Deep Time

by Trevor Baxendale

  —

  Jem walked towards the edge of the path in what looked like some kind of trance. The Doctor touched her gently on the arm, and she stopped and looked at him. Her expression remained blank.

  ‘He wanted you to live, you know,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s why he pushed you out of the ship like that.’

  ‘I know,’ she replied. Her voice was dull and flat, almost as if she was uninterested.

  ‘So live,’ the Doctor told her. ‘Take care, look after yourself and treasure your life – because that’s what he wanted. And so should you. If you can’t yet do it for yourself, then do it for him.’

  Jem paused, looked at him. ‘What do you know about losing someone you love?’

  ‘Enough. All I’m saying is – don’t give up.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because Dan wouldn’t want you to.’

  ‘Dan isn’t here any more.’

  ‘I don’t want you to. Nobody does. And we are all still here – and so are you.’

  ‘And that matters, does it?’ Jem turned after she said that, not giving the Doctor time to respond, and climbed down after the others. Her limbs moved with all the unthinking automation of a machine.

  The Doctor sighed and followed her.

  —

  The birds had started to fly closer. Occasionally one would swoop down, emitting ultrasonic squeals that the spacesuit audio systems could just about detect, and then wheel away. At first they assumed the birds had taken an interest in the climbing party as they inched their way down the cliff, but then it became apparent that they were attracted by something else. Some kind of lichen was growing in the deeper crevices of the rock face – spongy, mustard-coloured lumps the size of cauliflowers – and when these were disturbed in the continuous search for hand and footholds, large, pale lice would creep out of the darker recesses. The birds, as they grew bolder, would fly down, skirt across the face of the cliff and expertly peck at the lice as they passed.

  The birds were not birds. Closer views showed them to be some kind of cross between bats and dragonflies. They didn’t seem to be a danger to the climbers, but some of them had fibrous wingspans of nearly a metre and more than once they clipped the helmet or legs of someone as they hung against the cliff face.

  Marco lashed out at one persistent fly, trying to smash it away with his fist. He failed, but overbalanced, and started to topple away from the narrow path. Just as Marco began to fall, Balfour lunged forward and caught hold of his arm.

  For a second they were frozen. Marco, with a look of panic and terror on his face. Balfour, teeth gritted, straining to keep him from plunging to his death. They looked into each other’s eyes and understood exactly what had happened. Marco owed Balfour his life at that moment; but there was no gratitude, or relief, only deep resentment.

  Without speaking a word to each other, they regained their positions on the cliff and continued the descent.

  After a few minutes Clara opened a radio channel to the whole party. ‘Did anyone feel that?’

  ‘Feel what?’ asked Tanya.

  ‘I thought I felt something move,’ Clara said. ‘The rock, I mean.’

  ‘Some sort of tremor,’ said the Doctor. He was twenty metres above them, following Jem. ‘I felt it too.’

  Almost as soon as he finished speaking, there was another tremor. They all felt it this time. The whole rock face shook and loose shale clattered down the cliff.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Tibby’s voice sounded shakily in their helmets.

  ‘I dread to think,’ said the Doctor. ‘The geology suggests extensive seismic activity in the past, but—’

  His words were drowned out by another, longer tremor that they all felt strongly; it was as if the whole cliff was flinching, trying to shake them off.

  ‘Earthquake?’ said Clara, couching as low as she could to the narrow ledge she had found. The others were doing the same, or pressing themselves into the rock wall. Rocks and pebbles cascaded past them, some bouncing off their helmets. Clara tried to recall what the Doctor had said about the transparent globes. Something about withstanding a brick thrown at them?

  ‘We can’t go back up,’ Mitch said. ‘We’ll just have to carry on.’

  ‘Maybe we should pick up the pace a bit,’ suggested Hobbo, but it was clear from the look on Mitch’s face that this wasn’t really an option. Climbing down the cliff was a slow and difficult process for all of them. Mitch was already struggling. Hurrying was only going to cause accidents.

  Nevertheless, by mutual agreement, they continued with the descent, but it wasn’t long before a much larger quake hit. A massive shudder ran through several hundred thousand tons of granite and Clara felt her boots slip off the rocks. Her fingers scrabbled for a grip but it was useless. The Doctor went to grab her, but his hand missed hers and she fell. There wasn’t even time to scream before she realised that the Doctor, too, had lost his grip and was falling. They all were. No one could hold onto the rock now; it was splitting away from the cliff in great, angular chunks.

  And in the space of a few moments, they were all falling.

  Then Clara found the time to scream.

  Chapter

  11

  Clara woke up feeling warm and comfortable and, just for a second, she thought she was back in her bed, in her flat, waking up for another day at work. But then she realised she was staring up at the sky, not the ceiling; it was iron-grey, like the onset of a cold winter evening, scuffed with ominous clouds.

  Then something moved into view and blocked out the sky. It was the Doctor’s face, creased with concern, looking down at her. He was still wearing a spacesuit and helmet, and little lights were flashing inside his collar and reflecting off his nose and cheekbones. The memory of the cliff came suddenly back to Clara; the climb, the earthquake, the fall…

  The long fall…to what?

  ‘Am I dead?’ she asked. Her voice was a dry croak inside her helmet.

  The radio link clicked, and she heard the Doctor’s voice say, ‘Don’t be stupid. Sit up and look around you. Does this look like the afterlife?’

  Clara sat up. She was surrounded by whiteness. She was sitting in deep snow, atop a long drift of snow stretching away to the horizon. In the distance there were grey mountains, and above them empty sky. Clouds drifted across the twilight gloom like long, drawn-out ghosts of the storms she remembered.

  There was no cliff. No sign of it at all, not even a heap of rubble, or a vast mound of collapsed granite buried in snow. The nearest mountains were miles away. It looked like she’d woken up in the middle of Antarctica.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ She climbed unsteadily to her feet. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure.’

  ‘Where’s all the snow come from?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Where’s the cliff?’

  ‘Gone.’

  It was too much to take in. The whiteness was dazzling her; even though it lacked the harsh reflection of snow on Earth, it was still a contrast to the dismal grey of the planet she had known up to now. She turned around too quickly, trying to find a landmark in the trackless white wasteland, but found only dizziness.

  The Doctor grabbed her arm and held her upright. ‘You’re getting too old for all this, Clara,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up before I thump you. Where is everyone?’

  ‘Here and there.’

  Gradually, Clara began to see the others, appearing wraithlike out of the whiteness around them. She could see Tibby and Balfour, trudging towards them through the snow. They bent down and helped another spacesuited figure up. Judging by the figure’s slightness, Clara guessed it was Jem.

  ‘We ended up quite scattered,’ the Doctor said. He held up his left wrist to show a blinking green light set in the control panel. ‘I found you by tracking the transponder in your spacesuit.’

  Hobbo appeared, taking long, exaggerated steps through the snow. Her face was stony inside her helmet. �
�We still can’t find Mitch or Tanya,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll continue the search,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s enough of us now to spread out a bit and triangulate whatever transponder signals we can pick up.’

  The others began to set their radios to scan for the suit transponders. Bewildered and still more dazed than she cared to admit, Clara joined in the search. Tibby and Marco eventually found Mitch and Tanya together, half buried in the snow some two hundred metres away. Tibby knelt down and brushed clumps of snow off Mitch’s helmet until they could see his face. Ridiculously, his baseball cap was still firmly jammed on his head.

  His immediate reaction was predictable: ‘What the hell happened? How did we end up here?’

  ‘Where are we?’ Tanya asked as they were helped to their feet. She was physically shaking, but it had to be from shock rather than cold. The survival suits were all compensating for the temperatures, just as Balfour had said they would. Tanya looked around at the vast, snowy scenery. ‘Have we been teleported to another world or something?’

  ‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s the same planet. Same neutron star, mass, specific gravity, angle and speed of rotation…They all unequivocally indicate that it is the same planet.’

  ‘But there is some difference in the atmosphere,’ said Balfour. He held up his computer. ‘I’ve been running checks on air density and content. It’s still toxic, so don’t take your helmets off, but it’s not as bad as it was before. A lot more oxygen and nitrogen, a lot less methane…and this snow is not corrosive, which means that the clouds are now mostly water rather than acid.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ asked Marco with a touch of his old impatience. ‘Can anyone actually explain what just happened? Why aren’t we all dead in a mangled heap of rock at the bottom of that cliff?’

  ‘We already know the planet is surrounded by discrete time fields,’ the Doctor said. ‘There’s bound to be consequences on the surface.’

  ‘Have we travelled in time?’ wondered Clara. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Very probably. The earthquake must have been the result of a massive, localised temporal flux…throwing us all backwards in time.’

  ‘Backwards?’ repeated Marco. ‘How can you be sure? Why not forwards?’

  ‘It’s backwards,’ said the Doctor. ‘Take my word for it. I can feel it in my bones.’

  Marco looked at him scornfully. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘It’s a gift. I can sense time distortion and idiots. There’s one of those looking at me right now.’

  Marco turned away with an unhappy grunt. ‘Please yourself.’

  ‘Look around you,’ the Doctor told them. He turned slowly on the spot, arms outstretched. ‘We’re in the middle of an ice age! The landscape has been carved into pieces by glaciers and the planetary temperature has plummeted to below zero. What should take tens of thousands of years has passed in the time it takes to fall to the ground. It’s now a frozen world.’

  Clara let her gaze roam across the endless white. She felt she ought to shiver or something, but she was perfectly warm inside her spacesuit. It made the whole thing seem unreal. ‘It’s like Narnia.’

  ‘Not really,’ replied the Doctor matter-of-factly. ‘Narnia is a beautiful place. It was only briefly turned into a frozen hell by the despotic witch Jadis.’

  She gave him a sideways look. ‘I never know when you’re joking.’

  ‘I never joke. C. S. Lewis was a personal friend. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.’

  She smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I have a pretty good imagination.’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘But what does it all mean?’ asked Tanya.

  ‘It means,’ said the Doctor, ‘that this strange and dangerous planet has just become infinitely stranger, and infinitely more dangerous.’

  ‘The real question,’ said Balfour, ‘is what to do now?’

  ‘Find the Alexandria,’ said Jem. It was the first time she had spoken in quite a while. She didn’t make eye contact with any of the others, however, and it almost seemed as though she was speaking to herself.

  ‘There’s no reason to believe that it hasn’t traveled back in time with us,’ said Balfour. ‘It must be around here somewhere.’

  ‘But it could be completely buried under the snow,’ said Tibby.

  Marco gave a snort of disgust. ‘What’s the point? It could be anywhere.’

  ‘No, it’s quite close by,’ said Jem. She held up her arm to show a tiny flashing beacon on her wrist control. ‘That’s the transponder signal from Dan’s spacesuit.’

  There was silence. The wind moaned faintly across the wastes.

  ‘Jem, he can’t still be alive,’ Clara said, as gently as she could. Her voice sounded hollow and unwelcome inside her own helmet. It probably sounded the same way in Jem’s.

  ‘I know,’ the clone said. ‘But he’s here somewhere.’

  ‘Which means the Alexandria is here too,’ said Balfour. The relief was clear in his voice. ‘He went down with the ship, so it must be here.’

  ‘Which means the TARDIS will be here as well,’ the Doctor confirmed. He was already turning, scanning, looking for any kind of clue in the snow, but there was nothing to see but the empty whiteness.

  —

  They walked for hours, using their transceivers to home in on the signal from Dan Laker’s spacesuit.

  Moving through the snow was exhausting. Each of them was only too aware of how much precious oxygen was being used just to make progress. Heavy clouds the colour of burnished steel were gathering on the horizon, and beneath them swirled a haze of grey. Clara didn’t need to be a meteorologist to know that a blizzard was closing in. She trudged on, trying to catch up with the Doctor, who had his sonic screwdriver out and was sweeping it over the snow ahead of them.

  ‘I’m trying to pick up a signal from the TARDIS,’ he told Clara when she drew level. The others had spread out in a wide semicircle, checking the readings on their wrist displays. Laker’s suit appeared to be sending out a steady pulse and it looked as though they were already heading in the right direction.

  Clara looked behind them, studying the advancing storm front. It was catching them up. The clouds were darker, the blizzard less distant.

  ‘How long will our suits keep us warm?’ she asked, switching to a private channel with the Doctor.

  The Doctor shrugged. ‘Long enough. The power cells are small but extremely efficient. They’ll last for ever. We’ll starve to death long before the thermostats give out.’

  ‘Good to know.’

  ‘Although, to be honest, food isn’t the problem. We can survive for quite a long time without eating. Water is another matter.’

  ‘I’m getting thirsty. Everyone must be.’

  ‘The human body is sixty-five per cent water, Clara. Blood, tissues, organs – it’s needed everywhere. After just a few days without water, dehydration will increase to the point where the blood will thicken. Your heart will strain to pump it around your body. Your kidneys will fail, your blood pressure will drop. You’ll get more and more fatigued and confused. Eventually you’ll lapse into a coma. Death will follow quite quickly but it’s an agonising way to go.’

  ‘I’m so glad you told me,’ Clara said drily.

  ‘It’s ironic,’ said the Doctor, ‘considering we’re crossing a wasteland made entirely from water in its frozen state.’

  ‘Ironic, yeah.’ If Clara had felt thirsty before, her mouth felt bone dry now. Suddenly she craved a drink, visualising a long, cool carafe of clear water trickling with condensation.

  The Doctor continued to scan with the sonic screwdriver. The tip pulsed gently green.

  ‘Any luck with the TARDIS?’ Clara asked.

  The Doctor stopped and clicked the screwdriver off. ‘Nothing at all. It’s strange. It should still be with the Alexandria. If we can pick up Dan Laker’s suit signal, why can’t I detect the TARDIS? Unless I’d set the Hostile Action Displacement System, but I
don’t recall doing that. I’m pretty sure it’s broken.’

  The Doctor’s helmet reflected the snow quite strongly but Clara could still see the look of concern etched into his face. The eyebrows were doing their thing again. ‘Should I be worried?’

  ‘We should all be worried, Clara. The time flux we experienced won’t be a singular occurrence. If the whole planet is contained within a shifting time field, it will probably happen again, and there’s no telling when.’

  ‘So we really need to find the TARDIS urgently.’

  ‘Very urgently, and not just for food and water.’

  They plodded on, following the line of spacesuited figures as they homed in on the tiny transponder signal in another, lost spacesuit. Mitch and Hobbo had forged ahead, wading deep through the snow, carving a trench in which the others could follow a little more easily. Balfour and Tibby were next, with Tanya and Jem following, and then the Doctor and Clara.

  Some way behind, as if he was stalking them alone, came Marco.

  Clara kept glancing behind to check he was still there. As much as she didn’t like him, she would hate for him to become separated. If they lost anyone in this wilderness it could be a disaster. Behind him loomed the towering clouds of the distant snow storm.

  ‘Marco’s dropping behind,’ she said.

  ‘He wants us all where he can see us,’ remarked the Doctor. ‘Particularly you and me.’

  ‘He thinks we’re keeping something from him – and from the others.’

  ‘Well, we are.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we just tell them about the Glamour?’

  ‘No point. They probably wouldn’t believe us anyway. The thing with the Glamour is that its influence is utterly insidious, Clara. The person most affected would be the last to realise it.’

  Clara thought about this for a moment. ‘I don’t suppose it would be high on anyone’s list of priorities at the moment, anyway.’

  ‘Exactly. They’ve all got more immediate things to worry about at the moment – like survival. And so have we.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Clara looked behind again. Marco was still trudging after them. It was hard to tell at this distance, but she felt sure his eyes were burning straight into hers.