CHRIS ENTERED THE control room of the TARDIS, breathless from his run up from the guest suite. The big glass column in the centre of the console was coming to a halt, which Chris guessed was a signal that this miraculous craft had arrived at its destination.
Before he had time to say good morning, the Doctor had wrenched the red lever on the console and dived out of the big white doors as they opened. Chris followed Romana and K-9 outside.
The TARDIS had brought them to a place Chris recognised. These were the big water meadows outside the city. The autumn air was chill and spotted with fine drizzle.
The Doctor had already run to the river’s edge, where he stood sombrely examining an angler’s fold-out seat and a small collection of fishing ephemera.
‘We were too late,’ he said grimly, nodding to the river, where a body floated, face down.
Chris swallowed hard. ‘Why did the sphere attack him?’
‘Probably he tried to attack it,’ theorised the Doctor. ‘It must have a defence program of sorts.’
Chris stood back from the river, shaking himself. Suddenly he saw two things. At the edge of the big meadow they had arrived in, a brown Capri was parked, very badly. And passing the Capri at that moment, zigzagging erratically and slowly from side to side in what he could have sworn was a sulky, frustrated manner, was the sphere he’d heard so much about.
‘There!’ he called, pointing out to the meadow.
The others turned and followed his finger.
They watched as the sphere disappeared. But this was not like the dematerialisations of the TARDIS or the body of the Professor. Chris watched in amazement as the top section of the sphere was swallowed up by nothingness. Then the middle vanished, then the bottom. It was as if it had been gulped up by some huge invisible monster.
Chris was secretly pleased to see that the Doctor and Romana looked almost as perplexed by this as he felt.
‘Did you just see what I didn’t see?’ asked the Doctor, crunching forward over the long, dew-sodden grass.
‘No,’ said Romana, following him.
‘Neither did I,’ said Chris, following her. K-9 sped forward past the Doctor, leading their party, his gun probe extended from his snout.
‘It just vanished,’ said Chris.
‘That’s what I said,’ said the Doctor, staring up at the very spot the sphere had done whatever it had done.
The sphere drifted disconsolately back onto the command deck of the Ship.
Skagra, now once again clad in his preferred garb of neutral white, sat back in his command chair, his mind searching endlessly through reams of information stored in the Ship’s data core. There had to be something in all the fruits of his long researches into the Time Lords that would give him the power to understand the book. He knew better than to try to scan the book’s composition or molecular structure – as an ancient Artefact it would have been constructed using materials chosen specifically to resist analysis. But hours of checking, rechecking and cross-checking the data core had provided nothing that helped him.
He needed a Time Lord, or at least the mind of a Time Lord, to unlock the book’s secrets. Chronotis’s mind was useless, a hotchpotch of senility. But soon the sphere would return with the mind of the Doctor and, however erratic and childish that was, Skagra was certain he could force the truth from it.
‘My lord,’ said the Ship, gently insinuating itself into his thoughts, ‘the sphere, that construct of your unequalled genius, has returned to us.’
Skagra disconnected his data-spike, opened his eyes, and turned to the sphere. He held out his hand and the sphere bobbed gently onto his palm.
Skagra searched the sphere. A new mind had indeed been added. Skagra communed with it, asking it for knowledge of the book. Instead he got only confusing glimpses of the consciousness of another primitive human –
Piscine creatures, wriggling worms and quiet teas with the missus –
Skagra demanded an explanation from the sphere. The sphere, which had a rudimentary operating consciousness of its own, displayed a mental image – of the Doctor escaping from it into his ridiculous TARDIS.
Skagra almost shouted out loud. A curse word formed itself and almost pushed itself from his lips.
‘My lord, is anything wrong?’ enquired the Ship.
Skagra dismissed the sphere, which settled itself on the top of its cone.
‘Nothing is wrong,’ said Skagra levelly, though in his head he could see the Doctor being eviscerated by an enormous harpoon. He coughed. ‘Ship. Give me details of the Doctor’s TARDIS capsule.’
The Ship was ready with the information in microseconds. ‘My gracious lord, it displays the characteristics of a Gallifreyan time-travel capsule, Type 39, possibly Type 40.’
‘I know that,’ said Skagra, fighting the compulsion to exclaim. ‘Inform me of its present whereabouts. Is it still on this planet?’
‘Oh yes indeed, my lord,’ said the Ship. ‘It is in close proximity. In fact, intruders including your enemy, that nasty Doctor, are approaching us from it at this very moment.’
Skagra sat forward. ‘Show me!’
The Ship provided a holo-screen, showing a high angle from one of the sensors. On the screen was the Doctor, accompanied by two other humanoids. The first Skagra recognised as the fair-haired female who had accompanied the Doctor in some of the video-texts he had scanned. There was another male, unfamiliar to him but outwardly brutishly human and stupid-looking. Bringing up the rear was the Doctor’s irritating mobile computer, the unit so humorously titled K-9.
Skagra watched as the Doctor walked straight into the side of the Ship.
The Doctor, walking slowly forward into the empty meadow, suddenly cried out and rubbed his nose. He raised a commanding hand to halt the others.
‘Don’t move!’ he ordered. Then he stretched out his long arms tentatively. Chris watched as he seemed to touch an invisible wall, patting the thin air as if it contained solid shapes, like a mime artist.
‘K-9, there’s something here!’ he exclaimed.
‘Affirmative, Master,’ said K-9.
‘Then why didn’t you tell me there was something here, you stupid animal?’
‘This unit assumed that you could see it, Master,’ said K-9. ‘Apologies. I had not completed my scan and had not noted the object’s non-refractive exterior as regards the humanoid visual spectrum.’
‘I think it’s invisible,’ said Chris.
‘What is it, K-9?’ asked Romana.
‘It is a spacecraft, Mistress, of very advanced design,’ said K-9.
‘Are you sure about that, K-9?’ said the Doctor, rubbing his nose. ‘I’m sure we can spare a week for you to waggle your probes at it.’
K-9 sniffed. ‘Scan complete. Many of the ship’s functions are beyond my capacity to analyse.’
Chris reached out and touched the invisible hull of the craft. ‘If I build something this clever, I’ll want people to see it,’ he said.
‘K-9,’ said the Doctor, ‘what’s it powered by?’
‘Insufficient data,’ said K-9.
‘Aren’t we all?’
‘What about its origin?’ asked Romana. ‘Where does it come from?’ She reached out and felt the hull, touched it briefly and stepped back as if she wasn’t impressed.
‘Insufficient data,’ said K-9.
‘What does it look like?’ asked Chris.
‘A very large spacecraft,’ said K-9.
‘How large is very large?’ asked the Doctor.
‘One hundred metres long,’ answered K-9.
‘And is that large for a spacecraft, then?’ asked Chris. ‘Cause I’ve never see one.’
‘Well, I’ve seen bigger,’ said the Doctor, feeling his way down what was probably the side of the ship.
‘We’re not really seeing this one, are we?’ observed Romana.
‘There must be an entrance,’ said the Doctor. ‘Find the door and I’ll have us in there quicker than you can say sonic screwdriver…’
Chris suddenly noticed something. There was a low electronic hum coming from about six feet in the air.
‘That sounds like a door,’ said Romana.
There was another, lower hum from the same place. It seemed to Chris to be getting closer and closer to him. He stepped back nervously as a small line of grass right in front of him suddenly flattened as if something had been dropped on it.
The Doctor pushed in front of Chris and put a tentative foot forward. The heel of his boot made a metallic clang. He rocked forward to put his weight on it, and moved his other foot experimentally up a few inches. Then he pulled the first foot up cautiously and was suddenly standing a few inches above the ground.
‘Looks like stairs,’ mused the Doctor. ‘Well actually, it doesn’t look stairs, it feels like stairs. No way to welcome visitors, particularly those of us without legs.’ He nodded to K-9.
Chris suddenly had an idea. He picked up a big pile of autumn leaves that had been blown into the meadow, strode up to the line of flattened grass before the Doctor, and flung them upwards in his general direction.
The leaves flopped wetly down, onto nothing at all – but various levels of nothing at all, giving a vague brown wet indication of a staircase that led up to nowhere. ‘Aha,’ said Chris. ‘Well at least it gives us a vague idea of where the steps are.’
‘Well done, Bristol,’ said the Doctor. ‘Isn’t he good, Romana? Plucky old Bristol, that’s what this situation needed, a bit of practical thinking, and not afraid of getting his hands dirty.’
He turned and started going up the steps slowly, one by one.
Romana started after the Doctor. Two steps up, she turned with a smile. ‘Since you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, you can bring K-9.’
Chris rubbed his dirty hands on the sides of his jeans and looked down at K-9, who was wagging his tail impatiently. He bent down and hefted him up, grateful that he wasn’t as heavy as he looked.
‘Kindly exercise caution while conveying this unit, young master,’ said K-9.
Chris staggered in an ungainly fashion after the Doctor and Romana. So it was Sunday morning, and he was carrying a robot dog up some slippery steps into an invisible alien spaceship. Nobody was ever going to believe a word of this.
He glanced up to see that most of the Doctor had vanished into nothing, and now Romana was disappearing from her hat down. He quickened his pace –
There was no appreciable sensation whatever. Chris suddenly found himself seeing not the empty meadow but a small, spotlessly white chamber, like someone had flicked a switch behind his eyes. He jerked his head back, instinctively startled, and saw the meadow again.
‘Come on, Bristol!’ he heard the Doctor call.
Chris squared his shoulders and walked through.
He found himself in the white chamber. The Doctor and Romana were examining the featureless, curving white walls. Ahead of them was a large circular closed door.
‘Oh, I see,’ said Chris, setting K-9 down gratefully. ‘This must be the ship’s airlock. Assuming spaceships have airlocks, but then again yours doesn’t, but then again it’s not strictly a spaceship, is it?’
He trailed off, looked behind him, and saw the meadow, framed by another circular door. There was a low hum and it irised shut, cutting out the reassuring world of Cambridge and normality. A horrible thought struck him. ‘Wait a minute, nasty things happen to people in airlocks.’
‘Do they?’ asked the Doctor.
Chris nodded. ‘In films and things.’
‘Don’t worry, Chris,’ said Romana. ‘With a ship like this, Skagra could have blasted us down the moment we left the TARDIS.’
‘Don’t upset Bristol, Romana,’ said the Doctor. He knocked on the far door. ‘Come on, open up.’ He put his mouth to the door and sang loudly, ‘Why are we waiting?’
Chris was alarmed. ‘Hold on, this Skagra guy, he’s a cold-blooded killer. Are you sure it’s a good idea to provoke him? I mean, I’m not an expert, but when dealing with a psychopath is it a good idea to go shouting abuse through his letterbox?’
The Doctor gave Chris a look that was suddenly utterly sincere and serious. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Romana put a hand on Chris’s arm. ‘Don’t worry. The Doctor knows what he’s doing.’
The Doctor turned to her with a big grin. ‘Thank you, Romana,’ he said.
Romana smiled back. ‘Well, usually.’
And then suddenly there was a blazing glow of intense white light – and the Doctor was gone.
‘Where is he?’ asked Chris.
Romana looked around. ‘Where are we?’
Chris looked round in panic. He suddenly realised that he, Romana and K-9 were no longer where they had been. The Doctor hadn’t vanished – they had.
The room they stood in was still spotlessly white, and it was even smaller than the airlock.
But what made Chris’s blood run cold was the fact that there were no doors. Wherever they were, there was no way out.