VERY, VERY STUPID person. Or very, very clever person? He couldn’t decide.
So he opened his eyes and saw the frayed tassels at the ends of his scarf.
He twiddled the tassels.
Stupid or clever?
It might just be fun to twiddle the tassels for a lifetime, like a stupid person. If that’s what he was.
But if he turned out to be a clever person after all, that would be a very stupid thing to do.
‘Very stupid,’ he said.
He could talk. That suggested he was clever. Or did it? He dimly remembered that very stupid people could talk. Sometimes they did it a lot. Didn’t they?
‘Very stupid, very stupid,’ he said again.
Hold on, he thought. Who was he? He couldn’t decide if he was very stupid or very clever without knowing who he was. If he was very stupid he probably didn’t know who he was.
He decided to check to see if he knew who he was or not. ‘Who am I?’ he asked himself.
There were a few seconds of empty nothingness. He twiddled the tassels again. Twiddle twiddle twiddle. Twiddle-dee-dee, twiddle-dee-dee –
Dee. Dee? D? D for what?
Twiddly-diddly-Doctor.
Doctor.
The Doctor.
The Doctor!
Seven hundred and sixty years flashed through his mind in less than a second.
‘Very, very clever!’ he shouted, leaping to his feet from the command chair on the main deck of Skagra’s spaceship.
‘Ow ow ow ow ow!’ he said, slumping back into the seat, shutting his eyes and clutching his throbbing head. ‘Have you got anything for a headache, Skagra?’
There was no reply.
The Doctor opened an eye and looked around. ‘Skagra?’
‘My lord has departed,’ said a woman’s voice.
The Doctor opened his other eye and looked around again. There was nobody else on the command deck.
‘Who’s that?’ the Doctor called.
‘My lord,’ said the voice. ‘My wonderful lord Skagra.’
The Doctor swivelled right round in the chair. Still nobody about. ‘No, I don’t mean who’s departed, I mean who is that speaking?’
‘The servant of Skagra,’ said the voice. ‘I am the Ship.’
‘You’re the ship?’ The Doctor smiled. He realised that the voice seemed to be coming from all around him. ‘A talking spaceship?’
‘Correct,’ said the Ship.
‘Skagra must be pretty hard-up for friends,’ muttered the Doctor, choosing to forget K-9. ‘Will you tell me where my friends are?’
‘I will not!’ said the Ship, rather hotly. ‘You are an enemy of Skagra. Any orders you give me are hostile to my gracious lord.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean any harm,’ said the Doctor affably. ‘And it wasn’t an order, I only asked.’
There was a lengthy pause.
Finally the Ship said, ‘I do not understand how you are asking. In fact, I do not understand how you are moving.’
‘Really?’ The Doctor didn’t care for the Ship’s somewhat starchy and disapproving tone. He got up carefully from the chair. ‘Why’s that then? It seems quite natural to me.’
‘Because you are dead,’ said the Ship, sounding puzzled. ‘Your mind was extracted into the sphere.’
The Doctor laughed. ‘Ah, but it wasn’t, was it? The trick on these occasions is not to resist. I just let the thing believe I was very stupid, and then it didn’t pull nearly hard enough. It got a bad copy of my mind, a bootleg version if you like, but it left me with the original intact.’ He tapped the side of his head. He was trying to sound very casual, although in fact the mental effort he had expended had drained him. ‘Understand?’
‘No, I do not,’ said the Ship. ‘I scanned your body for life signs after the extraction. And you, Doctor, are quite definitely dead.’
The Doctor coughed. ‘Well, you see, I don’t like to keep boasting but that’s another little trick I picked up, I can suspend all life-functions for a very short period—’ He stopped himself and clamped his hand over his mouth.
‘What was that?’ asked the Ship suspiciously.
The Doctor shook his head.
‘You were saying?’ prompted the Ship.
‘I’m dead,’ said the Doctor cautiously.
‘I know,’ said the Ship.
‘Of course you do,’ said the Doctor.
‘Though maybe I should just give you another quick scan—’ began the Ship.
‘No need!’ cried the Doctor. ‘As the servant of the great Skagra, who is infallible—’
‘I’m glad you see him that way now,’ said the Ship. ‘What a pity you had to die before you had the realisation.’
‘Quite,’ said the Doctor. He continued, ‘As the servant of the infallible Skagra, your sensors must also be infallible. Ergo, I am dead.’
‘That seems reasonable,’ said the Ship.
‘And if I’m dead, then I’m an ex-enemy of Skagra,’ said the Doctor. ‘Correct?’
‘Correct,’ said the Ship.
The Doctor wiped his brow. He chose his next words very carefully. ‘So, if I’m dead, I cannot give orders that would be any kind of threat to Skagra. Correct?’
‘Correct,’ said the Ship.
‘Then I order you to release my friends,’ said the Doctor, crossing his fingers. ‘Please.’
There was a pause.
‘They will be released,’ said the Ship.
The Doctor gave a long exhalation. ‘Excellent! Thank you! I think I must be very clever.’ He mopped his brow again. ‘Do you know it’s getting very stuffy in here all of a sudden?’
‘You are dead?’ asked the Ship.
‘Yes!’ said the Doctor. ‘I thought we’d sorted all of that out.’
‘I am programmed to conserve resources,’ said the Ship simply. ‘Since there are no living beings on this command deck, I shut down the oxygen supply on the departure of my lord Skagra.’
The Doctor gasped for breath.
With a sudden dizzying sensation, he realised he had now used up all the oxygen left behind following Skagra’s exit. Normally he could have suspended his life-functions – but he had only just recovered from his last such trance.
He felt his knees give way. ‘Turn on the air supply,’ he gasped. Sharp, terrible pains pierced all three of his lungs.
‘That is not logical,’ said the Ship.
The Ship’s warm, matronly voice rang in the Doctor’s ears as he sank to the floor.
‘Dead men do not require oxygen… Dead men do not require oxygen… Dead men do not require oxygen…’