3

‘The planet’s called Earth. Where humans first came from. Long way back.’

‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me, Little Miss A-Star.’

The Doctor was busy at the controls of the TARDIS, his face lit by the glowing green column that rose and fell rhythmically like the beating heart of the ship. Ali was amazed at how quickly she’d got used to being in here after the first mind-bending experience of stepping through a door into another world. It all felt weirdly normal now. To tell the truth, some of the equipment looked decidedly primitive and old-fashioned compared to what she was used to. Not that she pretended to understand what everything did, but this was the relic of a civilisation that had died out a long time ago.

The Doctor had darted about madly, throwing switches, twiddling dials, jabbing buttons as they’d set off, and now that they were under way he’d calmed down enough to tell her about how he’d come to turn up on Karkinos.

‘I’d been down on Earth trying to save the old place again,’ he went on. ‘And there was this thing, this creature, call it what you want … Actually it’s usually called a Nestene Consciousness. Just another bully, another demigod like the Starman, wanting to feed off the planet and drain it dry. Not nice. I was trying to find it and put a sock in it and I was helped by a girl – about your age, as it goes. A lot like you in many ways.’

‘What was her name?’ asked Ali, curious.

‘Rose. Rose Tyler,’ said the Doctor.

‘A human girl?’

‘Yeah. The only type they had on the planet back then. You see, in that corner of the universe space travel hadn’t really taken off just yet, so there were only native creatures on the planet and the humans were the only halfway sentient ones. Them and meerkats.’

‘Tell me about Rose Tyler.’ Ali watched as the Doctor peered at some kind of monitor and, satisfied, stepped back from the controls. He turned and beamed at her.

‘Rose? She was funny and tough and clever and resourceful. She saved me, and she saved her boyfriend Mickey, and she saved the whole damned planet.’

‘Oh, you’re in love,’ said Ali with more than a touch of sarcasm.

‘No,’ said the Doctor, and he wasn’t smiling any more. ‘Don’t make that mistake, Ali. Let’s just say she was good company. And I like company.’

‘It must be difficult for you,’ said Ali. ‘Living as long as you do.’

‘Oh, I’ve had so many companions in my life,’ said the Doctor. ‘Susan and Barbara and Ian, Prince Egon, Jamie, Polly, Ella McBrien, Sarah-Jane Smith, Leela … They come, and, inevitably, they go. But without them …’

‘You’re the last lonely Time Lord.’

‘What is it with teenage girls?’ asked the Doctor. ‘Always digging. When I met Rose I’d only recently regenerated. I’m sure you know all about regeneration – you’ve probably got a diploma in it – and I was feeling a bit like a soft-shell crab, waiting for my new shell to harden – if you’ll pardon the analogy. I was still finding my feet. I thought: new body, new start, new companion.’

‘So what happened? Did you ask her?’

‘I did, as it goes. And she turned me down. I’d come on too strong, I guess, played my cards too soon. As I say, I was still adjusting to the regeneration – not quite calibrated. She just looked at me. She’s got a funny face, big mouth and big eyes … a big heart.’

‘You are in love.’

The Doctor ignored Ali and ploughed on. ‘And that’s why she couldn’t come. Because she cared more about what she’d have to leave behind than what I could offer her. Her family, her boyfriend, her life. I couldn’t argue with that. I couldn’t expect her to drop everything and go gallivanting off with a perfect stranger in search of adventure.’

‘Are you saying I don’t have a big heart?’ Ali blurted out before she could stop herself.

‘No. Not at all.’

‘You think I don’t care, don’t you?’ Ali was trying not to get angry. She was sure that it would show. That she’d be flushed an ugly red.

The Doctor looked wide-eyed and innocent, a little dismissive.

‘Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that. As I explained before we took off, I can land you right back on Karkinos a second after we left. Nobody will ever know. I didn’t have time to tell Rose that.’

‘I know you didn’t really want me to come with you, though.’ Ali could feel herself shaking.

‘You’re here, aren’t you? So stop your whingeing. Now, hold on to something – I need to get ready for landing.’

His goofy grin calmed her down a little.

‘But if you already saved the Earth,’ said Ali, gripping a rail, ‘why do you need to go back there?’

‘It’s like this, Ali.’ The Doctor had started to pace about. ‘I said goodbye to Rose, I came in here and started up the engines and, the next thing I knew, lights were flashing, alarms were blaring. It was all bells and buzzers and bleepers and hooters and tweeters, and I knew that didn’t mean my dinner was ready in the microwave – you don’t know what I’m talking about, but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the TARDIS is uniquely tuned to sense any problems with the fabric of time, and just as it had alerted me to the presence of the Nestene Consciousness in a place called London back in Rose’s time, now it was alerting me to a very similar problem somewhere else on the planet, a few thousand years earlier.’

‘The Starman?’

‘Give the girl a big round of applause. Yes, they’re dangerous entities, born when stars collapse, when they become black holes and white dwarfs and red dwarfs and wormholes, or whatever you call them in your neck of the intergalactic woods. When they collapse they alter the shape of space and they alter the shape of time, and sometimes a Starman is created, a cosmic being with primitive consciousness. And if you’re not careful, they can escape from their own time and go trampling through existence, wiping it clean and rewriting history, rewriting the laws of science itself. I suppose you could call them gods, if you wanted, and it was always one of the duties of the Time Lords to police the universe and snap the cuffs on them when they popped up where they shouldn’t. Nasty things, you know, gods, they don’t much care for anyone other than themselves. Don’t like any competition. So off I went to try to head this Starman off at the pass.’

‘Why did it look like there were two of them?’ Ali asked, remembering those two ghost-like giants towering above the trees.

‘Yeah, he looked like twins, and it looked like they weren’t really there,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s because it was existing in several different dimensions at once. Now, this orb –’ he picked up the silver ball from where it had been sitting in a cradle on the control console – ‘was created in a very similar way to the Starman. It has the power of a collapsed star in it. It was made by a very clever, and not very nice, character called the Exalted Holgoroth of All Tagkhanastria. And he was no better than the bloody Starman! He was only really interested in using the orb to build a space empire. So I thought I’d kill two pterodactyls with one stone. I paid a visit to the Holgoroth, pretending to be an emissary from the Crab Nebula, and I stole his orb right out from under his nose – which is an exciting story I’ll tell you one day if you’re very good – and I went after the Starman and got to him before he reached Earth. In the process he nearly killed me.’

‘I saw.’

‘But I had superior firepower!’ The Doctor tossed the orb into the air; it seemed to hover there for a moment, and then fell into the open palm of his hand with a slap. ‘And I knocked him for six! Well, into the twenty-sixth dimension anyway. He’s safe there for a while. Can’t do much damage – space and time’s always been a right mess in there. Might even sort things out a bit. Who knows?’

‘So if you flipped him into another dimension, why are we going back to Earth?’ Ali was trying to keep up and take all this in, but she was struggling.

‘It seems that my little ding-dong on your planet with the space twins has sent ripples spreading out.’ The Doctor mimed this with wiggling fingers. ‘Always the same – you push one problem under the carpet and another one pops out on the other side. Cause and effect, unforeseen consequences, the butterfly’s wing.’

‘What?’ Now Ali really had lost the thread.

‘In a nutshell,’ said the Doctor, ‘there’s another Starman, a worse one, a more powerful one, heading for Earth and I need to stop it. In fact, it’s probably already there.’

‘Can’t you just do what you did with the twins and grab it before it arrives?’ Ali asked.

‘No. That’s the thing. Me and this new Starman exist in the same time stream. A side-effect of using the orb. Unforeseen consequences. Turns out the magic orb is not as special as the Holgoroth claimed. Should have read the small print – “This item may not work as advertised!” Until I send this new Starman packing, the two of us have a time tag on us. We’re linked.’ The Doctor was back at the console again now, studying screens and meters, his hands a blur as they moved over the controls.

‘So now we’re landing on Earth,’ he shouted, ‘two thousand years before the birth of Christ …’

‘Who?’

‘He was a bit like Sherlock Holmes. Knew the answers to everything. Very good at solving mysteries. Some humans use him to measure time.’

‘And whereabouts on Earth?’

‘A place called Babylon. Lovely little spot – very hot in the summer, though.’

‘Doctor?’ said Ali. ‘One last thing.’

‘Make it quick.’

‘This new Starman, what will it look like?’

‘Good question.’

‘I mean, will it look like the twins?’

‘Probably not. It depends on what planets it’s absorbed. It could look like anything – a lizard, a fish, a goat, a sea urchin, an anglepoise lamp or a giant amorphous blob. One thing I can tell you, though: it probably won’t look very nice.’