Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction (8 page)

Susan seemed embarrassed. ‘No, you know that isn’t true... but Grandfather... please be patient with him...’

Barbara was silent for a moment, wondering whether to pursue the matter further tonight.

‘Try and get some sleep, Susan,’ she advised. ‘In the morning it will all seem different.’

‘Yes, maybe you’re right,’ the girl said and yawned. ‘I’m feeling quite sleepy already.’

‘Can you find your way back to your room in the dark?’

Susan nodded. ‘Yes; I know the TARDIS as well as you’d know your own house—it’s my home.’

With that she wished Barbara goodnight and went off down the corridor to her bedroom.

Barbara closed and locked the door. realising once again how tittle she knew of the Doctor and Susan’s past. Susan’s vague references to it just then troubled her. Why indeed should Susan and the Doctor trust her and Ian? And why, for that matter, should they trust the Doctor and Susan? Despite superficial similarities, she reminded herself once again that they belonged to two entirely different species. Apart from being trapped together in the Ship they had nothing whatsoever in common with each other.

Banishing such doubts from her mind she returned to her bed. She was already feeling very, very sleepy...

The Doctor sat in his chair for over an hour, muttering quietly to himself and carefully going over recent events in his head. The drug he had administered to his three companions would give him ample time to think and come up with a way out of this dilemma; and, more importantly, it would keep Ian and Barbara safely out of the way.

The doors had opened, letting in a brilliant white light. Appearances suggested that the doors had opened during flight. Those of the TARDIS’s controls which still seemed to be functioning normally certainly appeared to support this supposition. But if that was so why hadn’t they been immediately sucked out into the raging time vortex through which they were travelling? And if they were indeed still travelling, why was the central time rotor, which normally rose and fell during flight, motionless?

Therefore, logic decreed that the TARDIS had landed.
But things aren’t always very logical, are they?
Barbara had said. The Doctor, whose entire life had been ruled by the application of cold, hard logic and emotionless scientific observation wondered whether the schoolteacher’s disturbing proposition was, in fact, a valid one.

But for the moment, he decided, it would be best to follow the path of logical deduction and reasoning, the path he could follow best.

So the TARDIS had landed somewhere. But where? The multiple images on the scanner did nothing to help; the last one, the one of the exploding star system, was in fact distinctly disquieting.

For a moment the Doctor allowed himself the indulgence of thinking that the sequence of images might be some sort of coded message. But a message from whom? No sooner had the idea crossed his mind than he dismissed it. It was a preposterous notion: nothing could so interfere with the TARDIS without his knowledge and permission.

The Doctor finally eased himself out of his chair. There was only one way to find out where they were. He would not bring himself to admit that it was what Barbara had suggested all along. He would open the doors and venture out of the Ship!

In his bed, Ian tossed and turned, unable to get to sleep. Even the Doctor’s drugged drink was having no effect on him. Just as he was about to drop off, the concealed lighting in his room would suddenly flash and rise to a painful brilliance, shocking him out of his drowsiness. Then the lights would fade until his room was as dark and gloomy as the rest of the Ship.

This continued for almost an hour before Ian decided he had had enough. Dragging himself out of bed, he put on a dressing gown and staggered over to the door which he had locked before retiring. Frowning, he noticed that it was now unlocked.

Warily, he opened the door and looked down the corridor. Seeing that no one was out there waiting for him in the shadows, he staggered off to the control room.

Back in his bedroom the lights slowly dimmed and then went out altogether.

Back in her room Barbara was experiencing the same difficulties as Ian in getting to sleep. Although Barbara was not aware that she had been drugged, it was as if the pulsing lights which kept her awake were fighting a furious battle with the effects of the Doctor’s sleeping drug, intent on keeping her awake.

Finally she resolved to give up the struggle to fall asleep, and got up out of bed. She decided to go down to the rest room and pick up a book to read from the Doctor’s wide-ranging library. If she was lucky she would find something by Trollope; if anything could put her to sleep that would.

Slipping into her dressing gown she opened her bedroom door. Although the strange pulsating lights, presumably another malfunction of the TARDIS, had kept her awake, the Doctor’s drug was still having a potent effect upon her. If she hadn’t been so groggy she would have realised, as Ian had done, that her door had been mysteriously unlocked.

She looked up and down the darkened corridor, trying to remember the way to the rest room; it was so difficult to establish any sense of direction in this gloom. Which way, which way?

Still she could hear the in-out in-out breathing of the TARDIS life support system. Crazily she thought she could hear it changing its rhythm and tone, almost as if it was calling out her name:
Bar-bar-a
...
Bar-bar-a
...

She shivered, and then silently scolded herself for behaving like a silly schoolgirl. This was the TARDIS, she reminded herself, a precision-built machine; it was not a Gothic mansion from the latest Hammer horror film.

Nevertheless she walked smartly off in the direction away from the imaginary ‘voice’—and, in her superstition-derived ignorance, also away from the rest room.

Barbara first suspected she was lost when she became aware that the corridor in which she was walking seemed to be sloping downwards—and wasn’t the rest room on a slightly higher level than the sleeping quarters? She stopped and looked about her in the half-light.

She had come to a dead end. Behind her wound the corridor she had travelled down; to her sides were two roundelled walls, in one of which there was a door. Deciding that she couldn’t get any more lost than she was already she hesitated for a second, and then opened the door.

The door opened out onto a vast laboratory, almost the size of a school assembly hall. Lines of long wooden benches were covered with the most amazing variety of scientific tools Barbara had ever seen in her life. Everything from old Chinese abacuses to futuristic items of equipment, the purposes of which Barbara couldn’t even guess, seemed to be here.

One entire wall was lined with computers, all of which should have been chattering busily away to each other, but which, like everything else in the TARDIS, were now deathly silent. Another wall was covered with complicated charts and diagrams.

Barbara gave a silent whistle of appreciation; even she, as unscientific as they came, couldn’t help but be in awe of the size and comprehensiveness of the Doctor’s laboratory.

She gave herself a little pat on the back when she saw the huge shelves on the far wall, packed to overflowing with files, papers and books. She might not have found the rest room, but surely here she would find something to take her mind off her current situation?

But when she reached the bookcase she was sorely disappointed. Book after book was merely another dry scientific treatise. Barbara looked despairingly at what to her was merely mumbo-jumbo, much of it written in strange languages and multisyllabic words she didn’t know, or unearthly scripts she couldn’t decipher. Sighing, she replaced a book and turned to go.

It was then that she noticed the door which, hidden in the shadows cast from the bookcase, she hadn’t seen before. It seemed to be made of some heavy metal and was opened by a rotating circular handle. Curiosity got the better of the schoolteacher and she reached out to open it.

And then her heart missed a beat as a short sharp noise echoed throughout the laboratory. Turning around fearfully, she whispered, ‘Who’s there?’

No reply.

Barbara looked around and then breathed a sigh of relief as she saw the book on the floor. Obviously she had not replaced all the books carefully enough, and one had dropped to the floor.

Smiling, and chiding herself for her jumpiness, Barbara bent down to pick up the book. But then another book fell off the shelf. And then another. And another. And another—until every single book on the shelf was seemingly throwing itself through the air at Barbara.

Box files fell off the shelves and sprang open, sending their contents swirling and scattering in all directions, as though caught up in some eerie, intangible wind.

Barbara looked on in terror as a whole rack of test tubes swept off a nearby workbench and fell to the floor, smashing into a thousand pieces, their contents giving off noxious fumes.

Other vials and glass tubes rattled madly away in their containers. By her side a chair upended itself and crashed to the floor. Charts fell off the walls, and the floor began to shudder sickeningly beneath her.

‘Who’s there?’ she cried. ‘Why don’t you just leave me alone!’

But still the nightmarish visitation continued. Finally Barbara snapped and, terrified, ran out of the room—straight into Susan.

Barbara sobbed with relief when she saw her. ‘What is it?’ the girl asked.

‘In there,’ said Barbara, nodding back towards the laboratory. ‘There’s something in there, throwing about all the books, equipment, everything...’

Susan looked warily into the room. The devastation was apparent but nothing was moving there now. ‘It’s quiet now,’ she said, and then asked suspiciously: ‘But what were you doing in Grandfather’s laboratory?’

‘I wanted to get a book,’ explained Barbara, gasping for breath. ‘But I couldn’t find one; so I decided to explore the other rooms in the lab.’

‘Other rooms?’ asked Susan urgently. ‘What other rooms?’

‘Why, the one behind that door,’ Barbara said and pointed to the heavy door in the shadows of the bookcase.

Even in the gloom, Barbara could see Susan’s face turn chalky white. ‘That door... do you know what’s behind that door?’ she asked. Barbara shook her head, and Susan continued. ‘Some of Grandfather’s experiments require vast amounts of power and radiation—the isotopes are stored behind that lead-screened door. If you’d’ve gone in there without a protective suit you wouldn’t have survived for more than thirty seconds...’

‘And I was about to open that door,’ said Barbara slowly, ‘when the attack happened.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what it was, but whatever it was it just saved my life...’

‘You mean, you really do think that some sort of intelligence has come aboard the TARDIS?’

‘Yes, Susan,’ said Barbara. ‘Don’t you feel it too, that feeling that we’re being watched all the time?’

Susan shivered. ‘Don’t let’s talk about things like that now,’ she urged. ‘Let’s get back to Grandfather and Ian.’

In the control chamber the Doctor switched on the scanner screen and played back the sequence of images which, like everything else displayed on the screen, had been automatically recorded in the TARDIS’s memory banks. Once again the familiar pattern of the
Malvern Hills
, the planet Quinnius, and the exploding star system was being repeated. This time, however, the exit doors did not open.

He searched his mind, looking for an explanation, but found he could not make head or tail of it. Defeated, he shook his head and deactivated the scanner.

He wandered around the central console to another of its six control panels, the one which included the mechanism which would open the TARDIS’s great double doors onto the outside world. For a moment he considered the wisdom of the action he was going to take. Then, flexing his fingers, he lowered one ringed and bony hand down to open the doors.

Before he could reach and operate the control he felt two strong hands close tightly around his neck, dragging him back, attempting to throttle him. In desperation the Doctor struggled to shrug off the attack and then managed to turn around to confront his unknown assailant.

It was Ian. Wild-eyed and obsessed, he grabbed viciously at the Doctor’s throat. Amazingly the frail old man was able to push the younger man away and, still suffering from the effects of the Doctor’s drug, Ian fell crashing to the floor.

Massaging his throat, the Doctor staggered over to a chair as Barbara and Susan burst into the room. Barbara took in first the figure of Ian falling senseless to the floor, and then the Doctor, stunned and gasping for breath on a chair.

She rushed over to Ian’s side. Susan ran to her grandfather.

‘It’s no use pretending now!’ crowed the Doctor as he got his breath back. ‘I was right! It was you all along!’

‘Don’t just sit there!’ cried Barbara, not listening.
‘Come over here and help him!’

‘Help him?’ spluttered the Doctor. ‘You saw what he tried to do! He nearly strangled me!’

‘I saw nothing!’ Barbara snapped back. ‘All I can see is that he’s fainted... just like Susan...’

‘Susan didn’t faint,’ retorted the Doctor angrily. ‘It was you who told her she did—and I very nearly believed you!’

‘What does it matter?’

The Doctor, not as hurt as he would have liked to have made out but merely shaken, stood up with the help of a confused Susan.

‘Matter, young lady, matter?’ he said with affronted dignity. ‘That barbarian down there very nearly strangled me! He’s no better than those cavemen we met!’

Barbara was no longer paying any attention to the Doctor’s self-righteous prattling. ‘But he has fainted,’ she repeated. ‘Look at him.’

‘Oh, he’s merely play-acting,’ dismissed the Doctor, without bothering to look down at the unconscious schoolteacher.

Barbara looked up seriously, her face set in firm concern. ‘Doctor, he
has
fainted and I can’t believe he wanted to kill you. Don’t you see that something terrible’s happening to all of us?’