Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction (2 page)

Susan nodded again. ‘Yes, it’s terrible.’ There was no visible wound but Susan began to massage her temple to ease away the evident pain she was feeling.

‘Let me look at it,’ urged Barbara, but Susan seemed to only half-hear.

‘My leg hurts too,’ she said, and bent down to rub her knee. Barbara led her to a chair. As she slumped into it, Susan sighed.

‘That’s better, the pain’s gone now...’ She looked around the staff room in a daze, blinked, and then some sort of comprehension seemed to dawn in her face. ‘For a moment I couldn’t think where I was...’

Barbara looked at her oddly and was about to question her further when Susan saw the body of the old man on the floor. She leapt out of her chair. ‘
Grandfather!
’ she cried and dashed over to him.

For the first time Barbara registered the presence of the old man, and for one ludicrous moment felt slightly annoyed that he had chosen the middle of the staff room in which to keel over. Then she too darted over to his side and bent over him in concern.

She looked at him curiously, not quite recognising his face; but her practical mind supposed he was one of the assistant teachers employed to stand in for those members of staff who had been laid off by the flu which was going around the area at the moment. He looked as though he might be a Latin or Religious teacher. There was a particularly nasty wound on the side of his head, and his long silver-white hair was flecked with blood.

‘He’s cut his head open,’ she said.

Susan suddenly took charge. ‘I’ve got some ointment.’

‘Good,’ approved Barbara. ‘And get some water too.’ Susan stood up and headed for the door, and Barbara watched her as she passed the large table in the centre of the staff room. Suddenly Susan moaned in dismay as an overwhelming dizziness overcame her. Barbara watched her stagger away from the table.

‘Susan, what is it?’ she cried out, and made to go after her.

Susan steadied herself and waved aside Barbara’s offer of assistance. She seemed to have forgotten the old man lying on the floor and was instead pointing at the figure of Ian slumped in his chair.

‘Shouldn’t we go and help him?’ she asked.

What was the girl talking about? thought Barbara irately. Ian was only asleep after all; the way Susan was going on you’d have thought he was on his last legs!

‘Don’t be silly, Susan,’ she snapped. ‘Mr Chesterton is perfectly all right.’ She turned her attention to the old man. ‘But I don’t like the look of this cut at all...’

Susan suddenly remembered. ‘Oh yes...’ she said slowly. ‘Water .’ And then in a quizzical voice: ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know!’ Barbara replied tetchily. ‘Just do as you’re told!’

With that, Susan left the room. Barbara took off her cardigan and laid it underneath the old man’s head. Satisfied that he was comfortable, she walked over to Ian who had unbelievably slept through the entire crisis. This time she managed to shake him awake.

He looked groggily at her. ‘You’re working late tonight, Miss Wright...’ he said, and then raised a hand to his aching forehead. For one moment he thought he might have had one drink too many at The Cricketers, the pub many of the teaching staff frequented after school hours.

‘Don’t be stupid, Ian,’ Barbara said. ‘It’s the middle of the afternoon—and you’ve missed your physics class,’ she continued as an added reproof.

Ian winced at being once more on the receiving end of one of Barbara’s reprimands. He attempted to stand up and promptly sat down again as the world spun sickenly around him. He groaned; perhaps he had spent his lunchtime at The Cricketers after all.

‘Do you think I could have a glass of water, Barbara?’ he asked.

‘Susan’s getting some.’

‘Susan?’

‘Yes, Susan Foreman.’

Still dazed, Ian looked around the staff room and saw the old man. ‘What’s he doing there?’ he asked slowly. ‘He’s cut his head,’ Barbara explained. ‘There’s nothing we can do until Susan gets back with the water and ointment.’

But Ian had already crossed over the staff room—with some difficulty—and was kneeling by the old man. He felt his chest and looked up at Barbara with relief.

‘His heart’s all right and his breathing’s quite regular.’ He brushed away the locks of white hair to examine the cut more closely. ‘I don’t think that cut’s as bad as you seem to think it is either.’

‘But what if his skull’s fractured?’

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 unconscious 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 chided 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.’