Doctor Who

by David Solomons

‘Has it broken down again?’ Yaz waited for the Doctor to respond, but she didn’t seem to hear, being too busy inspecting the TARDIS systems for faults.

  Less than five minutes ago, they’d dropped Ryan and Graham off in London. The TARDIS had dematerialised as normal, but soon after that their journey had come to a stuttering halt. Now, they appeared to be stuck.

  The external scanner showed them drifting in the sparkling cosmos. Gazing at the endless star field, Yaz was reminded of a school camping trip she’d gone on to the Dales one year. She and her best friend, Aisha, had shared a tent, and out in the wilds of the national park they’d marvelled at the vastness of the night sky, but it paled in comparison with the view in front of her now. That night on the camping trip, Aisha had decided to become an astronaut. What would she make of Yaz now, out here among the stars?

  ‘How odd,’ said the Doctor at last. ‘Everything appears to be working. At least as much as usual.’ She rapped the console. ‘What are you up to? Hmm?’

  Yaz had noticed that the Doctor often addressed the TARDIS as if it was a person. That wasn’t so strange; her mum once had a Fiat called Pavarotti.

  ‘Since the TARDIS doesn’t appear to want to budge, I’ll just have to input the location of the next key and fly us there myself,’ the Doctor said.

  Yaz picked up the navigational bluebell containing the time-and-space co-ordinates of the three keys, and offered it to her.

  ‘I may be brilliant,’ said the Doctor, ‘but I can’t read an encrypted bluebell. Happily, the TARDIS has already downloaded the information, so I’m going to just hook myself up to its telepathic circuits and go for a rummage. Fancy coming along?’

  ‘You’re going inside the TARDIS? Like, inside its mind?’ That sounded awesome. ‘Of course I want to come.’

  The Doctor spun a knob. ‘Used to be that, to access the circuits, you shoved your hands into a blob of telepathic gel, but that was not hygienic.’

  As the Doctor slowly pulled the knob out, Yaz saw that it was attached to a long, slim metal rod that ended in a gleaming point. It was the hypodermic needle of her nightmares.

  ‘Now I’m just going to stick this –’

  ‘No way!’ Yaz threw up her hands and backed away.

  ‘In here,’ said the Doctor, reaching past Yaz to insert the device into another section of the vessel’s labyrinthine machinery.

  ‘Oh,’ said Yaz, abashed but nonetheless wary. ‘Going into the TARDIS like this – does it hurt?’

  ‘No. No. Well, maybe just a smidge. I mean, it’s not like mentally duelling the brain of Morbius was. That stung like a helmet full of wasps. But, on the flip side, it isn’t like looking for a clean pair of pants in your bottom drawer, either.’ She waggled her hand in a gesture of approximation. ‘Somewhere between the two, agony-wise.’

  ‘Agony? You didn’t say anything about ag–’

  Suddenly the TARDIS pitched over, throwing Yaz across the room. She hit the floor and slid along it, until she thumped against the wall. Picking herself up, she checked for bruises and saw that, remarkably, the Doctor had remained upright. She seemed to sense Yaz’s puzzlement.

  ‘Nadia Comăneci, first gymnast to achieve a perfect ten when she was at the 1976 Olympics,’ she said by way of explanation. ‘Taught me how to stick the landing.’

  The TARDIS shook again, more violently this time. Yaz grabbed the edge of the wall and held on. A third blast plunged them briefly into darkness, before the interior of the TARDIS filled with soft blue light.

  ‘Emergency lighting,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘I thought emergency lighting was always red,’ said Yaz.

  ‘It’s an emergency, Yaz. You don’t want to alarm people.’ Her hands skimmed the controls and the external scanner bloomed into life, displaying an image of the surrounding space.

  What looked like a vast log drifted past, gnarled and scored with gouges. A fragment of intergalactic driftwood, Yaz figured, but then she saw the spire of a radar dish poking up from the middle, and the vivid yellow glow of engines.

  ‘It’s a ship,’ she said.

  ‘Gardener warship, if I’m not mistaken,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s not all about wheelbarrows with them. Their sun-drives use an advanced form of photosynthesis to transform light into fuel for faster-than-light travel. But how did they find us? The chances of their ship being in the same space at the same time as the TARDIS are astronomically – and chronologically – small.’

  An arc of green fire leaped from the midship, and the TARDIS shuddered again. A warning light began flashing. This was not the moment to speculate on how the Gardeners had tracked them down.

  ‘We’ve lost time-travel propulsion,’ said the Doctor. ‘I should be able to get it working again, but in the meantime I’ll have to outrun them in regular space.’ She adjusted the control settings, diverting power for the impending chase. ‘You’ll have to go in alone.’

  ‘Go in where?’ Yaz was briefly stumped, then she understood. ‘The TARDIS?’

  With one hand, the Doctor steered out of the path of another blast from the Gardener warship. With the other hand, she withdrew the needle and offered it to Yaz. It glowed with a blue light similar in hue to the one on top of the TARDIS. ‘Hold this with both hands,’ she instructed.

  ‘How is this going to help?’

  ‘Have you heard of dowsing rods? Sometimes called divining rods. On earth they were an ancient method of detecting water beneath the ground by waving sticks around.’

  That seemed unlikely. ‘Did it work?’ Yaz asked.

  ‘Surprisingly often.’ The Doctor thrust the needle at her. ‘You’re going dowsing for the co-ordinates of the next key. When you’re ready, clasp the needle.’

  As Yaz reached out, the Doctor snatched it away. ‘Couple of points to bear in mind before you begin. You’re going to see things. They’re going to feel real. They are real, but they’re also constructs formed from memories and thoughts. And one more thing.’ Her tone darkened. ‘These telepathic circuits are connected to the TARDIS’s navigational function, so your timeline might get a little jumbled. Beginnings, middles and endings mean diddly-squat to a time machine. But almost certainly nothing to worry about.’

  She smiled and proffered the needle once more. ‘Ready?’

  ‘No.’ Yaz reached out and wrapped her fingers round the needle just as the TARDIS was struck again. The console exploded into flames, and the room disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  ‘Hey, Yazzer, what’re you doing in here?’

  Yaz blinked. Before her slouched a twelve-year-old girl in a school uniform and a hijab. She briefly glanced up from her mobile phone.

  ‘Aisha?’ What was her best friend from school doing aboard the TARDIS? Yaz glanced around. She was in the girls’ cloakroom of her secondary school. Except it wasn’t, of course. It was – what had the Doctor called it? – a construct. She inhaled the musty scent of wet woollen coats. Uncanny. She reached out and stroked the imaginary Aisha’s cheek, gently pinching it between finger and thumb.

  Aisha slapped her hand away. ‘Weirdo.’

  The back of her hand smarted and she was struck by a disconcerting thought. She ran to Carly Green’s locker and wrenched it open. Even though it was against the school rules, Carly had taped a mirror to the inside of the door. Yaz gazed into it.

  She was twelve years old again.

  Breathing heavily, she flopped down on the bench and put her head in her hands. There was another explanation for what was going on: perhaps all of this was real, and she’d just woken up from the strangest dream of her life. After all, what was more likely to be true? That she was a twenty-year-old travelling the universe with a Time Lord in a police box, or that she was twelve and at school in Sheffield? Maybe she’d banged her head and was suffering from a concussion. Or she’d eaten something weird. On a dare, Gary Clark in Year Eight had eaten a really hot ch
illi pepper and hallucinated that he was a French-speaking penguin. Maybe the same thing had happened to her? But that would mean there was no Doctor, no TARDIS, no Galactic Seed Vault.

  The vault!

  She remembered why she was there.

  There was an intrusive click-clicking and something blurred in front of her nose. Her eyes swam back into focus to see Aisha snapping her fingers.

  ‘Hey, space cadet,’ said her friend. ‘What is up with you today?’

  ‘I didn’t eat a chilli,’ she said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I’m looking for something.’

  ‘Yeah, your mind, which you appear to have lost.’

  ‘Come on, you can help. I have a feeling you’re here for a reason.’ She grabbed Aisha by the arm and hustled her out of the cloakroom. They took one step over the threshold, then stopped abruptly, as though they’d come to the edge of the world.

  ‘Whoa!’

  ‘Uh, where’s the rest of the school?’ asked Aisha.

  Instead of the science corridor, they were standing on the roof of a skyscraper, looking out over what at first glance appeared to be a big city at night. Lights pulsed in the darkness like traffic on a motorway.

  ‘Those aren’t cars,’ said Yaz. ‘I think they’re my memories.’ They zipped up and down neural pathways, forming and re-forming. ‘We’re in my mind.’

  ‘Can’t be,’ said Aisha. ‘It’s too big.’

  Yaz ignored the barb. ‘This is no good. The location of the key isn’t in my mind. I need to get inside the TARDIS.’

  The two girls descended to street level, and set off along the byways of Yaz’s mind, passing thoughts she hadn’t had in years.

  ‘Look!’ she exclaimed. ‘Calculating the area of parallelograms and trapeziums.’ It lay there unopened, like a piece of junk mail. And it was not alone. She blew the dust off another unloved thought. ‘Fronted adverbials.’

  ‘Your mind is even untidier than your bedroom,’ said Aisha. ‘Where are we going now?’

  ‘There,’ said Yaz. Up ahead lay the local park. ‘We didn’t have a garden, so we used to play here all the time. Remember?’

  ‘Of course I remember. We were here yesterday.’

  They ran through the open gates and followed the path past the swings and roundabout to a quiet clearing among a stand of trees. A broad old chestnut tree swayed in the wind, its branches thick with spiky green husks.

  Yaz studied the memory. ‘Remember when we sat under this tree to do our homework?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember I did my homework. Not sure what you were doing.’

  On the ground lay dozens of fallen husks, some split open to reveal glossy red-brown conkers. And, among the fallen fruit, nestled at the base of the trunk, something fluttered in the breeze. It was Yaz’s old homework book.

  She picked it up and flicked through pages filled with her childish scrawl. It was her maths homework. At school she’d liked numbers, but hadn’t been sure the feeling was mutual. She stopped at a swirlingly complex algebra equation far beyond anything she could recall ever learning. It wasn’t her handwriting. Someone else had inserted it here. Could this be the information she was searching for?

  She stared hard at the equation, willing it to make sense, but it was no use. Then she had an idea. ‘Aisha, you were always better at this stuff than me.’

  ‘No kidding,’ said her friend. ‘Y’know, when I’m not appearing in your flashbacks, I’m now an aerospace engineer.’ She examined the page. ‘Right, what have we got here?’

  ‘Is it a set of co-ordinates?’ Yaz asked hopefully.

  Aisha scanned the page. ‘Not exactly. More like directions. How to get from here to the TARDIS.’

  Finally, Yaz was on the right track. With Aisha to decipher the directions, she’d soon be in possession of the vital information.

  The trunk of the chestnut tree moved. A figure made of bark detached itself, and a secateurs-like hand swiped at Yaz. She ducked and took a step back. It was a Gardener. Here, in her mind.

  ‘Run!’ As she turned to flee, she almost tripped over something on the ground. Glancing down, she saw that it was the Doctor. She was sprawled full-length in the grass, unmoving, her eyes wide open but empty. Giving no thought to the advancing Gardener, Yaz dropped to her knees and pressed a palm to the Doctor’s chest, first one side then the other, searching for either heartbeat. Nothing.

  ‘Come on!’ Aisha grabbed Yaz, and hauled her away.

  They fled through a wood, and Yaz glanced back in horror. Behind them, the Gardener was standing over the Doctor’s motionless body, like a hunter with their prize. Bizarrely, flakes of snow were falling on the Gardener and the Doctor.

  There was no doubt in Yaz’s mind. The Doctor was dead.

  She had told Yaz that things could get jumbled up in here, that being connected to the TARDIS’s time circuits might affect the order of events. Everything she’d seen until now had already happened – from Aisha to the park to her homework. That could leave only one terrible conclusion.

  I think I just saw the future.

  Though the Doctor hadn’t accompanied Ryan and Graham, she had sent them to earth with what she called ‘the second-best thing – okay, maybe the third’. They had been in the TARDIS wardrobe, finding suitable outfits for the upcoming mission, when she presented it to them. It was a palm-sized cube constructed from some kind of white plastic, and if Ryan was honest it looked a bit rubbish.

  ‘It’s me,’ the Doctor had explained, ‘but in portable form.’

  Ryan regarded the white cube doubtfully. ‘Doesn’t look like you.’

  ‘It’s programmed with knowledge gained from all of my regenerations. Well, at least as much as you can fit into thirty-two brontobytes of memory. It’s just the entry-level cube. The cost of brontobyte storage is exorbitant.’ She held it up and a light pulsed inside. ‘If you come up against anything you don’t understand, or if you need advice, just ask the mysterious glowing cube.’ She tossed it to Ryan. ‘You activate it with the phrase “Okay, Doctor”. Go on, try it out.’

  ‘Okay, Doctor.’

  In response, the cube had glowed and a tiny holographic image of the Doctor appeared on the top surface and began to speak in her voice. ‘Hello, Ryan. I’m listening.’

  He’d known exactly what to ask. Finally, an opportunity to pose the question that had been bugging him since he’d joined her crew. ‘What is the correct sequence of controls for starting the TARDIS?’

  The hologram Doctor had answered instantly. ‘Cream the butter and sugar together, beat in the eggs, sift over the flour and fold in to the mixture –’

  ‘I think that’s the method for sponge cake,’ Yaz had said.

  The Doctor had grabbed the cube and given it a vigorous shake. ‘Yes, it can be a little erratic at times.’

  Now, the cube lay on his open palm, as he waited for Graham outside the locked gate of the residents-only garden on Never Square. Graham had gone in search of an alternate way in, figuring that the owners weren’t likely to open up to a couple of complete strangers. Ryan decided to consult the cube.

  ‘Okay, Doctor.’

  On cue, the cube glowed and the mini-Doctor appeared. ‘Hello, Ryan. I’m listening.’

  ‘What’s the best way to get in here?’

  ‘The best way to remove stains from wool is with a lint-free cloth dipped in a solution of equal parts alcohol and white vinegar.’

  Talk about a useless gadget.

  ‘What’s that thing?’ said a small voice from behind the fence railings.

  Ryan looked up. The owner of the voice was a boy of around seven or eight years old. He was a slight child with a pale complexion, and when he spoke there was a high pitch to his voice that was, to be frank, instantly annoying. He was dressed in an oddly formal manner for someone so young. Since it was summer, most kids were in T-shirts and shorts, but the b
oy sported a stiff white shirt tucked into a pair of neatly pressed grey trousers and polished brogues. He peered out at Ryan, curious eyes fixed on the cube.

  Thankfully, the hologram of the Doctor had vanished, making Ryan’s explanation simpler. ‘It’s a portable speaker,’ he said, pocketing the device and walking up to the railings. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Jonathan. What’s yours?’

  ‘I’m Ryan,’ he said. ‘Can you let me in?’

  ‘You don’t want to come in here, trust me. We were expecting two guests for the feast, but one didn’t show up. So there’s a lot of shouting. Father is a-po-plec-tic.’ He carefully pronounced each syllable. ‘That means his head’s about to explode, he’s so angry. Unless…’ The boy thought for a moment. ‘Would you like to come to the feast?’

  Dinner or a party, thought Ryan. That explained the boy’s fancy get-up. If the invitation would get him inside, he wasn’t going to turn it down. ‘You are looking at a regular party animal,’ he said.

  A smile spread across the boy’s face, and he unlocked the gate. ‘Father will be pleased.’

  He was in. Now to find the second key. Maybe it was hanging up in a shed, or perhaps it was the key to one of the garden gates? He kept his eyes peeled, only half listening to the boy’s incessant chat, as they walked along a white gravel path. It seemed Ryan’s presence was a bit of a novelty. Maybe Jonathan didn’t get out much.

  They hadn’t gone far, when their route was blocked by Alice in Wonderland. At least, that’s who she looked like to Ryan. She occupied the centre of the path, wearing a pale blue dress and party shoes. A hairband held a wave of blonde hair off her face, which was wearing an expression of annoyance. She folded her arms and tapped one foot on the ground. On second thought, maybe more Queen of Hearts than Alice.

  ‘My sister,’ muttered Jonathan.

  Ryan didn’t have a sister, but he did have Yaz and he’d seen the same disapproving expression on her face.

  ‘Who’s this?’ the girl said. She obviously meant Ryan, but her gaze was fixed on her little brother.

  ‘He’s my friend.’