Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction

by Nigel Robinson

  Ian gave a wry grin: Barbara was fussing too much again. ‘I don’t think it’s as bad as all that,’ he repeated. ‘But who is he?’

  Barbara frowned. ‘Don’t you know? I thought he was one of the replacement teachers...’

  Ian shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen the old boy in my life before.’

  Barbara was about to speak when the old man began to stir. His lips trembled and he muttered something. Bending down, Ian and Barbara could just make out his words.

  ‘I can’t take you back, Susan... I can’t!’ he groaned and then seemed to slip back into unconsciousness.

  Barbara and Ian exchanged curious looks. What was the old man talking about? Ian shrugged. ‘He’s rambling,’ he said.

  But something in the old man’s tone and his reference to Susan had struck a chord in Barbara’s mind. She blinked and looked around her.

  What her tired and shocked brain had rationalised as the staff room of Coal Hill school now shattered into a million shimmering pieces of light and reformed itself. The walls, she saw, were covered with large circular indentations, not staff notices as she had thought. The staff television set, positioned high on a shelf, was now a much stranger-looking video screen flush with the wall itself. Even the large table where most of the staff did their marking shrunk and transformed itself into a strange mushroom-shaped console.

  Finally recovered from the shock of the massive discharge of energy her brain at last correcly translated the images from her surroundings. She clutched Ian’s arm, her attentions temporarily turned away from the un-conscious form of the Doctor.

  ‘Ian, look! Can’t you see?’

  Ian frowned as, prompted by Barbara, his own surroundings began to redefine themselves. ‘What is it?’ he asked, still a little dazed.

  The memories came flooding back, as everything began to make sense. ‘It’s the Ship,’ said Barbara, almost wonderingly. ‘We’re in the TARDIS!’

  Although still dazed from her shock, and confused by Barbara’s strange manner, for Susan the TARDIS was home, and she recognised it for what it was practically as soon as she came to. So it was easy for her to find her way out of the control room and down one of the several corridors which led off it into the interior of the Ship.

  The one she followed took her to a small utility room adjacent to the living quarters. There she went to a first-aid cabinet and took out a roll of striped bandage, from which she cut off a length with a pair of scissors. She put the bandage in one of the large pockets of her dress, and absent-mindedly put the scissors in there too.

  Remembering the water, she walked over into the TARDIS rest room. This was a large chamber about the size of the control room which she and her grandfather, and latterly Ian and Barbara, used for recreation and relaxation. A large bookcase dominated one entire wall of the room, containing first editions of all the great classics of Earth literature: the Complete Works of Shakespeare some of which were personally signed); Le Contrat Social of Rousseau; Plato’s The Republic; and a peculiar work by a French philosopher called Fontenelle on the possibility of life on other planets (that one had always made the Doctor chuckle). Susan’s English teacher at Coal Hill would have been interested to note that there was nothing by Charles Dickens in the Doctor’s library.

  There were several items of antique furniture in the room, none as austere as those in the control room. Looking out of place by a magnificent Chippendale chaise-longue and a mahogany table, on which stood an ivory backgammon set, was the food machine—a large bank of dials and buttons, similar to a soft-drinks dispenser on Earth. Susan tapped out the code on the keyboard which would supply water.

  She frowned as the LED showed that the machine was empty. However, a plastic sachet of water was nevertheless produced. Confused, Susan shrugged, collected the sachet, and made her way back to the control room.

  Susan ran all the way back, anxious not to let a minute be wasted in treating her grandfather. But when she reached the control chamber she stood stock still, frozen in horror, all thoughts of her grandfather temporarily banished from her mind.

  Barbara and Ian were still bent over the unconscious form of the Doctor, but they leapt to their feet instantly when they heard Susan’s cry of terror. They followed Susan’s finger as it pointed, trembling, at the double doors behind them.

  Soundlessly they were opening, flooding the control room with a bright, unearthly light. Beyond that light the three travellers could see nothing—just a white, gaping void.

  Unable to move, Susan managed to say in a terrified whisper: ‘The doors... they can’t open on their own... They can’t...’

  And then her voice faded away, as she looked at the control console still bathed in an overhead shaft of light. The central time rotor was stationary, a normal indication that the TARDIS had landed. But the few displays which were still operational clearly showed that the time-machine was still in flight.

  And if that was so, reasoned Susan, all three of them should have been blasted to atoms the very second the exit doors opened and let in the furious uncontrollable forces of the time vortex. And less importantly, but even more curiously, the door controls on the console were still in the locked mode.

  By rights the doors should not be open; and by rights they should all be dead. What was happening to the TARDIS?

  Ian gestured vaguely over to the figure of the Doctor on the floor. ‘Perhaps he opened the doors before he cut his head open?’ he suggested. ‘Perhaps there was some kind of a fault, a delayed reaction, and they’ve only just opened?’

  Susan looked down at her grandfather but made no move towards him. ‘No... he wouldn’t... not while we were in flight...’ Her voice was weak and tremulous.

  ‘Then they must have been forced open when we crashed,’ said Barbara.

  ‘Crashed?’ asked Ian.

  ‘Yes, Ian, try and remember. There was an explosion and then we all passed out.’

  ‘No,’ said Susan firmly. ‘The Ship can’t crash—at least not in the way you mean. It’s impossible... And anyway, the controls say we’re still in flight...’ Her voice tailed off again, and then after a short pause: ‘Listen.’

  ‘Listen to what, Susan?’ asked Ian. ‘There’s nothing to hear:

  The girl nodded. ‘That’s right... Everything’s stopped. Everything’s as silent as... as...’ In the shadowy, eerie surroundings of the control room she could not bring herself to say the word ‘grave’.

  ‘No,’ said Barbara. ‘There is something. Listen.. As their ears strained to do so, they heard a series of long drawn-out sighs, in-out in-out in-out, like the sound of a wounded man trying to catch his last breaths before dying. In the darkness it sounded ominous and frightening.

  Barbara shuddered. It must be the life support system of the TARDIS pumping oxygen into the Ship, she reasoned; it had to be...

  Susan looked around the control room. The light from the open doors illuminated the faces of her two teachers with a ghastly brilliance, making their features unreal and ghoulish. Other lights cast uncanny shadows on the walls; the shadow of the Doctor’s eagle-shaped lectern threatened them like a nightmarish bird of prey. The shaft of brightness over the control console grew stronger and then fainter, and then stronger again, as if it were pulsing in time to the all-pervasive breathing sound. Susan raised a hand to her forehead and discovered she had broken out into a cold sweat.

  Barbara came forward to comfort her. ‘Susan, it’s all right.’

  Susan shrugged herself free of the schoolteacher’s touch. ‘No,’ she insisted, her eyes darting in all directions, ‘you’re wrong. I’ve got a feeling about this. There’s something inside the Ship!’

  ‘That’s not possible,’ said Ian with more conviction than he was beginning to feel in the circumstances.

  ‘You feel it, don’t you?’ Susan asked Barbara, almost accusingly.

  Barbara felt a shiver run down her spine, but was determined not to let her fear show. ‘Now, don’t be silly, Susan,’ she ch
ided and pointed over to the Doctor on the floor. ‘Your grandfather’s ill.’

  ‘What?’

  Barbara looked strangely at her former pupil. This was not the way she normally acted. At any other time she would have been at her grandfather’s side in an instant. But instead she seemed to be looking glassy-eyed into the distance; the shock of the crash—or whatever it was—must have affected her more than she had imagined. Even Ian seemed more lethargic and quieter than usual.

  ‘Susan, snap out of it!’ she said sternly. ‘Give me the bandage.’

  Shaken out of her trance, Susan handed the bandage over to Barbara who looked quizzically at the multi-coloured stripes on the fabric.

  ‘The coloured part is the ointment,’ explained Susan. ‘You’ll find that the colour disappears as it goes into the wound. When the bandage is white the wound is completely healed.’

  Barbara nodded approvingly and bent down to the Doctor again. After mopping his brow with her handkerchief and the water Susan had brought, she wrapped the bandage around his head. She couldn’t resist a small chuckle; with the multi-coloured bandage around his head, the Doctor looked just like a pirate.

  While the two girls had been tending to the Doctor Ian had sauntered over to the open doors. He was determined to see what—if anything—might lie outside. When he got to within three feet of them, they closed with a resounding thud!, plunging the control room once more into semi-darkness. Barbara and Susan looked up at the noise, as Ian turned around to face them.

  ‘Did you do that?’ he asked urgently.

  ‘We haven’t moved.’ Susan tried hard to keep her voice steady, but the fear she felt was apparent. ‘Neither of as has touched the controls.’

  Ian turned and moved away from the doors and back towards his two companions. As he did so, the doors swung open again, bathing the control room once more in an unearthly light. He spun round and began to walk smartly back to the doors which, as he approached them, thudded shut one more.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ he asked irately. ‘Are you playing a game with me?’

  The two girls shook their heads. Susan looked particularly distraught. The Doctor and the TARDIS were the only two things in her life which had proved constant and true; and now her grandfather lay unconscious on the floor, and the TARDIS was beginning to behave with an almost malevolent unpredictability. If those two things failed her what would she have left?

  Suddenly she shook herself out of her uncertainty and sprang to her feet. With the Doctor out of action she was the only one who could possibly discover what was happening to the TARDIS.

  ‘I’m going to try the controls,’ she resolved.

  Barbara muttered a word of caution but Susan strode resolutely over to the central control console. She reached out a hand to touch the controls on one of the six panels but before she could, her body convulsed, her back arched, and she fell away from the controls to join her grandfather unconscious on the floor.

  Ian rushed to her side, and felt automatically for a pulse. He looked over to Barbara. ‘She’s fainted,’ he said. ‘But I don’t understand it—she was perfectly all right a minute ago.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Barbara. ‘But a while before that you were all unconscious...’

  Ian stood up and moved to the control console. As he did so he staggered and seemed about to fall. Barbara was at his side in an instant.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, her voice full of concern.

  Ian shook his head. ‘I don’t know... I suddenly felt dizzy...’ He raised a hand to his brow. ‘And I’ve got this terrible headache...’

  ‘That’s not like you at all...’ said Barbara. Normally Ian was in the best of health. You don’t think it could be radiation sickness, do you? Like we had on Skaro?’

  ‘I don’t know, Barbara,’ Ian replied helplessly. ‘We don’t know what power that explosion may have unleashed...’

  ‘Sit down,’ urged Barbara. ‘Let me help you to a chair.’

  As they moved away from the console, Ian pointed to the doors. This time they had remained closed. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘What is going on around here? How could those doors have opened by themselves?’

  ‘Ian, you don’t think something could have taken over the TARDIS, do you?’ Barbara could still hear the steady in-out in-out breathing all around them; logic told her it was the TARDIS’s life support systems—but in the threatening gloom of the control chamber she was not too sure. Had an intruder somehow come aboard the TARDIS and was even now stalking them?

  ‘How am I supposed to know!’ snapped Ian and then immediately apologised for his sharp tone; the tension and uncertainty of their situation were beginning to affect him too.

  By their feet the Doctor began to groan. Barbara bent down to tend to him. ‘He’s beginning to stir,’ she said, and then looked at Ian in concern. ‘Ian, are you feeling better now?’ Ian said he was. ‘Well, take Susan and put her to bed. I’ll look after the Doctor.’

  Ian nodded, and picked up Susan gently in his arms. As he left the room he turned for one final look at Barbara kneeling in concern over the frail figure of the old man. ‘If anything happens, let me know.’

  Barbara smiled, a half-hearted smile which did nothing to conceal the anxiety she felt. ‘What could happen?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know...’ said Ian, and realised that in this ignorance lay their greatest weakness. If they knew what they were up against they could approach it rationally and conquer it. But in the darkness and silence of a strangely threatening TARDIS all they had was their fear of the unknown, a fear which was already tearing their nerves to shreds.

  As Ian left the room, the Doctor’s eyelids fluttered open. He looked up glassy-eyed at Barbara’s face. It seemed to take several moments for him to recognise her. And when he did his first concern was for his granddaughter.

  ‘Susan,’ he croaked through dry lips. ‘Is Susan all right?’

  Barbara smiled reassuringly down at him. ‘She’s fine. Ian’s taking care of her right now. But how are you?’ Satisfied that his granddaughter was well, the Doctor breathed a sigh of relief and allowed himself to examine his own condition. With the schoolteacher’s help he managed to sit up. ‘My head...’ he complained and felt the bandage.

  ‘You cut your forehead when you fell,’ explained Barbara. ‘But you’ll be all right; the ointment is working its way it.’ The coloured stripes on the bandage were much paler than before, a sure sign that Susan’s treatment was working.

  The Doctor massaged the back of his neck. ‘It hurts here,’ he complained.

  Barbara examined the old man’s neck; she could see no sign of a lump or a bruise. As she looked, the Doctor let out a sigh of terrible anguish.

  Barbara was shaken: she had never seen the Doctor like this before. For the first time she realised how much they all depended on him and how central he had become to all their lives; if anything were to happen to him there was no telling how they would ever escape from the madhouse the TARDIS seemed to have become. Would Susan, a mere child, be able to operate the Ship’s controls by herself? Barbara knew that she and Ian certainly couldn’t.

  Looking into the deep impenetrable shadows which shrouded the control room, and listening to that laboured in-out in-out breathing, Barbara was suddenly worried and very, very scared...

  Ian carried Susan’s limp body down shadowy corridors until he reached the TARDIS’s sleeping quarters. As always, he wondered at the sheer size of the time-machine. Its corridors and passageways seemed to wind on forever and he knew that during his short time on board the Doctor’s Ship he had only explored a small fraction of them.

  In fact, all he had seen of the TARDIS was the control room and the living, sleeping and recreational areas. There was no telling what else might be hidden deep inside the time-machine.

  The Doctor and Susan had talked of a laboratory and a workshop, even of a conservatory and a private art gallery and studio, but the Doctor actively discouraged further
exploration of his ship. Even after long weeks of travelling together and their ordeals on prehistoric Earth and on Skaro he still did not quite trust the two schoolteachers who had forced their presence upon him in Totters Lane

  .

  Suspicious and ungrateful old goat, thought Ian as he opened the door to Susan’s room with his foot. Like the rest of the TARDIS Susan’s room had been plunged into a semi-darkness, and though Ian’s eyes had now become accustomed to the gloom, he still moved around the unfamiliar room with care. He found the bed and laid Susan gently upon it.

  Looking about the room he saw an antique oil lamp on a table and he lit it with a match from the box in his pocket. The flickering flame of the lamp distorted and magnified the shadows on the wall, but he was grateful for the light it afforded him.

  He picked up a patchwork quilt which was slung over a chair and covered Susan with it. The girl’s pulse was still racing, he noted, and she was running a temperature.

  She needed something to keep her cool, he decided. He left the room and went down the corridor to the nearby rest room. The Doctor had shown Ian and Barbara only recently how to operate the food machine, and Ian thought he must have mis-set the controls when the machine clicked and whirred and registered the fact that it was empty of water. Nevertheless, as with Susan before him, a sachet of water was produced and Ian took it, wryly thinking that perhaps the Doctor’s genius at inventing gadgets for all manner of things wasn’t as good as he made it out to be. Even in his present situation that thought gave him some strange satisfaction: the Doctor wasn’t all that clever after all, in spite of all his rhetoric.

  When he returned to Susan’s room he stopped dead in his tracks. Susan was wide awake and standing stiffly by her bed. Her right arm was raised and in her hand she pointed a pair of long scissors threateningly at Ian.

  Ian took an instinctive step backwards and regarded Susan warily. Her face was white, drawn and stretched, her stylishly cropped dark hair a wild mess; her eyes stared wide open and mad, blazing with terror.

  ‘Susan, what are you doing?’ he asked softly, at the same time taking a cautious step towards her.