?’ Steven finally prompted.
‘Umm?’ The Doctor looked up. ‘Oh, we’ve landed, all right. But according to my instruments, the atmosphere outside the ship is quite poisonous!’
Chapter 2
The Feast of Steven
‘Poisonous?’ echoed Sara and Steven together.
‘Quite,’ the Doctor agreed, cheerfully. ‘Oh, not lethally so – but it would be very bad for you, I imagine. It’s pollution – smoke and grime, particles of chemicals in the air.’ He paused, reflectively. ‘You know, I’ve seen these readings before, if I could just remember them...’
‘Well, why don’t we have a look outside with the scanner?’ Steven suggested practically.
‘I was just about to,’ the Doctor snapped back testily. He worked the appropriate control, and they all looked towards the screen that hung from the roof. It remained obstinately blank. Clucking to himself, the Doctor tried the controls again, without any better luck. ‘Dear me, it doesn’t seem to be functioning. What can be wrong with it this time?’ He shuffled over to his fault locator. This was part of a panel of computers that constantly checked the TARDIS’s own functions against the prescribed patterns fed into it. The Doctor started it scanning the control systems to isolate the problem.
After a few seconds, a series of numbers appeared on the screen. The Doctor put on his half-spectacles to peer at them. ‘Chameleon circuit,’ he muttered. ‘Time path co-ordin – ah, here we are – scanner element K17.’
The fact that several other items showed malfunctions didn’t reassure Sara very much, but the scanner was the important one. ‘Is that hard to fix?’
‘Mmm?’ The Doctor glanced around. ‘Oh, no, no, not at all. It’s just a small circuit board. I have a spare around, I know. The pollution probably got to it. It just needs to be slotted into place.’
‘Oh, well, that’s easy,’ Steven said, cheerily. ‘Just slot it in, then.’ He suddenly realized that the Doctor was looking rather worried. ‘So, what’s the problem?’
The old man raised an eyebrow, thoughtfully. ‘It has to be fitted from the outside...’ All three of them looked towards the doors – beyond which lay... what?
‘Can’t we just leave?’ Steven asked.
‘And what do we do if we land on another world with the same ambiguous readings, eh?’ the Doctor asked him. ‘No, I’m afraid that the only thing we can do is to venture outside to repair the scanner.’ He crossed the room to one of the roundels that formed the pattern in the wall. He swung it open, and peered within. After a second, out of the jumble of circuit boards within, he withdrew one triumphantly. ‘Just the part!’ His eyes moved towards the doors again. ‘I just wish I could remember what those readings signify. I know that they are familiar...’
The Doctor was not mistaken about the familiarity of the readings from his instruments: the polluted atmosphere belonged to a planet that he knew well. In fact, he had been stranded on the world for several months after a catastrophic malfunction had forced him to rebuild part of the main console, quite a while before. It was when he and his granddaughter were still travelling together, and they had been forced to spend a protracted period on this planet.
It was Earth.
More precisely, it was Liverpool, in late 1965. The pollution was from a British pea-souper, creeping quietly over the face of the Mersey. It was early evening, and the weather was quite brisk. A light powdering of snow had fallen earlier, dusting the dirty streets and making them almost pretty. People scuttled about, wrapped up against the chill wind, and attempting to flash one another cheery smiles. After all, it was Christmas Day, and the season for goodwill and all that.
The TARDIS stood in a small yard, behind a stocky building whose bricks had once been red. Now they were blackened, save for the odd patch of snow. Above the doorway that led into the yard was an old-fashioned lantern-shaped blue light. Each of the panes had the word ‘Police’ etched on them, to alert the public in case they should have need of the services of a Bobby.
There was silence for a moment, and then the sound of a car engine, as a police car turned into the yard. The headlights flashed across the TARDIS, but died, as the driver, oblivious to the odd sight, cut the motor. He and his partner were too busy attempting to harmonize on the final verse of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ to notice a police box in the yard. Pleased with their efforts, the two men smirked at one another.
‘Beautiful,’ PC Welland said, sighing. ‘Just beautiful. We could charm birds out of the trees.’
‘Aye,’ PC Blessed answered. ‘I wish we could charm the birds out of the coffee bars.’
At that moment, the desk sergeant stuck his head out of the back door, looking for the source of the caterwauling to which he had been subjected. As he glanced around, his eyes fastened on to the TARDIS. ‘What the – ?’ he began. ‘Who put that there?’
Welland and Blessed clambered out of the car, and they finally spotted the new police box in the yard. ‘Where did that come from, Sarge?’ Welland asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Sergeant Ellis snapped. ‘Why ask me? I’m only supposed to know what goes on around here.’
‘Well,’ Blessed grinned, ‘police boxes don’t just turn up out of thin air.’
‘For all I know,’ the sergeant answered, ‘this one might as well have.’
‘Perhaps somebody sent it
to the inspector,’ Blessed suggested. ‘As a Christmas box!’ He laughed heartily at his own joke.
The sergeant was less amused. ‘And perhaps you’ll both just stay out there and watch it.’
‘Why?’ Welland asked, annoyed. It was cold out here, and he wanted a cuppa. ‘Do you think it’s going to fly away?’
‘Just you stay there and keep an eye on it. Right?’ The sergeant glared at them both, and then went back inside.
Welland shrugged at his partner, and started stamping his feet to keep them warm. ‘What do we do now?’
Blessed grinned again. ‘How about a few verses of “While Shepherds Watched”... ?’ he suggested.
Steven was in one of his argumentative moods again, which always brought out the worst in the Doctor. ‘And just why, if it isn’t safe for us, is it safe for you to go outside?’ he demanded.
‘Ah, do neither of you understand?’ the Doctor snapped back. He had donned his long cloak, and fastened it shut. He began to wind his scarf about his neck.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ Sara butted in, ‘let’s just go outside and repair the scanner.’
‘No!’ exclaimed the Doctor. He donned his furry hat, and then pocketed the circuit board. Where you and Steven come from, the air is pure. Outside those doors, the air holds the worst kind of pollution I’ve ever come across! Partly burned petrochemicals, suspended particles of...’
‘Then you shouldn’t go out there, either,’ Steven said, trying to be reasonable.
‘My dear boy,’ the Doctor replied patiently, ‘I’m used to all sorts of atmospheres. It won’t affect me. I’ll just pop out there and effect the repairs myself.’
‘And suppose something happens to you?’ Sara asked in concern.’
‘Then – and only then! – can you come out,’ agreed the Doctor. ‘But you must be very, very careful.’
‘And how are we supposed to know if something’s happened to you?’ Steven said sarcastically. ‘The scanner’s broken, so we can’t see out there.’
