Doctor Who: Terminus

When the TARDIS console is wilfully

sabotaged, the Doctor’s time machine becomes dimensionally unstable and begins to dissolve.

The area immediately affected is the room where Nyssa is working by herself.

As the creeping instability closes in on her, the TARDIS locks onto the nearest passing spacecraft, and the process of collapse is halted – but there is no sign of Nyssa.

Hoping that she has escaped onto the strangely deserted host liner, the Doctor goes looking for her. Whether or not he finds her, getting back to the TARDIS will be no easy business...

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DOCTOR WHO

TERMINUS

Based on the BBC television serial by Steve Gallagher by arrangement with the British Broadcasting Corporation

JOHN LYDECKER

A TARGET BOOK

published by

The Paperback Division of

W. H. Allen & Co. Ltd

A Target Book

Published in 1983

by the Paperback Division of W.H. Allen & Co. Ltd A Howard & Wyndham Company

44 Hill Street, London W1X 8LB

First published in Great Britain by

W.H. Allen & Co. Ltd 1983

Novelisation copyright © John Lydecker 1983

Original script copyright © Steve Gallagher 1983

‘Doctor Who’ series copyright © British Broadcasting Corporation 1983

Phototypeset by Sunrise Setting, Torquay, Devon Printed and bound in Great Britain by Hunt Barnard Printing Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks ISBN 0 426 19385 7

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Tegan was sure that there must be something to like about Turlough, but she couldn’t think what. It wasn’t his age, it wasn’t his looks – it wasn’t anything that she could name, but as they walked down the TARDIS

corridor his presence behind her gave Tegan a creepy feeling between the shoulders. It was like stories she’d heard of travellers back home in the Australian bush; they’d get the same crawling sensation and look down to see a snake about to strike.

‘These are all storerooms,’ she said, gesturing at a set of doors she was certain she’d never seen before, and she carried on past before Turlough could ask any awkward questions.
Just give him the tour, Tegan
, the Doctor had said,
you know your way around by now
, and she was left in the position of either tackling the job or else arguing for her own incompetence – which she wasn’t going to do, not in front of the Brat. Her assessment of Turlough was such that she’d trust him to store up the admission and use it to embarrass her sometime. It was about the
only
thing she’d trust him for.

At the next intersection, she stopped and glanced back. Turlough was looking the doors over as if he was weighing up whether or not to believe her. In the cool grey light of the timeless corridors he looked serene, almost angelic, but when he caught her eye and smiled there was a glint of something hard and unpleasant under the surface. If the Doctor looked for long enough, he’d probably see it as well... but then he’d never had reason to, and on the couple of occasions when she and Nyssa had tried to describe their doubts he’d dismissed them. Reservations about a new companion in the TARDIS could so easily look like a display of petty jealousy; and when the Doctor was around, Turlough’s act was very, very good.

He sauntered along slowly to catch up, and Tegan turned the corner. She saw with relief that, at last, they were coming into an area she recognised. Not only was so much of the TARDIS unfamiliar, she was convinced that parts of the craft quietly redesigned themselves when no one was looking.

Through this open area and out the other side, and they’d come to the corridor with the main living areas.

She slowed, so that Turlough could make up the distance. He didn’t hurry. Something else that had unsettled her; Turlough was no primitive, but there had been nothing in his background to prepare him for the intellectual and sensual shock of entering a craft containing the floorplan of a mansion in an external package the size of an old-earth police telephone box. So why was he taking it all so calmly?

‘Well,’ she said as they reached the living space,

‘that’s the layout.’ She tried not to sound too relieved at making it back.

‘It goes on forever,’ Turlough said politely, as if he was thanking an aunt for a present (
but he ought to be
standing there with his mouth hanging open and his mind
completely blown
, Tegan thought).

‘It can seem like it,’ she said. ‘It’s best if you don’t go wandering until you know your way around.’

‘How am I supposed to manage?’

‘Give me a call.’
That’s a joke
, she thought, and pointed across the corridor to the door of the room that she shared with Nyssa. ‘Most of the time I’ll be over there.’

‘Don’t I get a room?’

‘I was coming to that next.’

Well, to be honest, she’d been putting it off for as long as she could. She led him down to another of the doors and touched for it to open. ‘This one... isn’t being used,’ she said delicately.

Turlough went through and stood in the middle of the room, looking around. Tegan hesitated for a moment before she followed. This was Adric’s old room. Nothing inside had been touched or moved since they’d lost him. She could understand that it was only fair to let Turlough have somewhere that was within easy distance of the console room and the social areas, but why did it have to be
here
?

She knew the answer, of course; that the pain was a necessary part of the healing. But it didn’t make her feel any better.

‘It looks like a kid’s room,’ Turlough said.

Tegan did her best to keep the anger out of her voice. She almost succeeded. ‘It was Adric’s.’

‘Who?’

‘It doesn’t matter. But he wasn’t a child.’

Turlough barely seemed to have noticed. ‘I’ve had enough of children,’ he said, ‘what with that awful school on Earth.’

She relented a little. Maybe the Doctor was right, and she simply wasn’t giving him a chance. She said,

‘You can change things around to suit yourself.’

He picked up an interlocking mathematical puzzle from the desk, inspected it, and tossed it back. It rolled and landed on a heap of notes and charts. ‘All this can go, for a start,’ he said, and then he looked up and smiled. Practising for the Doctor. ‘That’s not unreasonable, is it?’

‘Do what you like,’ Tegan said stiffly. ‘It’s your place.’ And she turned and walked out.

When she was back in the corridor, she had to stop and take a deep breath. Steady, now, girl, don’t let him get to you. That’s how he works – he’ll needle away until you explode, and then he’ll stand there in complete innocence while you make a fool of yourself.

But why? We’ve taken him in, sheltered him... why isn’t it enough?

She stood under the corridor lights and listened to the even heartbeat of the TARDIS all around her. It was a good trick for getting calm. Tegan got half-way there, deciding it was the best she was going to manage, and went through to join Nyssa in their shared room.

‘He’s got the manners of a pig,’ she said.

Nyssa looked up from her work, surprised. ‘The Doctor?’

‘The brat! I had to show him all around the TARDIS. You’d think he was going to buy it.’

‘Perhaps he’ll settle down,’ Nyssa suggested, but Tegan wasn’t about to be reassured.

‘You know he threatened me?’ she said.

Nyssa laid aside the abacus that she’d been using to check over some data. ‘Seriously?’

‘It seemed serious enough at the time.’

‘Why?’

‘I found him playing around with a roundel. He tried to laugh it off, but he’s up to something.’

‘Have you told the Doctor?’

‘Not yet.’ And perhaps not ever, if Turlough managed to keep the Doctor convinced with his pretence of innocence.

Nyssa pushed herself back from the bench. Most of its surface was taken up with the intricate glassware tangle of a biochemical experiment, like a funfair modelled in miniature. She said, ‘Well, that means two of us are having a less than perfect day.’

‘Not you, as well,’ Tegan said, and she came over to take a look at the set-up on the bench. Nyssa had been saying for some time now that she felt she was losing her grip on all that she’d learned, and that it was time she went over some of the basics of the disciplines she’d acquired on her lost home world of Traken. The glassware and the spectral analyser had all come from the TARDIS’s extensive but haphazardly organised stores, maybe even from one of the rooms that Tegan had identified to Turlough in passing. There wasn’t much here that she could recognise, except for the shallow glass dishes in which bacterial cultures were growing and, of course, the book that Nyssa was using for reference. Of all the storage and information retrieval technologies available to the TARDIS, the Doctor insisted that books were the best. To put all of your faith in any more sophisticated system, he would say, is to ask for trouble; when a crisis hits and the lights go out, the time you need your information most is the very time that you can’t get to it. He called it a
Catch-22
situation. And when Nyssa wanted to know what a
Catch-22
situation was, the Doctor sent her to the TARDIS’s library – Earth, Literature (North American), twentieth century (third quarter).

Tegan said, ‘What’s the experiment?’

‘I’m trying to synthesise an enzyme. It’s one of the simpler procedures on the course, but it isn’t going right. I’m way out of practice.’

‘I thought you did this last time you had one of these blitzes. It went okay then.’

Nyssa sighed. ‘I know, but then I had Adric to do the calculation for me. This time I’m using my own figures, and they’re nowhere near as good. I’ve got a lot more ground to cover before I can afford to get lazy again.’ She looked despondently at the equipment and at the pages of notes that she’d scattered over every unoccupied space on the bench. This was to have been her occupation at one time; now it seemed that it was her last link with Traken, and she was in danger of losing it.