Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead (2 page)

He turned away from the view below. Beside him stood a man in black. ‘Who are you?’ said Turlough.

‘Your Guardian,’ said the man.

Turlough looked down once more at the scene below and then again at the stranger. ‘What is this place?’

The stranger smiled.

‘Am I dead?’

‘No,’ said the dark stranger.

Turlough thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think I would really care if I were dead. I hate Earth.’

The man in black smiled again. ‘You wish to leave?’

‘Is it possible?’

‘All things are possible.’

‘Then get me away from here!’

The man in black, who called himself Guardian of the boy, was well pleased. But there was no love in the smile that he now gave his protégé. ‘First we have to discuss terms.’

Turlough could never remember exactly what then transpired in that strange nowhere. He knew only that a terrible pact was made between himself and the man in black, and that when he felt drawn back again to the Earth below and had despaired in his heart at the prospect of life again on that planet, the man who called himself his Guardian had cried out, ‘Do you agree?’ and he, Turlough, had answered, ‘Yes!’

The boy lying unconscious beside the twisted wreckage of the old car groaned.

‘He’s been lucky,’ said Doctor Runciman, turning to the Headmaster as he finished his examination. ‘No bones broken. Just slight concussion.’

‘It’s a wonder they weren’t both killed.’

Turlough groaned again.

‘He’s coming round.’

Turlough opened his eyes. The faces of Doctor Runciman and the Headmaster swam mistily into view. He felt a paralysing sense of doom. He began to mutter deliriously.

‘Steady on, old chap. You’ve had a bit of a knock.’

But it was no fear of Runciman or Mr Sellick that chilled the boy’s heart; he had just vowed to kill one of the most evil creatures in the Universe.

As soon as Turlough had been carried to Doctor Runciman’s Range Rover and was on his way back to school, the Headmaster turned his attention to the crashed car. ‘What’s the damage your end, Brigadier?’

Two brogue shoes and legs clad in cavalry twill protruded from under the twisted Humber. Their owner continued his unseen examination of the car, though not without casting certain aspersions on the inmates of Brendon School. ‘In thirty years of soldiering I have never encountered such destructive power...’ There was a glimpse of harris tweed as the speaker began to crawl from under the chassis, ‘... as I have seen displayed in a mere six years of teaching, by the British Schoolboy!’ A greying, military figure drew himself up to his full height. ‘It’s occasions like this that justify the return of capital punishment,’ growled the old soldier.

It was Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.

2

To the boys of Brendon School, the Brigadier was just part of the fixtures and fittings, like Matron’s dreaded cascara or the Headmaster’s smelly Dobermann. They knew nothing of his distinguished career with UNIT, the top-secret security organisation, and would certainly have been amazed, had they known, that the blimpish but kindly assistant master was for many years the friend and colleague of a Time Lord from Gallifrey.

It was a long time now since the Doctor and the Brigadier had met. Yet, on that summer’s day in 1983, there was one thing that united them. While, at Brendon School, the Brigadier surveyed the wreckage of his beloved Humber, far out in space the Doctor was assessing the damage to a broken-down TARDIS (of which he was equally fond).

Without warning a savage and unfamiliar alarm had sounded on the console, at which moment all temporal and spatial progress had come to a shuddering halt.

Tegan and Nyssa picked themselves up from the corner of the control room where they had been thrown by the violence of the emergency stop. They both felt in need of reassurance after the sudden jolting, but there was no point in talking to the Doctor — already at work on the console –

as the continuing shriek of the claxon made communication impossible.

The silence, when the alarm was finally switched off, was a relief in itself. The Doctor turned from the systems panel. ‘Warp ellipse cut-out,’ he announced casually, and began to pull the whole circuit board apart.

The news meant very little to Tegan, who wondered if it was a polite way of saying they had run out of petrol.

Nyssa understood more of the Doctor’s technical jargon.

She leaned over his shoulder. ‘That would mean we were near an object in a fixed orbit in time as well as space.’

The Doctor didn’t answer, but continued to make a rough and ready modification of the circuit.

Nyssa watched suspiciously. ‘Doctor, you’re short-circuiting the cut-out.’

‘The sounding of the alarm was a pure malfunction.’

‘Suppose there was a ship on collision course with the TARDIS!’

‘A ship in a warp ellipse?’ The Doctor moved to the navigational controls. ‘Do you know what the statistical chances of that are?’

‘Several billion to one.’

‘Precisely.’ The Doctor completed the resetting of the co-ordinates and the column began to rise and fall. They were under way again.

Tegan had overheard enough of the conversation to be thoroughly alarmed. As she saw it, they were going the wrong way down a motorway on the optimistic assumtion there was no other traffic. ‘But if there’s even a chance of one of those ships on a collision course...’

The Doctor interrupted her impatiently. ‘There’s a chance of anything!’ Did the wretched girl expect him to hang about some crossroads in space, simply because a redundant alarm had accidentally gone off? The type of vessel it was designed to detect had never ever been built

— well not so far as he knew. But, seeing the hurt and anxious look on Tegan’s face, he smiled reassuringly.

‘Statistically speaking, if you gave typewriters to a treeful of monkeys, they’d eventually produce the words of William Shakespeare.’

Nyssa had been watching the empty starfield on the scanner screen, and was perturbed by a dull red glow that appeared in the far distance. She cried out.

But the Doctor was busy lecturing Tegan. ‘Now you and I know, that at the end of the millenium those monkeys will still be tapping out gibberish...’

‘Doctor!’ Nyssa was staring, horror-struck, at the screen.

The red glow was brighter, closer, and had taken on a very solid shape. ‘Something’s coming straight for us!’

The Doctor and Tegan spun round. Out of the void of space a blood-red ship loomed towards them. The Doctor hurled himself at the console.

‘We’ve got to get out of the way!’ yelled Tegan.

‘We can’t!’ cried the Doctor, desperately wrestling with the controls. ‘We’ve converged with a warp ellipse.’

The impossible had happened; forces beyond the control of the TARDIS’s navigational system impelled them towards a fatal impact with the on-coming ship. The scanner flared a violent crimson as the vessel filled the whole screen.’

Tegan screamed. ‘We’re going to crash!’

‘Hold tight! I’m trying to materialise on board.’

The TARDIS vibrated to the point of

disintegration. The two girls gripped the side of the console in terror. Tegan closed her eyes.

She opened them again as she felt the shaking die away.

She noticed that the red vessel had gone from the screen. A gloomy interior presented itself to the scanner.

‘Just made it,’ said the Doctor rather shakily.

Tegan thought back to the Doctor’s parable of the typewriters. ‘Seems as if a monkey has just written
Hamlet
!’

she muttered sarcastically.

In the sick-bay of Brendon School, Miss Cassidy, the Matron, ruled supreme.

‘Right, into bed with you, young man.’

Turlough viewed the iron-framed beds on either side of the sterile, unfriendly room. On one, the starched sheets had been folded back ready for the injured boy. ‘Matron, I’m perfectly all right.’

‘Mild concussion and shock. You heard what Doctor Runciman said.’

Turlough had no intention of submitting to the dictatorial old harridan. ‘I’m not going to bed.’

Matron regarded the boy as a Sergeant-Major might some young recruit who has just said he would really rather not get his hair cut. Nor would her voice have been out of place on the parade ground. ‘Just for once, Turlough, you can do as you’re told. You’re in enough hot water already.’ She marched him smartly to the waiting bed.

Turlough conceded defeat, and slipped between the bedclothes. He shivered at the touch of the cold, unwelcoming sheets and looked in dismay round the empty room. He felt trapped.

Then he saw the crystal on the bedside table. ‘Where did this come from?’

Matron looked up from where she was tidying Turlough’s clothes. ‘It was in your jacket pocket — and that was in a fine old mess, I don’t mind telling you.’

Turlough picked up the cube to examine it more closely; then dropped it furtively behind the water jug.

The Headmaster had come into the sick-bay.

Mr Sellick looked unenthusiastically at the reclining Turlough. ‘Well, Turlough, how are you feeling?’

‘Much better thank you, sir.’

‘Which is more than the Brigadier can say about his car.’

Turlough closed his eyes at the laboured sarcasm.

The Headmaster peered at the sullen, uncooperative boy. ‘I don’t understand you, Turlough. You make no effort in games. You refuse to join the CCF. You do little work in class — though you’ve got a first-class mind. And now this!’ A look of weary disgust passed across his face, as if Sally, the Dobermann, had just disgraced herself in the drawing room.

Turlough gazed at the ceiling, and wondered if he could really despise the Headmaster more than Canon Whitstable, the school Chaplain.

The Headmaster droned on with a catalogue of Turlough’s inadequacies.

‘I wasn’t driving, you know.’

‘What?’ The Headmaster stammered to a halt, like a speaker forced to abandon a prepared text. ‘The Brigadier’s car.’

‘But Ibbotson said...’

‘I didn’t want Ibbotson to get into trouble.’

The Headmaster looked curiously at Turlough.

‘I went along in case he got hurt. I knew he wasn’t really able to drive the car.’

‘I see.’

The Headmaster didn’t see at all. He was thoroughly confused. Could it be that some of the values of Brendon School had rubbed off on this sixth-form dissident? It was unlike Turlough to take the rap for someone else; but Turlough was a very unlikely boy.

Turlough stared at the Headmaster. The Headmaster found himself unable to turn away from those cold, clear, blue eyes. There was certainly something quite remarkable about...

‘Turlough must get some sleep, Headmaster.’

‘Of course, Matron. I’ll look in again later.’

Miss Cassidy escorted the Headmaster from the room, and, with a last glance at the recumbent boy, closed the door.

Turlough instantly sat up, leaned across the table, and picked up the cube.

It was geometrically perfect and made of some immensely hard, crystalline substance, not of the Earth nor any other planet with which he was familiar. It was as clear as water from a mountain stream and refracted the cold light of the room most strangely.

As he gazed into the icy transulence, he found himself trembling. Something had invaded his consciousness. He could see an immense white cloud. Then he remembered when he had been himself, but beyond himself. ‘I thought it was just a dream,’ he murmured, half in wonder, half in fear.

He felt a strong current thrill through his body. No longer inert, the cube began to glow until the whole room was suffused with light.

From somewhere beyond space and time a great voice spoke. ‘Waking or sleeping. I shall be with you... until our business is concluded.’

And Turlough remembered the man in black, and the terrible bargain that had been made. He nerved himself to speak. ‘Why can’t
you
destroy this Doctor?’

‘I cannot be involved,’ came the Olympian voice of the dark stranger who called himself Turlough’s Guardian. ‘I may not be seen to act in this matter.’

Turlough recoiled at the thought of murder, but he was desperate to escape from Earth. He challenged the stranger.

‘Why am I still here?’

‘Patience, Turlough,’ the voice replied. ‘Already the elements of chance are ranged against the Doctor. Soon he will be separated from the TARDIS, and in your power!’

Slowly, the Doctor opened the door of the TARDIS and peered out. A long gloomy corridor stretched in front of him. He stepped from the police box followed by Tegan and Nyssa. As their eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, they looked round in amazement at the ship inside which they had materialised.

The companionway ahead of them was paved with marble, the walls panelled in onyx and lapis lazuli. To one side spiralled a grand staircase of polished gypsum, above which hung a great chandelier. Everywhere there were frescoes, mosaics and rich tapestries, delicate objects of porphyry and alabaster. It was like no vessel they had seen before.

They walked cautiously forward, anxious to prevent their feet from clattering on the hard floor.

‘No sign of any passengers,’ observed Nyssa.

‘They’re probably having cocktails with the Captain,’

joked Tegan nervously.

‘What?’

‘I mean it’s more like the
Queen Mary
than a spaceship’.

They were whispering, like children from the village who had wandered, uninvited, into the Big House. But no starched parlour maid rushed forward to ask them their business.

Another marbled avenue stretched before them, either side flanked by elegant columns. The light, like shafts of autumn sun, reflected ruby and gold in the rich inlaid stones of the pavement.

All three felt ill at ease and overcome with claustrophobia, as if buried alive in the funeral splendour of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

‘I take it back,’ said Tegan, unnerved by the absence of any crew. ‘This isn’t the
Queen Mary
. It’s the
Marie Celeste
.’