IT MAY – THOUGH it almost certainly will not – come as a surprise to discover that the police box that Chris Parsons saw in Professor Chronotis’s rooms was not a police box at all. It was in fact a TARDIS, a machine that could travel anywhere in space and time, and its humble battered wooden blue shell housed a vast, futuristic interior. Chris was also very wrong to think back to his childhood trips to London because this TARDIS was not a product of Metropolitan Police technology. It may – though it almost certainly will not – come as a terrible shock that this TARDIS was not from Earth at all but in fact originated on the distant planet Gallifrey, home of the awesomely powerful society of the Time Lords. And it could – though this would really be pushing it – elicit gasps of awe to learn that this TARDIS was the current occupancy, if not exactly the property, of that mysterious traveller in time and space the Doctor, a renegade Time Lord who had shunned the static and futile life on Gallifrey and set off many hundreds of years ago to explore the infinite universe.
The Doctor’s ‘mission’, if it could be called that, and it was something he would never have called it, had been simply to explore, to live a long life packed with wonder and excitement. Along the way, however, he had found himself dragged into the righting of wrongs, not for any grand and crusading reason but simply because he happened to be there and because it seemed the decent thing to do. Generally these adventures had taken place in the company of people from Earth, but relatively recently the Doctor had been joined by – or more accurately had foisted upon him – a member of his own people, the very same race he had spent so many centuries running from.
Her name was Romanadvoratrelundar – Romana for short, thankfully – and she was, at 125 years old, a recent graduate of the Academy of Time Lords. She had been selected by the White Guardian, a mysterious being even more awesomely powerful than the Time Lords, to assist the Doctor in a mission – and this really was a mission, much to the Doctor’s irritation – to recover the six segments of the Key to Time, an extraordinarily awesomely powerful object needed to restore the harmony of the cosmos. Mission more-or-less accomplished, the Doctor had intended to return Romana to Gallifrey and continue his travels alone but for the company of K-9, a mobile computer in the shape of a dog whose powers, if not exactly awesome, were pretty handy, battery life permitting. K-9 also had the advantage over Romana, from the Doctor’s point of view, in that he obeyed orders, came when whistled for, and was equipped with an off switch.
However, the Doctor’s success in the quest for the Key to Time had incurred the wrath of the vengeful Black Guardian, who was as equally awesomely powerful as the White Guardian, although his desire was to plunge the cosmos into eternal chaos. He had sworn in a very dramatic way to hunt the Doctor down and destroy him. To avoid detection, the Doctor had attached a device called a Randomiser to his TARDIS, his plan being to outfox the Black Guardian by popping up randomly all over the place. Neither Romana nor K-9 had the heart to tell the Doctor that that was pretty much what he did anyway.
Whatever the case, the addition of the Randomiser meant the Doctor certainly could not return Romana to Gallifrey. And this suited them both, because the Doctor liked good company on his travels and Romana had learnt to appreciate the full variety of what life had to offer beyond the narrow confines of Gallifrey. Neither of them had ever discussed these feelings with the other, of course. This was not because they were members of an awesomely powerful race with a completely different set of emotional responses – although they were – but because they were not (currently at least) the kind of people who did that sort of thing.
One of Romana’s particularly important discoveries during this period had been the extent of the Doctor’s fascination for a planet in the Mutter’s Spiral galaxy – Sol 3, known to its inhabitants as Earth. He had a great affinity for the people of this apparently distant and insignificant planet, and seemed to regard saving it from destruction as his special hobby. The Doctor had spent so much time there, and so much time in the company of its people, that it was hard to interact with him on any meaningful level without at the very least a working knowledge of the planet’s history, social structure and idioms.
And so one afternoon she plucked a computer tablet from the TARDIS library and read up on it all, history and culture, from the birth of the planet from drifting clouds of cosmic dust, through the Stone Age, the Trojan War, Homer, Shakespeare, the Great Break-Out into Space, right up to its eventual immolation in the 57th segment of time. (‘Been there, seen it, done it, wrote most of that, caused that,’ the Doctor kept saying over her shoulder, irritatingly.) It had been a very interesting 45 minutes, and now Romana was able to keep pace with the Doctor and his favourite planet.
And now they were back on Earth again, taking part in what the Doctor had assured her was an idyllically bucolic and very relaxing activity. As usual, Romana had her doubts.
They’d arrived in the Professor’s rooms a couple of hours earlier, but found them empty. Romana was concerned his absence might have something to do with the urgent message he had sent them. But the Doctor seemed almost glad of the chance to rush off through the back of the college to the river’s edge, where he threw a handful of large-denomination notes at a surprised young student, threw off his hat, coat and scarf and virtually bundled Romana into a tiny, wobbly wooden boat.
She couldn’t see the point in this at all at first. There was a perfectly serviceable path right next to the river, which they could have walked along and enjoyed exactly the same view without the possibility of capsizing. But the Doctor had seemed so delighted, marvelling at the wooden pole before thrusting it into the dirty water and using the full heft of his tall powerful frame to push off down the river like it was the Amazon, that Romana decided literally to go with the flow.
Now she reclined in the punt, the Doctor’s ancient Baedeker guide in one hand, the other trailing over the edge through the clear water, enlivened by the sunshine and the pleasing architecture of the college buildings along the banks. Unlike the Academy on Gallifrey, this was a fresh, vibrant place of learning, the most ancient of the colleges a mere eight hundred years old.
The Doctor stood at the other end of the punt, punctuating each stroke of the pole with the name of one of the great Cambridge alumni.
‘Wordsworth! Rutherford! Christopher Smart! Andrew Marvell! Judge Jeffreys! Owen Chadwick!’
Romana frowned. That name hadn’t been on her tablet. ‘Who?’
‘Owen Chadwick!’ the Doctor repeated emphatically. ‘Some of the greatest thinkers in Earth’s history have laboured here.’ He went on. ‘Newton!’
Romana nodded. She knew Newton. ‘“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,”’ she quoted.
The Doctor gave the pole a particularly hard shove through a muddy patch and the punt shot forward, as if to illustrate the truth of those words.
‘So Newton invented punting?’ asked Romana.
‘Do you know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had?’ said the Doctor airily. ‘Like all great thinkers, he encapsulated the simplest things. There was no limit to old Isaac’s genius.’
Romana smiled as the little boat passed under a bridge, the shadows of the willows on the bank casting criss-crossed patterns on the stone. ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ she mused, ‘that something so primitive can be so…’ She searched for the right word.
‘Restful?’ the Doctor suggested, shoving down again and causing the punt to wobble alarmingly.
Romana found the word. ‘Simple. You just push in one direction and the boat moves in the other.’
They emerged from under the bridge and Romana gazed at another grand college building beyond the trees that lined the riverbank. ‘I love the spring,’ she said. ‘All the leaves, the colours…’
‘It’s October,’ said the Doctor, a little shamefaced.
Romana blinked in surprise. ‘I thought you said we’d be arriving in May Week?’
‘I did,’ said the Doctor. ‘May Week is in June.’
‘I’m confused,’ said Romana.
‘So was the TARDIS,’ admitted the Doctor.
Romana decided to make the best of it. ‘Oh, I do love the autumn,’ she said, trying not to sound too critical. ‘All the leaves, the colours…’
The Doctor harrumphed. ‘Yes. Well, at least with something as simple as a punt nothing can possibly go wrong. No coordinates. No relative dimensional stabilisers. Nothing!’ He lunged down yet again. ‘Just the water, the punt, a strong pair of hands and the pole!’
The words were barely out of his mouth when the pole jammed solidly into another muddy patch with a loud squelch. The Doctor tried manfully to retrieve it as the punt shot forward but was finally forced to abandon it or join it in the River Cam.
Romana looked sadly at the retreating pole as they sailed on.
The Doctor slumped down into the punt. ‘Er… I think it’s about time for us to go and see if the Professor is back in his rooms. Ask me how.’
‘How?’
‘For every reaction,’ said the Doctor with one of his sudden toothy grins, ‘there is an opposite – and equally difficult – action!’
He rattled in the bottom of the punt and snatched up a long-handled wooden paddle, deployed for just such an emergency, swung it into the water and started to paddle furiously towards the bank.
The punt passed under another bridge. Romana was glad there was only one paddle. She’d had quite enough paddling during their adventure on the third moon of Delta Magna, when—
Suddenly her thoughts were interrupted. This interruption was not just in the normal sense, of something distracting her. It felt as if something had literally barged into her mind and cut off her train of thought.
It was a thin, distorted babble of inhuman voices. Lost souls in torment, crying out in terror and confusion. The words were indistinguishable but the anguish was unmistakable, and tugged at her hearts.
The punt swept out from under the bridge. Romana blinked, and the voices were gone. It had all happened in a second.
The Doctor’s expression was similarly disturbed, and he had stopped mid-paddle, looking around in surprise. Romana caught at his arm. ‘Did you just hear voices?’
The Doctor nodded solemnly, just as the sun passed under a cloud, sending a chill autumn wind along the river. ‘Yes – a sort of thin, distorted babble of inhuman voices.’
‘Then what was it?’ asked Romana.
The Doctor shrugged. ‘Probably nothing,’ he said very unconvincingly.
‘Doctor, please, let’s go in,’ urged Romana.
The Doctor nodded and resumed paddling ferociously towards the shore.
If the Doctor or Romana had looked up rather than just around at this point, much of what follows may have turned out quite differently. But as it happened, they did not. And so they did not see the man on the bridge.
Skagra looked down, making his first detailed survey of this planet of primitives. He enjoyed looking down on people.
He still wore the functional white coveralls of the Think Tank, but had added a long, shining silver cape and a wide-brimmed shining silver hat, the better to go unnoticed and unremarked upon on this remote and uncivilised world. He had been pleased to see, on his journey on foot into this small conurbation known as Cambridge, that he had been correct in this decision. Several of the primitives had even shouted words of social greeting to him as he passed through the streets, using untranslatable colloquialisms such as ‘Oi, Disco Tex, where are the Sex-o-lettes?’ and ‘Get her!’ and ‘Hello, honky-tonk!’ Yes, he was obviously passing for a native amongst these cattle.
This planet really was almost distressingly backward. The few pathetic satellites winking in its orbit stood as a measure of that. Its people travelled in ground cars with exhaust pipes that belched smoke, or on laughably basic self-propelled contraptions consisting of two wheels and very little else. Skagra had passed a trading post that trumpeted low-resolution magnetic videotape recording equipment as the height of invention and sophistication, suggesting that the primitives would never have to miss Coronation Street, whatever that was, ever again. Their economy seemed to consist of shoving dirty pieces of paper with the head of a great matriarch printed crudely on one side at each other. The Matriarch wore a crown, suggesting a type-B monarchy, which was presumably something to do with this important street where coronations were so regularly performed.
There was also this strange, slow and wasteful mode of transport along the waterway in small wooden craft. He had just seen a primitive male make an incredible hash of this simple, if pointless, task.
All things considered, Skagra decided Earth rated as a 2 out of 10 planet, bad but not quite the worst he’d ever seen, and it gained half a point for its breathable atmosphere and another half a point for its tolerably close sun.
In fact it was the perfect place to hide away in, just as his target had done. Somewhere in this quadrant of the city, the so-called ‘university quarter’, was what he had come for. He was approaching it circumspectly, still not quite convinced that anybody could be so stupid as to possess what he desired, yet put up no security systems to protect either it, or himself.
The leather handles of a large carpet bag were clutched tightly in one of his hands. Inside the bag was the sphere, the babble of its voices undetectable by the non-telepathic primitives of this planet. The sphere buzzed and hummed angrily, rubbing against Skagra’s leg like a pet demanding to be fed.
‘Soon,’ he told it curtly. ‘Very soon.’