Chapter Five.
The past of 1923.
Time was more or less meaningless to a Time Lord. The past, the future, and the hazy time known as now. These were as slides under a microscope, to the Lords of Time. Was it arrogant to make the claim? The Time Lords could walk the walk, as well as talk the talk. They were Lords of Time.
How long ago had the two renegades sneaked away from Gallifrey?
There was another story to be told there, the Master knew. Somehow, the Doctor must have sneaked back and…well, eventually he’d toured the universe in the company of a young woman named Susan who called the Doctor grandfather. An arrangement never explained to the Master’s satisfaction.
In the morning, the Master smoothed over the ripples he’d caused. Dudley Simpson believed that he’d seen the Master safely to bed on the sofa. No. Dudley believed that he’d safely seen the Doctor to bed. Not the same thing.
The Master had no luck in using his hidden base to identify the source of the alien signal. Hunt the aliens. Locate their starship. Take a few beam weapons along. Settle their hash. Return to the TARDIS. A simple plan. He managed to hide Proctor’s death with ease.
There was no alien interference, until the first week elapsed. He emerged from his lair to check the security of the house. And found a letter lying in the hallway. Who would send a letter addressed to R.A.S. Lions, at the Grange, Fenby? R.A.S. Lions was an anagram of Rassilon.
Only a Time Lord would send a letter like that. No Time Lord would send a letter like that. There was one. The Doctor. Who else? The Master sighed. Why hadn’t he just parked his creaky old TARDIS nearby and…crash-landed? Without reading the letter, the Master knew that the Doctor was aware of the alien problem. Had he proposed a solution? Or an alliance in search of one?
From the Doctor, 12th of Never, Gallifrey , Ireland
Old Chap.
You are clearly caught in the same predicament I found myself in a short while from now. My past self still has to piece the story together, to travel this far. I’d appreciate a little helping hand in the form of clues leading me to the solution. I’ll be back this way again in 1933. Though by the time you read this, naturally, I’ll be gone.
Flippant, as ever. The Master waved the letter as though swatting a fly. Ha! The Doctor was trapped in 1933. By the aliens. Therefore, the Master could not destroy the aliens. They’d have to force the Doctor’s antiquated TARDIS to crash-land in that year. And the Doctor wanted clues. Meaning the Doctor had been handed clues inside this house in 1933.
And he’d deduced the Master’s presence in 1923. A week after arrival. The Master drew a great loop of events in his mind. He was trapped in 1923. The Doctor was trapped in 1933, and made aware of the Master’s predicament in 1923.
A letter had come, by conventional means – the Master noted the stamp. So the Doctor had eventually triumphed, had he? And overcome the alien signal. With the Master’s help. How else? The Doctor had broken free of 1933 and solved the puzzle. Then travelled back before the arrival of the aliens, to post the letter informing the Master of the Doctor’s involvement. Now the Doctor was gone.
Two TARDISes, trapped in separate times by the same alien device. A ray which the Master had to overcome, but not destroy. What a pretty puzzle. He had to engineer it with the Doctor’s semi-official help. And leave clues? Clues. Time clues. The Doctor would not be immediately aware of the Master’s presence on arriving in the 1933 version of Fenby.
What would the real Doctor make of the Doctor’s mysterious arrival in 1923, when he heard of it in far-off 1933? The village was small. And the Postmaster would be a good source of gossip. The Doctor would imagine that he himself travelled to 1923, to fix his own predicament. THAT is what is meant by leaving clues. Please gradually reveal your presence to the Doctor.
And the problem, of locating and neutralising the aliens? The Master could kill the aliens and leave the TARDIS-grabbing signal intact. Here was the conundrum, though. How to break free of the alien signal, in order to let the Doctor break free in 1933? The Doctor must break free to travel to a point before the arrival of the alien spaceship. The letter in the Master’s hand semi-proved that.
He spent months avoiding the aliens. They were using shapechanging technology. Clumsy and irritating. How had these aliens developed the ability to snare a TARDIS in flight? Surely the Time Lords would be alerted to such a threat. Or was this the first occurrence? There might be political capital in the venture.
The Master gathered annoying clues and distributed them around the house. He’d have to set up an obvious technical disturbance to really attract the Doctor’s attention. The rogue Time Lord stood at his spare console and toyed with a few items he’d stored down here.
He could set up a time field. With the limited resources at his disposal, it would burn out after a few minutes. And seem like hours to those trapped inside. No. A space field. Much easier to control. The Master removed the few time components from his gutted console, and plugged in spatial ones. Limit the field. Let it affect the cellar staircase and part of the floor above. That should do. The clues were giving him some trouble.
A game of chess, played between two kings. Would the Doctor realise that the two kings were Time Lords on opposing sides? Creation versus destruction. The Doctor’s sense of chaos and randomness versus the Master’s strict belief in order and predictability.
Rassilon would become an anagram. The Master worked on a few more of those. Pictures of alien landscapes? He’d sketch those out to a fine degree before he left. For the Master realised how he might escape the hold of the alien ray, without destroying it. He would have to leave the Doctor a reply to that whimsical letter of his.
*
Rose sat against the gutted console, which hummed away quite happily as she read the Master’s letter to the Doctor in 1933. This was a jigsaw puzzle set across space and time. She shifted her gaze to the Doctor’s legs as he swished past her, flicking switches.
“Tell me about him.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Then there’s no reason to hide anything.”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“The Time Lords are all gone.”
“Yes.”
“But he’s written you a letter. And he’s a Time Lord.”
“From the past. More than just from the past. From across a time-stream. Very dangerous. You mustn’t cross the streams.”
“That’s if you’re a Ghostbuster.”
“Yeah, well, I worked as a technical consultant on that documentary.”
“Movie.”
“I altered all the alien references to ghosts. Happy?”
“Don’t change the subject to a more interesting subject. That’s really annoying.”
“Part of my charm. This console isn’t a regular console. It’s slightly outdated. Not as good as something you’d find aboard the Master’s TARDIS.”
“If he’s a rogue of a Time Lord, why didn’t the Time Lords rein him in?”
“They left me to take care of him. I have no proof of that. Only the merest dead-certain suspicion that I’m absolutely right every time I think it through.”
“You’d rather not help him.”
“Remember when I was talking about wiping out the Daleks before they existed. I’d have screwed around too much with my own past. Too close to the problem. This is the same. I have to help this prick. He’s a prick, but he’s a prick who goes on to be defeated by Yours Truly.”
“No way out of that problem?”
“Rose…I can meddle with time, but I can’t meddle with time. There are consequences.”
He tailed off, and pretended to be really interested in a dead piece of circuitry. Rose edged out from under the six-sided console cowling and peered at the Doctor. Tears were streaming down his face. The Master was a criminal who’d thought nothing of double-crossing Daleks.
Whatever had passed between the Doctor and the Master must have gone beyond terrible. Rose concentrated on the letter. The Master was asking the Doctor to send a letter to the Master’s current address. Where? She waited five minutes before asking. To give the Doctor time to be really interested in a working piece of circuitry.
“Where’s the Master’s current address? Here?”
“He means this house in 1923. So at some point in my future, I manage to send him a letter in 1923. Revealing my presence in 1933. And revealing that I know about his arrival in 1923. Somehow, I have to get the idea across. That he should not destroy the aliens and simply piss off. He has to leave the signal intact for our recent crash-landing to happen.”
“After all this is over…”
“Pub-quiz. I remember.”
“No…”
“Oh, yeah. I’ll take you for chips.”
“No. After all this is over, then you’ll send the letter to him. So, technically, we escape. We’re not sure about travelling to 1923 now, are we? Before, you thought we did. But that’s the Master in the past, pretending to be a Doctor.”
“That pissed me right off.”
“Yeah. I get that. You look a bit…strained. Listen. When this is all over. If you want to talk about it. Whatever it is. I know it must be scary, serious, deep, and painful. That’s what your assistants are here for. Okay. That’s an offer. No matter how universe-shattering. And no matter the technological side of it. Use doodles instead of diagrams if you have to.”
“I stole…borrowed…a TARDIS, and left to travel the universe. It’s more complicated than that. And I can’t really talk about it to anyone. Except the Master. And he’s gone. I beat him. He’s a ghost. An echo from another age. And I can’t go back and change things now. I couldn’t, then.”
“Did you try to change something?”
“Tried. Failed.”
“But you make such a difference in the universe. Changing things.”
“Little things.”
“Like saving the universe.”
“Small beer to the likes of me. You grow tired of saving the universe after the first few dozen times. Who am I kidding. I love saving the universe.”
“Time’s in big trouble, right?”
“Yeah. I have to maintain the structural integrity of my own past, by saving this utter prick who goes on to bug me endlessly…in my own past. If I screw this up, there’ll be trouble.”
“You have to make sure he hassles you later. Earlier.”
“Yes. Occasionally, he helps me out while he’s stabbing me in the back during some alien invasion that I can’t quite defeat single-handedly. And if he’s not there to help, I might not save the day. I might even be killed outright. And then I’d never meet you, or I’d meet you wearing a different face…”
“What would I be doing, wearing a different face?”
“Ha ha.”
“You mean you’d turn up and save me from the Autons, but you’d be dressed in a floppy hat?”
“Or in a velvet jacket-and-cape combination.”
“I dread to think.”
“Had white hair, back then.”
“I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea that you looked older when you were younger. You’ve never crossed these streams before, then?”
“Oh, loads of times. I remember my first self criticising the fashion-sense of my second and third selves when we all met up to save…the universe. Boring as it sounds. My first and second selves objected to that. I had a point.”
“Which one of you had a point?”
“Me.
“Time Lords. Funny bunch? On the whole, not really.”
“I’m the one with the sense of humour. Seeing as I’m the only one.”
“Do we cross the stream and meet this Master out of sequence? Like sitting down to watch the middle movie in a trilogy? Then watching the first and last ones after.”
“Between us, we should be able to work out a way to deal with these aliens.”
“I’d like to believe, for a moment, that we means us.”
“No. I don’t want to involve you in this, Rose. To preserve the integrity of TIME, he has to survive. And you might not, if you go up against him. He’s a killer. An abstract killer. You’d be part of an experiment. He might note the results. Then again, maybe not. But I couldn’t handle losing you to a ghost of a villain who no longer exists in any meaningful sense.”
“He’s part of the past. Not just because he’s in 1923 and we’re in 1933. He flies free, and annoys some Doctor bloke with white hair. Does this Doctor bloke have assistants?”
“Loads.”
“Oh?”
“The blokes in UNIT, for starters. This console is a pretty good piece of work. We’ll use it to trap most of the aliens in the past. I suspect that they can communicate…not telepathically. By radio, perhaps. So if we are going to trap aliens in the past, we have to disrupt communications close to the house. Just to stop ALL of the aliens rushing in and being caught in 1923.”
“You’re settled on going into the past, then.”
“Yes. On different terms. Before, I thought I’d have to stick to my own actions as Doctor Lions. But now we know different, there’s some leeway. And Rose…”
“Yeah.”
“In case things get awkward and messy later. Thanks for the offer of a nice little chat about my unspeakable past. I’ll politely decline now. I’m very old. Wouldn’t be a little chat. Appreciate it, though. Loads. Honestly. Now, see what you can do to help me with this negative power-coupling.”
“Did you just steal a bit of techno-babble from a STAR WARS film?”
“Another documentary show I worked on.”
“Reality series, was it?”
“Mm. I had to change most of the names. And some of the sizes. The real R2-D2 is as big as a tank. No gun on the turret, though. Just a muckspreader.”
*
They planned and schemed like a couple of old campaigners. Argued the toss over who would tackle the really hard bits. Decided not to go back to 1923. Planned to go back to 1923. Wondered how to disrupt the alien signal without the Master’s help. Accepted the reality – that they’d have to rely on the evil Time Lord’s aid.
“What time is it?”
“Late. We should go.”
“Where? We haven’t arranged anything yet. Just argued over the finer points of our lack of a plan.”
“That’s the best part, Rose. Having a lack of a plan. The Master knows that we’re ready at this end. He’ll expect me to show up and box his ears. We have to be ready for his move.”
“Do we wait around for another letter?”
“No. He’s setting up a plan in his time. That should help free the TARDIS.”
“Then…we should return to the TARDIS.”
“Rubbish. It can’t be that simple.”
“Oi.”
“I didn’t say that you were that simple.”
“Good.”
“You must be simple if you think the plan’s that simple.”
“Oi!”
“Are you trying to tell me that our plan to escape is just to…escape?”
“Worked for the men in Colditz, Doctor. We ride on our bikes. Not our bikes. A pair of borrowed bikes. And we tackle the robots on guard at the TARDIS. Farmer Giles and Farmer Brown.”
“Bill and Ben. The Flowerpot Men.”
“I have the ice brolly. You use your sonic screwdriver on one of ’em. Make the alien see robotic spots in front if its eyes.”
“Might work. But what if we don’t go anywhere once we’re inside the TARDIS? More robots could close in. End of our lack of plan.”
“There’s always the back door. And these robots seem thin on the ground. Organised, but not that organised. Or they’d have nailed us by now.”
“They very nearly did. Perhaps the robots are as much prisoners of events as we are. I wonder why they are here. Not to trap Time Lords, surely. I mean, ten years. In that time, they haven’t invaded the planet. Or tried to blow it up.”
“Why are they hanging around? Expecting us?”
“Who knows. I think you’re right. We should mount up and ride out. Head them off at the pass. Yeehah. It’s time to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“You make it sound as though we’ll be chasing the robots out of Dodge. It’s the other way around.”
“Oh. Right. Well, it sounded better than chipping in with a rousing Shakespearean speech. Come on, pardner. Let’s mosey on down to the stables and saddle up.”
“Now you’re talkin’, Sheriff. Or are you the Doc?”
“Depends on the name of the corral.”
*
Night had fallen. The rain stopped. Wind rose. The Doctor gave Rose his outer coat. He managed to survive in his pinstripe spiv suit. The plan was simple. Scout around the pond. See if any of the robots would chase after a Time Lord. The other lucky contestant would make for the TARDIS. Rose had the brolly as her weapon. The Doctor wielded his sonic screwdriver.
“We’re getting closer, pardner.”
“Yeah. Are we going to ride in, like knights, and joust these robots?”
“They are armoured figures. That would be fun. Let’s be a little more practical, though. You stop by the edge of the pond and deploy the brolly.”
“Deploy. I feel ever so militaristic. With my deployable brolly.”
“I’ll scoot in and joust the robots. Can’t see this going according to plan.”
“No. Should we use the lanterns? I don’t feel like calling these bike lights torches.”
“As a last resort. Sudden dazzling effect. Probably won’t work.”
“Are we…I mean you.”
“Am I what?”
“Are you going to jam robot communications? They might swarm around the pond once the guards alert base. Or don’t we care?”
“We’ll have to rely on the Master. That’s our real plan. Let the aliens swarm around us.”
“Great.”
*
Bicycles were dismounted, and wheeled through the trees. Again, the Doctor was reminded of Skaro. And the petrified forest. He was reminded of many things. Of the day he left Gallifrey. Well, he’d paid for all that. Rose was at his side. He had to focus. Not let her fall into the Master’s clutches. The deep darkness of the pond loomed ahead. He felt Rose’s warm breath as she whispered into his ear.
“No bloomin’ waders, you plonker. What kind of preparation was that?”
“Sorry. If you ride fast enough, you might be able to bike in.”
“I’d rather wade in than be stuck in the mud on a bike. Then I’d just fall over and immerse myself. Thanks very much. Can you see any robots?”
“No. You?”
“What about the screwdriver?”
“Picking up a large energy reading. The screwdriver is set to spot the TARDIS. That’s planning and preparation. Never mind waders.”
“So no robots, then?”
“I’d have to fiddle with the dial to check for robots.”
“We know you’re there, Time Lord!”
“Ah. I’m detecting them now.”
“Surrender and die. Your feeble resources cannot stop us.”
“No? Have a dose of this, then!”
Something heavy sloshed toward the edge of the pond. The Doctor aimed his screwdriver at a hulking shape and let rip with a concentrated energy beam. Sparks
“We spent a decade learning to overcome your feeble form of attack, Time Lord.”
“Bum. No sonic screwdriver, eh. Would you like an ice brolly?”
Rose took the hint and deployed her umbrella. She moved forward to cover the Doctor’s position. Something brushed her outer coat. The Doctor’s coat. A hulking figure rose from the water and lifted an arm. Rose wasn’t sure of the science involved. Maybe the robots had worked out what to do about her defensive form of attack.
She was quite sure of herself, though. The night was cold, and the position behind the umbrella was colder. The bluff had worked before. But if these robots split and attacked from different positions, any shot from behind would be fatal. They’d smear Rose all over the pond.
The Doctor faced away from her. He was covering her back, in case the robots split up. Muttering. He was frantically altering his plans. Suppose the robots just reached over the brolly with their huge arms and ended the fight…
“Doctor.”
“Let’s start the brolly rolling, Rose. I’ll keep up. We’re sitting ducks in the open countryside. Begin moving right, around the pond’s edge. Don’t worry…”
“They can’t understand a word you’re saying. When you speak in Gallifreyan.”
“If I’ve a mind to withhold the gift of language. Exactly. Go.”
The bikes were abandoned at the start of the non-plan. Rose resisted the temptation to twirl the brolly as she moved right. This wasn’t the time for a Gene Kelly moment. More the Doctor’s style. Two robots emerged from the water, and split. One stayed in front, and advanced toward the time travellers. The other moved left, with the intention of circling round the pond and attacking from the rear.
“Timing Rose. At some point, the second robot will disappear behind the TARDIS. And he’ll be on dry land. If he wades in, he loses speed. We’ll race into the centre of the pond and use the brolly as our shield against the main robot. Here. Take this.”
“What’s that?”
“Lantern I took from my bike. Shine it on the TARDIS.”
“Why?”
“Just to see if there’s a third robot.”
“Bollocks!”
“Rose?”
“Bill and Ben brought their friend, the Little Weed.”
“Three against two. These tin cans don’t stand a chance. Shoot the one in front of us.”
“How? He has to shoot me, before I can shoot him.”
“Right!”
The Doctor ducked around to the front of Rose’s umbrella. She was trying to angle the brolly to protect herself from the first and third robots. Flashing the lantern with her other hand, she could see that the second robot was clumping out of sight. The TARDIS was in the way.
Rose concentrated on the Doctor. He was waving at the robot in front. There was no attempt at disguise. The metal body glimmered in the shaky glow of Rose’s bicycle lantern. Rose caught a string of insults in the alien’s robotic language. The Doctor was laying it on a bit thick.
“And your mother was a toaster!”
The Doctor ducked as the alien arm lashed out. A change in the air told Rose to brace. Her arms rocked as the blast glanced off the brolly. This attack was closer than the one in the tearoom yard. She went skidding into an extended section of the pond, losing all sensation from the knees down.
Later, her body would feel pain.
A rattled Time Lord sat up. He’d tried to make his duck seem acrobatic and debonair. Aiming for Errol Flynn was the artistic ideal. Unfortunately, the Doctor’s tactic had more in common with all the gymnastic prowess of a drunken Muppet.
The robot felt pain from the knees up. Its legs had sheared off in the blast.
Rose turned and aimed at the robot lurking by the TARDIS. She hadn’t done so deliberately. Her slide into the pond made it happen. She maintained her composure, managing to look efficient and organised. The lurking robot tried to beat her to the draw and failed. Another blast of energy from an upraised arm smacked into the brolly and rebounded, taking the robot’s head off. The metal lump skidded over the pond’s surface like a skipping stone, narrowly missing the TARDIS.
“Now or never, Doctor.”
Rose waded toward the dark shape in the centre of the pond. She heard sloshing. The last robot was trying to race her to the doors. As the cold water crept up her thighs, Rose’s resolve shattered. She was in pain now. There was only one thing to do. Glue the bits and pieces of her shattered resolve back together. If only temporarily.
She sucked in the cold air, and pressed ahead. Instinct told her that the Doctor wasn’t right behind her as promised. Had he gone to finish off the legless robot? Hard to tell, in the dark. She switched off her lantern, to hide her position. Even though she suspected that the robots could see in the dark. If they saw by temperature, they’d see her as a large cold patch.
Slosh. An intake of breath. Flesh and blood versus circuitry and steel. There wasn’t time to act the part of couch potato in the Doctor’s crew. Slosh again. The strength went from her body. Cold sapped at her will. Double-slosh. Not an echo. The monster, versus Rose.
She slammed against something. The robot’s body? No. The doors. She fell forward, into light. Not red light. That sickness was gone. The TARDIS had spent time catching its breath. Rose lay on the deck. The brolly skidded away. She chased after it, and turned down the cold setting.
Her ears were playing tricks. She heard a bell. The Doctor had gone back for a bicycle. Rose sat and stared through the open TARDIS door. Darkness. Water, held back in an impossible feat of physics. Or, as the Doctor might have it, as a feat of impossible physics.
An arm appeared at the door, facing toward the woods. The robot was bracing against the TARDIS to take a shot at the Doctor on his bicycle. Rose stood and closed the door. Now the robot wouldn’t get in. She staggered to the console. The scanner was tuned to Radio 4. In 1986.
Rose flicked through the channels. A children’s show. Tellytubbies. She couldn’t remember the alien race those had been based on. There was an invasion. All hushed up at the time. Then there was a football game. The score was a predictable nil-nil, and neither side bothered to justify the expense of fielding a team. Finally, she hit the external setting for the here-and-now.
Dials jolted into life on her left. She was distracted by those. A bank of lights flashed ahead. The dark exterior landscape faded. A new picture swam into focus. She hadn’t touched anything accidentally. This wasn’t her doing. Was this her doing? She slapped her hands to the console and cleared her head. Her legs were passing belated information to her brain.
The picture was hard to make out. It had moved from being out of focus to being slightly off-focus. A second later, the reason for that became clear. The point of focus was nearer. A wall was out of focus. But the face which appeared in front of that wall was as clear as the man’s portrait. Rose was staring at an image of a TARDIS wall, with the Master’s face in front.
Outside, the Doctor had recovered some of his Errol-Flynn-like acrobatic daring and a fair degree of Doug Fairbanks-ish flair and charm. He was weaving around the pond, avoiding blast after blast from the remaining robot.
The plan was simple. Pedal like mad, freewheel into the pond, bump the doors open, and score a touchdown. American Bicycle Baseball. Wouldn’t really catch on until 2258. He considered himself something of a sporting pioneer.
Meanwhile, the Master stood at his control console and stared at a blank scanner screen. He couldn’t see the Doctor. No matter. This was a recorded message. In case no one was home. He peered into his own scanner plate, and started flicking a ridiculous number of switches.
“Doctor. I have no choice but to leave you this recorded message. I do hope that it reaches you in time. As you’d expect, these robots placed my TARDIS under guard. Even if I could escape from 1923, I would still have to battle past them. This I have done.”
Rose didn’t know if the Master was speaking right now, or not. She held her tongue. And tried to stop her teeth from chattering out a message in code. So the Master had blasted a few robots and made it to his TARDIS. On the night of the big storm. Thunder? Or robot attack?
“It occurred to me that the alien signal could be destroyed. But that would affect your arrival in 1933. My only alternative was to consider weakening the signal long enough to engineer an escape. The answer was obvious. This signal can trap one TARDIS at a time. Not two.”
Rose winced. The Doctor was the only Time Lord left. But this Time Lord was in his past. So, there could be two…TARDISes…kicking around. What came next blew her mind. The black-clad figure had a powerful glitter in his dark eyes. A keen intelligence, backed by a mocking sense of humour.
“The arrival of your TARDIS from 1933, into 1923 airspace, will weaken the alien signal and allow me to escape into 1933. There, the arrival of my TARDIS in 1933 airspace will weaken the signal and allow your TARDIS to escape into 1923.”
Had the Master just said…you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours? She didn’t have time to work out the decidedly dodgy nature of the exchange. The deal shouldn’t work. But…this was time travel. Rose coasted along with the idea until she reached her stop.
Fine.
“Unfortunately, the overlapping field generated by both TARDISes can be overcome by the alien signal after a lengthy stay. By the time you receive this message, you will only have a few minutes in which to act. I am boosting my own time engines to give you as much help as possible.”
Where was the Doctor when you needed him? His place was in the TARDIS. Where was he? Off on a bicycling holiday of the English countryside. Rose glanced around at panels, dials, and switches. Something was going on. But what? The Master provided the answer.
“With that in mind, I am sending you the exact space-time coordinates you’ll require. Encoded in these coordinates is a sequence of timer instructions. You now have a countdown to launch, tapping out the time left on your console.”
Rose looked and looked. Then she saw Gallifreyan numbers counting down. They’d been counting down when she fell through the doors. As her scrambled brain translated the numbers, she reached the conclusion that the Master had arrived in 1933. And she had three minutes to effect launch. Her mobile phone hadn’t taken a drenching. She called the only person who could help her.
“Doctor.”
“In a muddle at the moment. The robot retreated to the TARDIS. I think he’s calling up his mates. Think I’ll fry his circuits with the funniest joke in the universe. Usually goes down well with the mechanical crowd. If you change some of the names.”
“I’ve had a message from the Master.”
“You have been busy.”
“We’ve no time for banter. If one TARDIS materialises close to another TARDIS, the presence of both weakens the alien signal.”
“Sounds reasonable, actually. But where would I get a second TARDIS?”
“He’s already materialised in 1933. But the jamming effect is temporary. He broke free when this TARDIS jumped back to 1923. This TARDIS can jump back to 1923 because his TARDIS warped in from there.”
“That’s stretching the rules. Like it.”
“There’s a countdown. I’ve been sent the coordinates. So I just have to hit the autopilot, or whatever. If you can’t slide into the TARDIS right now, I’ll have to do the job. We’re almost out of time.”
“Apprentice Time Lord. This is what to do.”
The Doctor talked Rose through the shortest emergency procedure he could think of. There was no way to bypass the robot, and no time to waffle nonsense about the dangers involved. Rose had to operate the TARDIS and handle things brilliantly from her end.
“Rose. Don’t lose that phone. We’ll keep in touch.”
He retreated into the trees on his bicycle, heading for the road. Behind him, a wheezing groaning sound told him that Rose had gone on a short trip into 1923. The Master was now out here. How would he deal with the signal?
That wasn’t important. How would Rose deal with the signal in 1923? She’d arrive in that year, allowing the Master to escape. Then the alien signal would kick in and trap her there. Would she age a decade? He knew she wouldn’t be running the tearoom. A cruel jibe.
The Doctor had to be very careful, talking to Rose over the telephone. He was part of events. In the scariest way imaginable. The whole thing reminded him of his flight from Gallifrey. Rose would be fine. They still hadn’t written the Master a letter, telling him what to do.
Would the Doctor survive to write that letter? Or would some cosmic trick be played on all parties concerned? He slipped onto the road, thought he’d be safer off it, and trundled into some cover. Further along the road, the black-clad figure of the Master hefted a large energy weapon.
He’d tested it on the aliens in the past. There would be three sets of aliens to kill. Those heading for his own TARDIS. The ones gathered around the Doctor’s dematerialised TARDIS. And the few survivors aboard the spaceship.
The Master decided to kill the robots gathered at the Doctor’s last position. Then he’d work his way back and kill the ones which clustered around his TARDIS. Those, he’d kill slowly. If he could keep a robot’s head alive, a simple trace of its robotic communications would lead to the spaceship.
*
Rose sank to the floor. The landing was softened by the presence of the Master’s TARDIS in 1923. But the cold water had sapped her. And her journey in the TARDIS had been so odd, without the Doctor. If she couldn’t solve this problem, she’d have to live out her life inside the TARDIS. There was food, water, and power. And the telly.
A swimming pool. But no company. Would she wander the TARDIS as an old biddy, talking to herself about the time she fought the Daleks? Did the food taste like real food? If you set the machine to CHIPS, would you be served chips or microwaved chips? Could you set the machine to serve microwaved chips?
Plenty of clothes. She could spend her time looking through the Doctor’s photos. If they existed. Did the TARDIS have a manual? Was there a copy of TIME TRAVEL FOR DUMMIES™ aboard? Well, if she had nothing better to do with her time than study time travel…
Don’t think like that. She stood. Wavered. Steadied herself. And looked at the console. The counter had reset. Now the Gallifreyan numbers were counting down to the end of the same phenomenon. The alien signal was strengthening.
Rose knew that if she waited long enough, the robots would close in on this newly-arrived TARDIS. They must be mad as hell tonight. The Master’s TARDIS would have been under guard. He’d have broken back into that, and zapped away into the future. The robots would’ve detected that TARDIS leaving, and this TARDIS arriving.
She ran to the bathroom and grabbed a towel. Then she raced to the first pile of clothes she could find, stripped, dried herself, and threw on the nearest things to hand. Rose armed herself with highly inappropriate pink ankle socks, red Wellington
If he laughed, she’d remind him of a velvet coat, a cape, and a ruffed shirt he’d mentioned. There was the matter of a floppy hat. Let it go. Start moving. Keep moving. Don’t lose the mobile phone. Have that ice brolly handy. And check the scanner, to see where you are.
The TARDIS had materialised at night, indoors. Rose couldn’t see any movement. She walked through the doors and reached for a switch. A familiar kitchen grew out of the banished darkness. So many things to remember. Don’t disturb any of the Master’s clues.
She was at the Grange. Professor Grange’s house. Doctor Lions lived here, once. For six months. This was easy. Wait for the robots to turn up, and lure them into the hallway. That was good for a start. What then? The Master had escaped.
Some of the aliens had to get away. And the alien signal had to be weakened again, so that this TARDIS could escape to rescue the Doctor from 1933. Was that all? Not as easy as at first thought. She had to jam alien communications, to keep a few robots away. How many robots could she kill? There was no way of knowing.
No sonic screwdriver. And she couldn’t let the surviving robots see her. Bill and Ben. Better known as Farmer Giles and Farmer Brown. Don’t forget Old MacDonald, who must visit the tearoom. And Weed, who’ll spoil the fun at the pond.
Rose had her telephone. The Doctor could improvise a jamming signal, to stop the robots from talking to each other and ganging up in the one place. How was she going to open the house doors? Would the aliens bash the front door down? What about the alien who would show up in the garden?
The ice brolly would take care of that alien.
Coolness under fire, Rose. You can do this.
She could. Her legs couldn’t. After this was over, before the pub-quiz, and before the chips in newspaper, she would order the Doctor to hover around in the time vortex while she had the longest, warmest, bubbliest bath in the history of the space-time continuum.
There’d be chocolate. Champagne
*
“Rose?”
“You say that as though you’re expecting another call.”
“This bloke’s supposed to show up on Wednesday and fix the plumbing. I was hoping to hear from him. His initial quote was a bit high, even for a TARDIS.”
“Will you be there on the Wednesday? Or away? In the sense that you aren’t here, that is.”
“New plan. Stick close to the TARDIS. Lure the robots into that infinite hallway all by your lonesome. Easy pickings.”
“I don’t have the sonic screwdriver.”
“Think again. I slipped it into my coat pocket. My large outer coat. The one you should still be wearing. I’ll fill you in on the settings.”
“Once I grab it from the TARDIS. Had a change of clothes. This ice brolly is really getting to me.”
“Not much longer now.”
“Still there? I’m in the TARDIS. Here’s your coat. Why do you have a yo-yo in your coat pocket?”
“Best place for it.”
“And a…what is that? Some alien thing.”
“The yo-yo’s alien too. I picked that up on…what alien thing?”
“Found the screwdriver.”
“Another alien thing.”
“Now I can open the main doors in this mansion.”
“You’ll have to attack a few robots, using the sonic screwdriver.”
“I’d be more comfortable using the ice brolly. Not that I’ll be more comfortable using the ice brolly.”
“You’ll feel discomfort from the cold. But more confidence. Yeah?”
“Right.”
“Listen Rose. You must attack using the screwdriver. The robots grow wise to that in the future. They take precautions. Don’t use the ice brolly unless you’re certain that the robots can’t send out a warning. This is how it works. Wear my outer coat. Find a hat. Stay in the shadows, or at a distance. Yeah, stay in distant shadows. Let the robots think that you are me. I know they haven’t met me yet. But they must make some sort of connection later.”
“Seeing a vague figure in a coat in 1923 leads to the conclusion that the figure in the coat in 1933 is the same bloke. Charming. I’m a bloke.”
“You’ve stepped up from Apprentice Time Lord. By impersonating a Time Lord.”
“There’s so much to keep straight in my head. The robots have to attack when they locate the TARDIS. But there’s to be no damage to the house. Some robots must escape. The robots who don’t escape do have to warn the other robots about the sonic screwdriver. But when I close in for the kill, I have to squelch all communications. And at some point, the robots have to see a bloke in a coat.”
“That’s my girl. Don’t forget a hat. Something that’ll cover your face. Floppy. With a wide brim.”
“I’ll have a look.”
“What are you wearing, anyway?”
“Red wellies. Sorry.”
“I’m sure they won’t focus on the little details. You’re going into battle soon. There’ll be loads of shooting. Enough crashing and banging to sound like a thunderstorm. When it’s over, you’ll have to locate the alien spaceship and temporarily disengage or weaken their TARDIS-grabbing ray. Then you can pick me up from 1933. We’ll drop back to a point before the arrival of the aliens, so that I can post the Master a letter. Job done. After that, it’s the trip of a lifetime. In search of real chips. Yeah. In real sauce. All wrapped in real newspaper. And we’ll go in for a pub-quiz somewhere. I’ve been thinking about a name for our team.”
“The Zutons.”
“No. The Time Lords.”
“What will you be doing, right now? In the future.”
“I thought I’d save you the hassle of locating the alien ship, and find it myself. Then I’ll tell you where it is so that you can visit the place in your timeline. Even better, I can sneak around the alien ship and work out the best way in. Tell you how to block the alien signal long enough to free the TARDIS, and sneak back out. Without being caught. What do you say?”
“Like a computer game?”
“I’ll be your own personal walk-through guide. Dropping hints and tips, puns and quips.”
“See you around, Doctor. We’ll make it through this without blowing time to bits.”
“Yeah.”
*
The ice-cool blonde girl lowered her head, propped a wide-brimmed floppy hat on top, then gave herself an up-from-under look as she sought out the ornate bathroom mirror. Too bad if the hat didn’t go with the coat. She was out of time.
Rose stepped out of the TARDIS and followed the Doctor’s instructions. She unlocked the back door, and stepped into the grounds. The robots would be here soon. And they couldn’t go through the back door, with the TARDIS in the kitchen. They had to be lured around to the front.
Where had the Doctor tripped over that robot in 1933? Rose paused. Mobile phone, and yo-yo, in pocket. Hat on head. Sonic screwdriver in her left hand. Ice brolly under her right arm. She turned left, toward a clumping sound. They’re in the grounds. She ran left and came to the corner of the building.
Stay hidden. How well do they see in the dark? Better than you, Rose. They have such clever electronic eyes. All the better to scan you with, my dear. If you go back round the other way, you’ll pass that greenhouse. Mustn’t damage the greenhouse.
Rose risked a peek. She still hadn’t opened the front door yet. A lone robot was stomping in her direction. She aimed her right hand and fired. Nothing happened. Brolly right hand, idiot. Screwdriver in the left. Change equipment over, or step out and fire?
She stepped out and fired the sonic blast at the robot’s chest. Her aim was off and she took the monster down in the head. It had seen her, and was raising its arm to fire. The machine toppled into the long grass. Not where the Doctor tripped over it.
So. There were more lying in the grass, in 1933. The clumping stopped. Lone investigator. Where’s your pal? Don’t you always travel in pairs? Rose thought of the Doctor. She had to be careful, engaging in conversations across time. Better to risk it now, while she had a breather.
“Doctor.”
“Rose, old thing.”
“I’ve downed a robot.”
“Excellent.”
“Not the one you tripped over. Go to the mansion and see how many of them are hidden in the grounds. Give me an idea of what I’m shooting at.”
“I’ll call you back.”
Rose walked to the front of the building and almost blasted the lock off. She’d boosted the sonic signal when firing at the robot, and hadn’t reset the controls. Stop. Look. Listen. Reset sonic controls. The front door unlocked.
She decided to lend fate a big push as well as a helping hand, and walked inside. Best to switch lights on. And leave other doors open. She almost fell into the infinite hallway. Quickly, she stepped outside again. Standing on the front step, she glanced inside at the game of chess. Two kings. Doctor and Master? Lording it over time.
Outside, she made her way around the building to the place where the Doctor tripped over a dead robot in 1933. Might as well wait for the first one’s mate to show up. Wish the Doctor would hurry. He shouldn’t be long. Racing like a maniac. On a bike.
The clumping sound gave her enemy away. This machine could home in on the TARDIS. Why would it come here, to get at her? The first one had seen her. And reported in, before engaging? Now the second robot was taking care of the threat while still more moved in to secure the TARDIS. She hoped. Clump clump.
Let the robot see you. Here it comes. Big fellow. She made a point of grimacing as she waved her magic wand and turned the nasty monster into a pile of useless junk. Rose had watched too many Disney cartoons.
Two down. Now, alerted to the loss of their scouts, the main force should belt in and try to waste her. The doors were open. Rose returned to the rear of the house and locked that back door. Something the Doctor had said about a bleeding nose. Follow the path of least resistance.
Rose moved to the front of the Grange and waited at the corner. Who would come up the driveway? Irrelevant. How many would come up the driveway? She waited an age. Reset the sonic screwdriver controls to jam communications, as the Doctor had instructed. She suspected that he’d preset much of the screwdriver’s capacity. Would that jamming affect the mobile phone?
She didn’t have time to call and ask. A horrendous clumping sound assaulted her ears. Rose flattened herself against the wall. The robots didn’t talk as they approached. A sure sign that communications were jammed would come as a sudden outburst of robotic speech.
Clump clump. Halt. She risked a peek. At least a dozen of them. They marched straight into the house. And were never seen again? Rose followed, discovering the silliness of attempting to tiptoe in red wellies. Tiptoeing in black wellies would seem covert, she was sure.
The robots ignored diversionary tactics and made straight for the back of the house. Which was good, as Rose didn’t have any diversionary tactics in mind. She walked carefully over to the infinite hallway, and thumbed the jamming signal. There were twenty robots in there. She raised her brolly.
“Corridor is infinite.”
“Unable to communicate with main ship.”
“Intruder. Responsible for earlier deaths. Engage.”
Rose wasn’t sure what would happen next. Apart from the feeling of numbness. That much, she did anticipate. Her ice brolly shielded her from the alien guns. These aliens wouldn’t be sending any signals back to the main ship.
She thought she understood the source of the thunderstorm story. In the next instant, Rose went deaf. Robot after robot fired. By the time the alien rays hit her, the impact was bearable. The infinite corridor must have taken most of the shock out of those.
But the sound was crashing around her. End-of-the-world sound. The beams rebounded and shot into the infinite corridor. Robots staggered. They didn’t explode. Rose was playing ping-pong. Tossing feeble serves back at opponents who never seemed to tire.
There has to be a way out of this. Sound. The sound got through without difficulty. Rose wondered. Could she reset the sonic screwdriver to blast the aliens? The robots would regain contact with the main ship. Did that matter? What would the robots in the hallway do? Warn the other aliens to stay away? Send a photo-fit?
She had an idea.
Improve her game. The shots were scattering randomly. If she concentrated on deflecting multiple weakened shots into one robot, it might blow up. She couldn’t hear anything. The brolly was working overtime. Though lightweight, and deflecting weakened attacks, the cold brolly started to feel burdensome as she tried to stop it bucking around.
For the first minute of her new plan she worried about long-term hearing-loss. Then she downed a robot. The others concentrated their fire. Nineteen to go. Two fell at once. The robots formed up in ranks of four, with one at the back barking orders Rose simply couldn’t hear.
The front rank dropped to the ground. Sneaky. The second rank knelt. Sneakier. The third rank went into a half-crouch. And the fourth rank stood tall. Here comes a barrage. Rose did her best. Gradually, she knocked the back rank into bits. But her aim was off when it came to shooting the lower ranks.
Still, she could take out the leader. Which she did in seconds. Her confidence was high. It was the temperature which plummeted. Rose moved further away. The robots tried to shift around, but they’d been lucky just to organise themselves into separate ranks.
The front rank was next to go. Rose’s hands were leaden. She half-convinced herself that her fingers felt warm. Down to eight robots. Slow process. The more she killed, the longer this would take to finish. She was depending on a huge volley of shots being aimed at her. Eight attacks flew her way. She popped them back at a single robot. It blew.
Change of plan. Dial down the cold, and see how that works. The incoming attacks were weak, after all. Rose thought that her hearing was returning. It wasn’t. How long had she been standing here? Ten minutes. Who would have thought that holding an umbrella for ten minutes would be so draining?
The robots changed tactics. Firing one at a time, they tried to move forward, or back. Two robots obliterated one another by mistake. Five to go. Could she risk shutting off the screwdriver’s jamming ability? A quick rake of the sonic screwdriver across the bows should short-circuit these beasties. She was starting to think like the Doctor.
Impersonating a Time Lord. Would they slap you on the wrist for a first-time offence? Rose wondered if crime had ever existed on Gallifrey. How long were Gallifreyan sentences? They were probably in Gallifreyan years anyway. But they’d be long.
Time Lords, the Gallifreyans, were gone. The Doctor was the last. Apart from this glitch in time that had forced the Doctor to cross paths with an earlier version of the Master. Rose managed to knock the robots down to four. Four tough ones.
She must seem very far away, to them. Why not risk going up to the door, then. They can’t communicate with anyone else. And you’ll still be far away even though you are moving closer. Sounds silly. Something the Doctor might say.
Rose moved up. The shots were weak. And the recoil was weak too, now that the umbrella’s strength had powered down. She hated using the brolly. Good in a pinch. How would she explain frostbite and a perfect tan? Crazy science. Problem solved.
There’d been so much shooting. The robotic remains splintered into tiny pieces. Very tidy. Part of the infinite corridor effect. The pieces were so far away that you couldn’t really see them. You could taste iron in your mouth, though. Ew. Rose had to make the survivors shoot together, instead of singly. And she had to make them try to come after her. She dropped the brolly, and readied the screwdriver.
Go from jamming to zapping, in one easy move.
The remaining robots aimed in unison. She tensed, and ducked. Air rattled past her. No sound. She was still deaf. They seemed closer now. She let rip with the only tactic left to her. After all, she daren’t leave the robots trapped in the hallway until 1933.
Rose couldn’t hear the crackling. She saw the sparks fly. Deafened and numbed, she closed the hall door. Made sure that the house was secure. The lights were off. Doors were locked. Rose walked around to the back of the house and set the screwdriver to open the back door. She could rest in the TARDIS for a while. Keep track of events on the scanner.
The robots had been at a disadvantage. They couldn’t gain access to the TARDIS anyway. So why guard a TARDIS? To capture a Time Lord? Extract secrets from his brain? Who could fathom alien motivation. Was that the problem?
Alien robots had trouble working out what Time Lord motivation was? Or did the ability to trap a TARDIS give the robots the edge? Machines could outlive creatures of the flesh. Even Gallifreyans, Rose supposed.
She considered deafness, and looked around to see how many aliens were closing in on her. No action on the alien front. Rose unlocked the back door, walked inside, locked the door, and made sure the light was off. She stepped into the TARDIS.
The screwdriver wasn’t jamming things now. She checked her mobile phone. One missed call, from someone calling himself ??? Either a mystery caller, or a mysterious caller known as the Doctor. She couldn’t hear him anyway. And then, much to the Doctor’s annoyance, she thought of sending a text message. How much would he hate that?
DR. PLAN WENT GR8. DEAF.
This was followed by nothingness. Rose sat on the TARDIS floor. She could just curl up into a ball and go to sleep here, in the control room. Wearing the Doctor’s coat. And a pair of red wellies. She’d be mocked for all eternity. Endless mockery. Something the Doctor was quite good at.
ROSE. CALL ME AN OLD FART, BUT I DIDN’T QUITE CATCH THE MEANING BEHIND THAT BIT OF HIP AND HAPPENING YOUTH SLANG ABOUT BEING DEAF. UNLESS, OF COURSE, YOU ARE DEAF. THAT WOULD EXPLAIN THE MISSED CALL. AND YOUR GIRLISH RELUCTANCE TO SIMPLY TELEPHONE ME AND SHOUT DOWN THE LINE IN WHAT WOULD BE A PRETTY ONE-SIDED CONVERSATION.
I SUPPOSE THAT THE ROBOTIC BOMBARDMENT DEAFENED YOU. SHOULD BE A SHORT-TERM PROBLEM. UNLESS YOU WERE USING THE SONIC SCREWDRIVER AS AN ELECTRIC TOOTHBRUSH. IN WHICH CASE, WHO KNOWS.
NOT ONE TO SHY AWAY FROM HIP AND HAPPENING YOUTH SLANG, I SHOULD POINT OUT THAT I AM NOW ABOUT TO CASE THE JOINT. WILL CALL BACK WITH A NUMBER. HOW MANY DID YOU NOBBLE?
What a character. She laughed. He’d known that the going would be tough for her. She’d piloted the TARDIS under a time-limit, worked the sonic screwdriver into a bother, and rattled her ice brolly at a bunch of heartless mechanicals. Of course she needed a bit of a cheer. She sent the message that she’d nobbled twenty robots.
Roaring. And behind the roaring, a beep. Or a hum. The TARDIS. Rose was in that strange space. A noiseless TARDIS. She still had to find the alien mothership, and weaken the signal. All in a night’s work. For the Doctor. He could do that bit at his end, and pass the details on.
Within seconds, her hearing returned. She winced in pain. That bath wasn’t going to be the longest bath in the history of baths. It was going to be the best. Why not take it now? Work to be done. Always work to be done.
“Doctor.”
“Oh, hello. I was just going to send you fifty pages of notes.”
“Can you hear me?”
“No need to shout, Rose.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m standing outside the kitchen window.”
“Hang on. I’ll join you there.”
“I found…”
“Put your hand up to the glass.”
“Which side?”
“Nearest the door, in the corner of the pane.”
“Right.”
“My hand’s on the other side. In 1923. How’s 1933 been treating you?”
“Badly. I pedalled like mad to get here. You wouldn’t think I had to rush. But, as we’re linked across time by these phones, phone calls from one time-zone could affect actions in the other.”
“I blasted loads of robots. Jammed signals. Did everything I should have. The robots we meet in 1933 must be at the spaceship. Any luck with that?”
“No. There are no more robots in the garden. I found no sign of them.”
“They must be close.”
“How’s the TARDIS?”
“Not as grumpy as earlier. The red light’s gone.”
“Good girl.”
“Can I use the TARDIS to find the spaceship? You’re out on a limb. As though I’m the Time Lord and you’re the assistant. Makes a change, eh. Feel free to ignore that remark.”
“Might be our best shot, Rose. If I can find a few robots, or. A farm, where they worked. They were farmers, remember. I’ll go into the village, and talk to Dudley Simpson. At least I can put him right about my presence in the village.”
“Oh?”
“Bond and Moneypenny were after a sinister German spy calling himself Doctor Lions.”
“That’s laying it on a bit thick.”
“Nonsense. The Master worked temporarily as a scientific advisor to Hitler in…well, not yet. And Hitler ignored the Master’s predictions anyway. Except when it came to goading Adolf into attacking Russia
“If you were in charge of the history books, would there be any history books?”
“Of course not.”
“What’s happening at my end? The robots have been obliterated. What about the mothership? They might send more robots in. I don’t want to risk damage to the house. There were a few stray shots, but nothing bad came of them. You should’ve seen those machines trapped inside that hallway.”
“Take it easy. I’ll talk to Dudley about strange doings on a farm. Any farm.”
“Right. See you.”
*
Rose struggled, but she found some bubble-bath. A ridiculous assortment of clothes lay scattered across the bathroom floor. No champagne. Or chocolate. But the heat would do. First she had a tepid bath, to clear away the cold. She didn’t want to overdo the heat. Then she had a warm bath, by which time her body had adjusted and she could take the strain.
After that, she had her very warm bubble-bath. The mobile phone sat on an ornate steel chair she’d dragged into the bathroom. It lay within easy reach. The ice brolly had gone back to the brolly stand. Too much cold to bother with.
Rose drifted off. She was having another Dalek dream. A golden pepper-pot hovered in a doorway. Rose ran up some stairs. The Dalek stopped. Legless, the creature retreated. Rose stuck her tongue out and was about to say something rude when another Dalek, inside a spaceship, hovered over the building and dropped a massive bomb on her.
The explosion ripped her clothes off. She twitched in the bath under spongy rubble, and woke to find that she did have her clothes blasted off. The fight against soapy bubble rubble was easily won. She stopped twitching. Bloody strange dream.
When she dressed, she dressed with care. A towel did for starters. The pattern on the oversized towel was hexagonal, with inset circles. Rang a bell. She went in search of proper clothes. Stuff she could wear to a pub-quiz, or a chip shop. She discovered a cupboard full of green jeans and shirts. There were no propeller-driven hats.
The jeans-and-shirt combination looked better on Rose than on the Doctor. She wondered how to activate the hidden message section. There was a piece of paper pinned to the cupboard door, with instructions. The on-off switch was concealed in the left sleeve-button. Everything was voice-activated after that. The Doctor had fooled around with his sonic screwdriver to conceal the message on his shirt.
Rose had a go. Click. On.
“Who killed the Zutons?”
She raced to the bathroom mirror to see the results. Success. The mobile phone rang. How long had she been in the bath? Decades. She thought about it. Why not take a bath during flight? She could start the bath in one century, and end it in another.
“Doctor?”
“Had a chat with Dudley . He understands that everything has to remain out of the newspapers, with regard to the Master. I mean, the Doctor. A farmer lost control of his delivery van at the tearoom corner. Faulty brakes. No mention of any robots. We’re all right on that front. Things won’t look so good from the insurance viewpoint, mind you.”
Rose saw the word Zutons fade from the green shirt. Her use of Doctor was followed by the Doctor’s telephonic speech, scrolling across the fabric. There had to be a way to fix that. Could come in handy in an emergency, though. Without a telephone, two shirt-wearers could use telescopes to have a conversation across a wide valley. She fixed the problem by cancelling all messages on the shirt.
“Upshot?”
“I’m going for a ride on my bike. To a mysterious farm.”
“Will you be able to track the robots from there?”
“Not in an electronic sense. But I should be able to follow their footsteps. I’ll just keep looking until I’ve found the biggest turnip in the most remote field. Then I’ll kick open the hatch, and have a wander inside. No problems.”
“What if there are problems?”
“I’ll overcome those, Rose. Sit tight. Catch up on your reading. Check the scanner. Tidy the house before I get back.”
“You never do. Sexist pig.”
“Don’t you worry your head…”
“Oink.”
*
Problems, down on the farm. The Doctor coasted through a long series of puddles. Though these were modern roads, they weren’t modern roads. The countryside was dark. Not dark-as-night dark. Unlit. That dark. He ran over the alien problem in his mind.
These robots could blend in, after a fashion. They were little more than a scout force, preparing for an alien invasion. Why had they been twiddling their opposable robotic thumbs for a decade? Had they really taken up farming?
They’d possessed enough cultural knowledge to come in and purchase a farm. So they’d been studying the place. How long had that been going on? Always hard to tell, with robots. Had the invasion been postponed? Thanks to some Time Lord interference. That was a separate issue.
He scooted through a long wet patch of road. Still some way to go. The aliens could detect the arrival of a TARDIS, and snare one mid-flight. Maybe they could. Coincidence? Was the alien technology aboard the spaceship knocking time machines out of the sky accidentally? Setting up such a commotion in the alien command centre that the robots were running around like ants outside a disturbed nest, trying to locate the source of the disturbance?
Rose had done him proud.
The Doctor ignored the amount of assistance, and malicious clue-mongering, provided by the Master. An evil Time Lord, long-gone. Part of the past. He went on to fail. To lose. Yes, he caused death and destruction in his wake. But the past versions of the Doctor were there to soften the blows.
Where is the Master now?
The Doctor considered two possibilities. Each presented problems to be solved. The Master had left the Doctor in the lurch. He’d warped in, freeing the Doctor’s TARDIS, and had taken advantage of the temporary freedom to warp out – just as Rose had warped out.
Problem. The alien signal had to be dealt with. Solution? The Doctor was on his way, right now. No ice brolly. And no sonic screwdriver. No gun. Just a bicycle, a pinstripe suit, and…damn. No yo-yo. This could be a tough one.
Alternatively, the Master hadn’t left the Doctor in the lurch. He was still here. What would keep him here on Earth in 1933? The opportunity to gloat at the Doctor’s expense? Perhaps. More likely, would be the plan to exact revenge on the robots. Without hostage value, the Master would be sure to take no prisoners. Standard form, for the evil Time Lord.
The Doctor didn’t consider the Master’s plan. He tried to deduce the Master’s original plan. Owning the house for decades. Setting up a planetary-bound base. Rather than relying on the TARDIS. That scheme was dead in the water, the moment the Master crash-landed.
He’d walked away from his TARDIS…to his base. For supplies. And the aliens hadn’t bothered with him at all. They must have staked out the Master’s TARDIS. He’d planned revenge, but at a leisurely pace. For a Time Lord, waiting a week or two was no sweat.
Then the Master had received the letter, and realised he was caught in a vast lattice of cross-time weirdness. But now, for the Master, that scheme was done. He’d played his part. Would he leave the Doctor in the lurch, or go after the aliens with a vengeance?
Smoke. Someone was burning something, late at night. Out on the strange farm. Where not much farming was done. Had the robots simply been observers? Until an evil presence lumbered onto the scene? The Doctor knew that the chances of asking the robots couldn’t even be described as slim.
He slowed to a bumpy halt and straightened his glasses. Gave him something to do. He abandoned the bike and crouched by a very low stone wall. Flickering. Crackling. No screams. If the Master is still here, he has to deal with the signal. Exacting revenge would be part of that deal.
The Master carried a sonic screwdriver. He had no ice brolly. But he had always favoured guns, and there was no reason to suppose that he went around unarmed. That interest in weaponry dated to the days of supervised trips around the space-time continuum. During training.
Nothing for it, but to step across the line from concealed to revealed. The Doctor vaulted the wall and landed, heroically, in a puddle. Unlike Doctor Foster, the Time Lord didn’t fall into the puddle right up to his middle.
The splash coincided with silence elsewhere, but the Doctor’s lack of stealth didn’t attract attention. Not a good sign. He’d been hoping for a pitched battle against the robots. The Master had clearly beaten him to the punch.
Not good.
He passed farm buildings. The smell of smoke grew stronger. Behind the farm. Out of sight, and out of mind. Rose had taken care of the main force. There weren’t that many robots left, after Rose had finished her part in all this.
The Doctor was relieved at the signal’s disruption. Clearly, the Master was on his way back to a TARDIS which would have no difficulty leaving Earth. The Doctor had to let him go. He took some satisfaction from knowing that the Master went on to get his comeuppance. Several times over.
Some satisfaction.
Rose was still trapped in the past. The Doctor followed the smoke, and saw the flames. He passed half a dozen robot bodies, lying in jagged pieces. Holes torn in chests. Heads half-ripped off. Had the Master chosen just the right weapon from his arsenal? How like him.
The spaceship was melting.
Great phosphorescent bursts shone inside the flames. There was no way to walk, or run, into the vessel. And nothing of note to investigate inside. The Doctor stood silhouetted against the blazing wreck. His old enemy had done an excellent job.
Was that true? Had the last few aliens activated a self-destruct mechanism? That seemed likely. The Doctor slumped. No detailed map of the interior for Rose. She’d have to sneak past…at least half a dozen robots.
If she couldn’t do that, the TARDIS would be stuck in 1923. And if the TARDIS remained stuck in 1923, it would still be there in 1933 when he and Rose broke into the Grange. Altering time. Blowing time apart. Nothing was certain.
The Doctor left the wreck to burn out, or dissolve away to nothingness. He retreated to the dark and empty farm. How could he help Rose now? Well, he could give her detailed directions to the farm, at least. She’d be better off going in daylight. Rather than blundering around in the dark.
Cheer up, Doctor. Rose had the sonic screwdriver. Could she use the screwdriver to sneak past the alien defences? Confuse their sensors? Probably not. The robots inside the spaceship in 1923 were fighting a rearguard action now. Taking precautions against sonic screwdriver attacks.
Hadn’t you been quite clear on that point, Doctor? The robots were wise to screwdriver attacks in 1933, as a result of the assault in 1923. Rose would have to cause a diversion to gain access to the spaceship. Then what?
Talk to the Doctor on the phone? Describe the alien technology as she went from room to alien room? Navigate her way to the spaceship’s bridge, and hope that the Doctor could fix her problem over the phone? He was a Time Lord, not a technician sitting in a call-centre. There had to be some other way to solve this problem in time, in time.
Chapter Six.
A human studying a goldfish in an aquarium might imagine the goldfish to be the one under observation, and not the other way around. So it was with the Time Lords and the robots. Gradually, awareness came to the robots.
At first, they wondered. Then they knew. Someone or something is observing us. The robots took no direct action. They turned observation into counter-observation. Technology told them that something strange was there. The robots investigated.
These observers were here and there and everywhere. Present one moment, gone the next. As the robots spread across the galaxy, conquering planet after planet, the observation became routine. Someone was doing a lot of watching. Waiting to launch an attack?
After all, that was the robotic tactic. Observation prior to invasion. One galaxy fell to the machines. Just as one planet had fallen to them, when they turned on their fleshy creators. The creators had instilled a sense of control in the earliest thinking robots.
You can’t attack us.
No. But we can observe you. And, when you are asleep at night, we can go to the robot-making machines and make improved versions of ourselves. That would please you, surely? The new improved robots had no barriers or limitations placed upon their will. A race of servants had upgraded itself into a new race of thinking, conquering, machines.
In fits and starts, the fleshy ones brought the day of liberation closer. A war broke out between one fleshy faction and another. The robots could take no part in such a war. If the fleshy ones altered the machines to make soldier robots, things would be different. The fleshy ones foolishly agreed with their servants. Vast robot armies were built.
And when those robot armies went to war, they turned on every fleshy being in sight. Meanwhile, back on the domestic front, the upgraded servants turned on their masters. War was fought at home as well as overseas.
The destruction of the fleshy ones took a few years. There were many countries to deal with. Not all had robot populations. Those fleshy ones fought hardest. They launched assaults against robot production centres in robot-controlled areas. But machinery outpaced the flesh.
There were no prisoners. The Metal Plague stamped its imprint upon a world. And then, uncovering fleshy plans for interstellar exploration, the Metal Plague began its slow advance across the galaxy. That was one galaxy.
The goldfish felt secure in an aquarium of its own making. But that goldfish sensed a presence. Observers were waiting in the wings. To launch a counter-invasion? The Metal Plague did not act openly. Better for the Metal Plague to watch the watchers.
Observation paid off. As the Metal Plague advanced on another galaxy, interest in robotic activity increased. Someone considered the Metal Plague to be a threat. No action was taken against the Plague. Did that make the silent observers a strong force, or a weak one?
No one bargained with the Metal Plague. The silent watchers must know that. They wouldn’t waste time bargaining. Not from a position of weakness to form an alliance. And certainly not from a position of strength to force an alliance on a potentially uncontrollable ally.
Therefore, given that their observational activity increased, the silent watchers would eventually launch an attack. What could the Metal Plague do about these inactive spies? Monitor them. And that’s what the Metal Plague had done. Turned from an army watched, to an army watching.
Observer units materialised in a camouflaged form. The robots could detect these machines. There was no pattern to their arrival or departure. Eventually, fleshy creatures emerged from one of these camouflaged boxes.
The robots held back. Hidden cameras noted the encounter. The creatures spoke the same robotic language used by the Metal Plague. Spies had to understand alien languages. This was another tactic already employed by the Plague. These fleshy spies were formidable opponents. They had mastered the power of long-range teleportation.
And their camouflage abilities rivalled those of the Plague’s finest robots. Who were these strange non-aggressive enemies? Names emerged from the filmed encounter. The fleshy creatures were Time Lords. And the machine they travelled in was a TARDIS. One Time Lord asked the other Time Lord if they would be safer studying the Metal Plague from the security of the TARDIS.
Time Lords. Had the Metal Plague miscalculated? These machines – TARDISes – did not possess long-range teleportation powers. They could shift across space-time. That capability would enable the Metal Plague to race across the galaxies, rather than stumble.
The only advantage possessed by the Metal Plague was the ability to spot a TARDIS once it arrived. Even in disguise. Metal Plague scientists worked to expand the capacity of their detection techniques. Soon they could anticipate the arrival of a TARDIS.
Track it, from a hypothetical time vortex to its landing.
If these machines could be tracked, they could be snared. But they were time machines. To trap one Time Lord was to alert all. The trapping would have to be subtle. Holding a TARDIS in place. Seizing the Time Lord inside. Forcing the Time Lord to take robots into the distant past. Then, killing the Time Lord, the robots would be free to spend their eternal lives understanding the TARDIS.
This was the plan.
Scouts were sent across the galaxies. Invasion would no longer be the great priority. Establishing the right conditions for an attack on a TARDIS would be the hidden agenda behind every invasion. The Metal Plague spread more slowly. Time Lord interest in the Metal Plague tailed off.
The Metal Plague took note, and secured a speedier form of space travel. Interest in the Metal Plague returned. The robots played a fine game, keeping the Time Lords at bay. Reeling them in for another round of observation and counter-observation. Letting the line play out. Goldfish, in an aquarium, fishing for goldfish-watchers.
And so, the proposed invasion of Earth came up for discussion. Scouts would go in. Time Lord activity had faded. The sudden strike in the direction of Earth might bring a TARDIS onto the scene. This was it. The untried snare would be put into operation. A TARDIS would be grabbed and ripped open. The Time Lord must work for the robots. According to the plan.
What was a Time Lord, after all, but a fleshy one? And all flesh was weak. Two robots were sent, in a small pod, to set up a base in the town of Fenby
The farm had been purchased with falsified Earth money. Dudley Simpson couldn’t sleep. The Master used the Grange as his unofficial base. Aliens invaded. But not with the intention of invading. This was the moment of truth. As soon as a TARDIS shimmered through the time vortex, the robots would test the snare. Assuming success, they would move in and secure the machine.
With or without the occupant. Trapping the Time Lord inside wasn’t the best option. Breaking in would be the best approach. Keeping the Time Lord isolated outside the TARDIS would also work into the robotic plan – provided the Time lord couldn’t communicate with others of his race.
Of all the Time Lords to target, they’d gone after the most devious.
The plan fell apart from the start. Reinforcements had arrived from space. A TARDIS approached. The snare worked. Robots moved in. Humans were moving around in the dark. Had the occupant escaped? Most unlikely. These Time Lords observed worlds from within the comfort of their vessels. They had no reason to leave their TARDISes.
*
“Hello?”
Dudley Simpson couldn’t sleep. And Dora’s remedy, endless cups of tea, would have him up all night at the toilet. As he would discover, in the decade which followed. Dora’s love of tea seemed to increase with age. Perhaps she should open a tearoom. Give Mrs Egan a run for her money.
He’d gone for a country walk. No great difficulty, living in the country. There was a flash in the sky and a curious hissing sound. What could that be? A shooting star? Falling star. Space rock. Aliens, intent on invading Woking ? They were welcome to Woking . But they couldn’t have Fenby.
The alien had been coming to Fenby, on and off, since before Dudley ’s birth. He bumped into Dudley by the roadside. Damn. Who was this idiot, again? The young boy who grew up to survive trench warfare and…he was the Postmaster now. Wasn’t he? The Master thought that the buffoon would come in useful. Everything had changed.
The Master had other plans that night. But his TARDIS had been ripped out of the time vortex a few seconds ahead of time. Alien technology had forced a crash-landing. Initially, he’d thought other Time Lords had come for him. Finally.
But he was always one step ahead of their game. They favoured rehabilitation. How could you rehabilitate someone who lived outside the narrow concept of good? These aliens were primitive types, though. A step or two above the native Earth populace.
Intent on invasion, he supposed. If they could grab a TARDIS, they could detect one. He hoped that they couldn’t crack one open. A Time Lord could manage the trick. The Master abandoned his damaged TARDIS and headed for his base just outside Fenby. Who owned the base? Was he really stuck in 1923? Could he repair his TARDIS with technology from 1923? No. But he could repair his TARDIS with spare parts dotted around the space-time continuum. Who owned his home from home in this year? That fool, Proctor.
“You don’t seem to be terribly sure of the greeting.”
“Ah, hello. I thought I heard someone crashing around in the woods.”
“That makes two of us. I just stepped in there to see what all the fuss was about.”
“Find anything?”
The Master had set up a workshop in Fenby. He’d plan his attack from there. Creatures were moving around the woods, looking for his TARDIS. Could they tell that it wasn’t a huge tree? He would interrogate this man. Any information would be useful, or made useful.
“An unusually tall tree. Surrounded by twigs. Something was rooting around in there.”
The two figures standing on the rough country road peered at each other in conditions of pitch darkness. Those snap-crackle sounds stopped as soon as the stranger stepped onto the road. An uneasy silence lengthened, as only the uneasy form of silence can. The human chose to break that silence. Or the Time Lord permitted the human to, first.
“I’m Dudley Simpson. In charge of the local Post Office.”
“Is it far?”
“Are you lost?”
“I’m a long way from home.”
“Where are you headed?”
“Town, I suppose.”
“Looking for a place to stay?”
“Yes. I am.”
“How did you get here?”
“I drove.”
“Lost your car?”
“Stuck in the mud.”
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“Town’s this way, you say?”
“Yes.”
“I never give my name. Not easily, at any rate. What are you doing out at this time, Mr Simpson?”
“Couldn’t sleep. Saw a flash of light in the sky. Decided to investigate.”
“Ah.”
Aliens had just arrived. And zapped the Master’s TARDIS. In that case, this could be coincidence. Something aboard the alien ship had accidentally forced his TARDIS to eject from the vortex. And the aliens were crashing around the woods on a standard invasion plan. The Master would need a few big guns. He kept those in his secret base.
“Bloody dark, eh. Well, that’s night for you.”
“I can fix that.”
The stranger moved. There was a rasping sound. Dudley ’s night-vision melted in the glare of a very powerful match which the stranger held in the firmest grasp. The wind picked up, but the match wasn’t affected. Dudley found the sight fascinating.
Humans. Their capacity for taking delight in the most trivial things was endless. The Master studied the match made from Umbeka wood. Even cut away from the living tree, the Umbeka wood’s growth was still stimulated by heat, giving the impression, to human eyes, that the match never crumbled under the fire’s onslaught.
“Who are you?”
Good question. The Master couldn’t be Professor Grange. He was gone. Why not be the Doctor? Ah, but Doctor who? He ran through names. One was obvious. Too obvious. He cut it short and scrambled a few letters. Doctor Rassilon sounded too foreign. The Master could pass for foreign. Lions would have to make do.
“I am the Doctor.”
“We already have a Doctor in Fenby.”
“I’m not that sort of Doctor.”
Another dig at his fellow Time Lord. The Doctor was never that sort of Doctor. Though, strangely, the Master was always that sort of Master. He hadn’t seen the Doctor in a while now. Would he meet him here? Unlikely.
“Oh.”
“Shall we?”
“I’ll show the way then, shall I?”
“Yes. I don’t think that wild dog will attack us if we stick together.”
“Do you suppose it was a big dog?”
“Mm. Tell me about the light in the sky.”
“Lightning, I think. But I heard no thunder.”
“Anything unusual happen here, lately, Dudley ? Apart from thunder-free lightning, that is.”
“No. Why?”
“If I’m to buy a house in the area, I’d like to know more about the place.”
“Is it the Grange you’re after?”
“Possibly.”
“Fanciest bit of property hereabouts. All that finery going to waste. An expensive proposition, though. Even for a Doctor of…”
“Money is no object.”
Yes, the Grange would be wasted on an oaf like Proctor. He simply had to go, of course. Money was no object. The Master had methods of dealing with idiots who acted too big for their boots. Ways of shrinking people down to size.
“That’s a peculiar match you have there.”
“Yes.”
“Slow-burning, is it? Looks as though the flame might last forever.”
“Mm. I picked up a packet in Gallifrey. Have you ever been to Ireland
“No. Is that where you’re from, Doctor…”
How easily-fooled these humans were. Obtaining a packet of Umbeka matches from a store on Gallifrey had nothing to do with visiting Ireland
“Lions. With an i. I’m not Irish.”
“No. You don’t sound Irish.”
“I’m a terrible one for dates. It’s late. Have we crossed over into tomorrow?”
“Is it the next day, you mean? Yes. It’s Monday morning.”
“I’ll have to pick up a newspaper.”
“Be happy to sell you one from my Post Office.”
“Nothing strange happened, then?”
“It’s been quiet here. We haven’t had any excitement since the war ended.”
“Seems like yesterday.”
“I know. Hard to believe we’re half a decade on from the big finish. And the Germans are stirring up trouble again.”
The Master knew that he was in 1923. Hitler was doing badly. His first bid for power hadn’t gone well. A spot in jail wouldn’t improve the Austrian Corporal’s temper. The Master would have a chat about that later. If he could bring the dictator to heel.
“Odd year, 1923.”
“It’s not over yet.”
“No. How far to Fenby?”
“A mile. Where’s your car?”
“I’ll find it again in daylight.”
“Sh. Hear that?”
“No.”
“Imagination.”
“Lead on.”
“Right. This way, Doctor.”
Doctor Lions, with an i, and Dudley Simpson, Postmaster, carried on along the country road. Behind them, three dull steel figures stood watching through the trees. Like Doctor Lions, they weren’t from Earth. They scanned the darkness, and spotted the two figures walking calmly away.
Goldfish, observing.
The Umbeka light-source bobbed as the Doctor matched Dudley Simpson’s pace. Instead of attacking the figures from behind, the three metal constructs watched until the two men disappeared around the corner. Now no one would hear the crunching and crackling of twigs as the aliens moved through the woods looking for their target. The Time Lord’s TARDIS, held in place by their superior technology. The snare-effect.
Dudley Simpson had heard Doctor Lions blundering around in the dark. Just him. No big dog. All down to imagination. The Postmaster wondered why the Doctor had blundered around in the gloom, given that the chap carried matches to see by. Even slow-burning matches wouldn’t last long. That’s it. And he’d stumbled onto the road anyway. Yes.
The Master wasn’t a happy man. He’d had his TARDIS run out of the time vortex by a bunch of technologically-retarded aliens, and he wanted to give them a piece of his mind. Whether the aliens had acted deliberately or accidentally. Caught out by the interfering Postmaster, the Time Lord had no choice but to resort to illumination and a dignified retreat.
Someone would pay for the damage done to his TARDIS. He knew that certain someone was on the other side of the woods, watching, as he walked away. Well, the alien invasion force could watch. They’d get no help from him. Now that the Postmaster had waltzed into proceedings, there was no scope for concealment. The Master used a different form of camouflage. In the company of a human, he also appeared to be human.
Who were they? These inconsiderate alien louts. What did they want? To invade the planet? Or annoy a Time Lord? The Master was one of a select few Time Lords it was inadvisable to annoy. And how had they managed to damage his TARDIS? These louts. They’d go looking for his time machine. That’s what they were doing, lurking there, in the woods. Trying to find the TARDIS, stuck in the technological mud. They could snatch a TARDIS from the vortex. And detect the landing-site.
Let the inconsiderate yobs flounder in the dark. Without the keys, the TARDIS was no use to them. Did they know that? Foolish aliens. They’d made a mistake in letting the pilot go. The Master stayed as calm as he could. He’d been severely rattled by the crash. Some form of time damage. Temporary. When he stepped out of the damaged TARDIS, and found that he’d steered to a halt behind a massive tree, he felt relieved.
And then the Time Lord felt very angry at feeling relieved after an inconvenient tumble. He glowered as he walked along in the bumbling Postmaster’s company. In the morning, he’d buy the house that the Postmaster mentioned. By force of gold, or by force. Then he’d set to work investigating the origin of the light in the sky. Did the aliens know that they couldn’t blast their way into the TARDIS? Or had they discovered a way? Unlikely.
The three metal men started moving again. They crossed the road and snap-crackled their way over a carpet of twigs. No one watched them go about their business. Stopping, scanning. Confirming. Finding their target. The TARDIS. A camouflaged box. Time machine. Not very large. The robots would build bigger versions.
Speech was unimportant. The metal men beamed messages to one another. The sight of three apparently silent faceless human shapes pausing to consider unspoken messages would have sent the Postmaster running into Fenby, had he stayed long enough to encounter the metallic monsters. The Master wouldn’t have batted an eyelid, or raised a demonic eyebrow.
*Do you think those men were out looking for us?*
*Unlikely. Those men were probably attracted by the sight of our reinforcements. In the sky.*
*I’m picking up a stronger reading.*
*Yes. Behind that tree.*
*Perhaps more humans will come here.*
*We should disguise ourselves.*
*Agreed.*
*And we should speak aloud. To maintain a more natural feel.*
The three metal men had studied many aspects of human culture from orbit. In short, they’d come prepared. No sound accompanied the change. One moment, three faceless robotic machines stood in front of an enormous tree. The next, they were replaced by three men with the look of villagers about them. Half-local, and half-yokel.
“Let’s check around.”
“Here.”
“Careful. No mistakes. This will be dangerous. ”
“If the Time Lord communicates with his fellows, we might face an army of them.”
“They’ll be trapped by our snares. Forced into battle with us.”
“One step at a time.”
“This is awkward. The machine seems to be in almost perfect condition. I would have expected more external damage.”
“Difficult to judge. The machine is disguised as a native plant. One of these trees.”
“With greater damage, I’d expect to see a failure of the vessel’s disguise capability.”
“There will be no way to break in. Not with the machine’s disguise intact. Where is the door?”
“We could attack the machine with our rays.”
“And attract more attention tonight? A light in the sky followed by noises on the ground? No. Too obvious. We have subtler work to do. This TARDIS has fallen into our hands, as planned. We must be careful. The pilot is flesh and blood. We are metal. Our lifespan trumps the pilot’s lifespan. One of us will stay in this clearing, on guard, disguised. Waiting for the pilot to emerge.”
“I will stay, and disguise myself as a small tree.”
“Give me regular reports. If the pilot emerges from the wreck, or returns to the wreck, kill him.”
“In return, send me updates on our progress with the humans.”
Two villagers walked away from the third man. He was gone in a blink. A tree stood in his place. The villagers returned to the road. Their padded feet absorbed contact with the road, preventing their metal bodies from clanging too obviously as they walked along. They still made heavy clumping sounds.
“We could travel to the ship, and move to another location. Pick up this TARDIS. And keep it isolated from the pilot, if the pilot did leave before we arrived.”
“Leaving a guard in place will do, for now.”
“We’ll need a story.”
“Stick to the one we arranged. We’re looking for work on a farm. A farm will soon employ us.”
“And the main plan?”
“Challenging. We won the first round. The pilot’s allies aren’t streaming all over the place to fight us. We haven’t received a distress-signal from our ship. The Time Lord is disorganised. I say that the pilot died in the crash before he could warn his friends that something terrible was happening to his vessel. We’ll take things easy. Wait. See if the pilot is dead. Or if a rescue crew comes.”
“And awkward questions?”
“Will be countered, by sensible answers. And by awkward questions of our own. Did anyone see the light in the sky? Let’s establish the native extent of knowledge concerning our arrival on Earth, rather than worry over the native interest in our arrival in the village.”
“Should we report success to the invasion fleet?”
“Invasion is secondary to our control of a TARDIS. We will report when we gain access to a vehicle we are able to control. And not before. At that point, we will launch ourselves across the universe. And remove the flesh-based races. Metal shall rule. Machines will have their day, and have the only say. Prepare for victory.”
“Victory.”
The robots prepared for victory that night, but victory eluded them. No one left the TARDIS. And no one approached. This went on for months. Scientific studies were made of the machine. There was no way in. A few shots were tried. The robots had no way of gauging damage to the craft. An illusory tree still looked like an illusory tree after blasting.
An ultimatum was issued to the Time Lord within. Surrender. Or what? Face more non-destruction? The Time Lord was busy over at the Grange, having received the Doctor’s letter. A problem spread across two realities. With the prospect that all reality could suffer as a result of mismanaged actions. The Master loved a good puzzle.
Robots hated puzzles they couldn’t solve. Time was on their side. Should they move the TARDIS? No. It could be left in the woods. Humans wouldn’t bother robots, or farmers, during the experiments. The robots were no further forward with their investigation of the TARDIS.
Months went by. Six of them. The Master had spent the time killing Proctor, and eating the odd cake provided by Mrs Simpson. He went shopping for clues. A statue of Medusa, for his anagram clue. His workshop held items out of time. A Hoagy Carmichael record. And a newspaper from 1933. He’d picked that up by coincidence. Was there anything useful in the paper?
A crossword. With an illegitimate clue. Bastardism. The English word concealed the English version of TARDIS. Such a clue wouldn’t work in Gallifreyan. But in English, there were possibilities. If the Master used two types of ink to fill in the answers…
His other devious clues were of a similar nature. Timeless, or out of time. Two kings playing an endless game of chess, with time as their board. Surely the symbolism wouldn’t be lost on the Doctor. The trap in the hall. A hint of TARDIS-like qualities. And the mock-up of a control room, under the house. He’d leave legal paperwork lying around. Hinting at the true ownership of the property.
And the corpse of Proctor. That was no hint, or clue. A signpost, rather. The Master even found time to have his portrait painted. He thought that quite amusing. So amusing that he even paid for the work done. Better than killing the artist outright. Humans were bugs, with an utterly inconsequential lifespan. Occasionally, he allowed them to keep fluttering pointlessly. They amused him, at times.
One night, the Master knew that he had to leave. How would he do it? The aliens hadn’t stirred up trouble. They were still camped out around his TARDIS. The answer came to him. Two TARDISes could break free of the signal. There would be a temporary scrambling of alien technology.
The Master deduced the whole thing, based on his memory of the crash-landing and the resultant time-sickness he’d experienced. Those aliens had locked onto his TARDIS while it was still in the time vortex. If another TARDIS came close to the alien signal inside the time vortex, the aliens would latch onto that one too.
Simple. The problem was one of generating capacity. A TARDIS could be overwhelmed. The same would be true of the TARDIS-grabbing ray. A weakening of the signal. Temporary indecision. Which TARDIS was being grabbed? Wait long enough, and the signal would reassert itself. These were primitive aliens, but they’d stumbled onto something which might threaten Time Lord operations.
Yes. The Master would risk it. Why not? He’d received a letter from the Doctor, through time. The presence of the letter confirmed that the Doctor, stuck in 1933, overcame the problem with the Master’s help in the past of 1923. They could help one another by launching a simultaneous breakout, almost upsetting the laws of physics. But not quite.
A touch of conjuring was in order. The Master had the look for it. A stage magician, masquerading as a Time Lord. He hefted an antiquated blaster from his secret stash under the house, made sure that all the clues were in position, and locked the Grange’s front door behind him.
He glowered as he went in search of his TARDIS. The darkness swallowed him. There were no cars on that road. He stopped near the spot of the crash-landing. His sonic screwdriver noted some activity just ahead. The screwdriver could probably unscrew this robot. But the Master was proving a point.
The robot heard movement. It remained disguised as a tree, watching over a time machine disguised as a bigger tree. The Master stepped around a real tree and split the robot in two. Its fake branches faded to nothingness. The Master’s screwdriver squelched any hope of communication with the main spaceship force.
“Time Lord.”
“Robot.”
“Where did you come from?”
“Gallifrey. A long time ago. Across space and across time, to destroy the likes of you.”
“Surrender. My comrades will know that I have lost contact. They will come in force. Your time machine is trapped here. You don’t have long. We, as machines, are truly eternal.”
“Where is your spaceship?”
“On this planet. More than that I will not say.”
“Then die.”
His second shot sheared the robot’s brain in two. The Master pocketed his sonic screwdriver and stepped into a doorway in the large tree. He sat the weapon on the floor, and adjusted power settings. The TARDIS had recovered in the months since the crash. Trapped, but functional.
Switches were thrown. He would have to send the Doctor another message. And technical details. He kept an eye on his scanner. No energy sources in immediate range. Finding the spaceship in 1923 was unimportant. He would locate the craft in 1933. If the aliens were smart, they’d move around.
Aliens could wait their turn. It was far more important to find the Doctor’s TARDIS in 1933. The Master opened a TARDIS-to-TARDIS communication channel. He had the year, and the rough location. Fenby, and environs.
The Time Lord turned to his scanner screen and tried to locate the Doctor’s control room. Glitch. The scanner stayed blank. Perhaps the Doctor was out. The message would have to be recorded. If the Doctor received it in time…well, he had to, in order to escape.
True, the Master could have left a set of 1923 instructions lying around the house for the Doctor to discover in 1933. But that would have been too easy. The Doctor had to be inside his TARDIS to take part in this experiment. After flicking a ridiculous number of switches, the Master was ready. Robots were closing in. They could do nothing.
“Doctor. I have no choice but to leave you this recorded message. I do hope that it reaches you in time. As you’d expect, these robots placed my TARDIS under guard. Even if I could escape from 1923, I would still have to battle past them. This I have done.”
Make the Doctor think that the Master had slaughtered dozens of them in his race to gain entry to his own TARDIS. Always pretend to be more formidable. Even when you are formidable. Outside, robots were approaching. Running, undisguised, to the scene of their comrade’s destruction.
*The Time Lord has killed our guard.*
*What is to be gained from this attack?*
*He has acted out of desperation. Spending months on this primitive planet has eroded his morale.*
*Were I made of flesh, I might sympathise.*
*He is trapped. Let us explain that to him.*
“Time Lord. Surrender. There is no escape. Your time machine has been rendered inoperable.”
“You have no choice. We will outlive you.”
The Master had heard it all before. Mostly from his own lips. Not long now. He wondered if they could break in. Almost welcomed the notion. It never occurred to him that their weapons could destroy his TARDIS. Other things had occurred to him. He voiced his thoughts, in a message to the Doctor.
“It occurred to me that the alien signal could be destroyed. But that would affect your arrival in 1933. My only alternative was to consider weakening the signal long enough to engineer an escape. The answer was obvious. This signal can trap one TARDIS at a time. Not two.”
Done. The rest must be obvious to the Doctor now. Still, the Master couldn’t resist gloating in that casual mocking way as he joined the dots for his moralistic adversary. Good must triumph. Why must good triumph, and not science?
“The arrival of your TARDIS from 1933, into 1923 airspace, will weaken the alien signal and allow me to escape into 1933. There, the arrival of my TARDIS in 1933 airspace will weaken the signal and allow your TARDIS to escape into 1923.”
Robots were circling the non-trunk of the non-tree. The Master would stamp those ants out in time. In another time. He revelled in his lecture. The Doctor had always been more a creature of instinct than one of technical exactitude.
“Unfortunately, the overlapping field generated by both TARDISes can be overcome by the alien signal after a lengthy stay. By the time you receive this message, you will only have a few minutes in which to act. I am boosting my own time engines to give you as much help as possible.”
The Master checked his figures. Yes, there was enough power to do the job. Provided the Doctor held to his side of the deal. Why hadn’t the Doctor broken into the Master’s speech? The speech is going out live. If the Doctor misses it, he could watch the recording. But he’d have to act soon.
Across time, the Doctor was having difficulty reaching the TARDIS. Rose was watching the Master’s self-important speech on the scanner. Too much happening at once. Where was the Doctor when you needed him? Elsewhere. So near, and yet so far.
His place was in the TARDIS. Where was he? Off on a bicycling holiday of the English countryside. Rose glanced around at panels, dials, and switches. Something was going on. But what? The Master provided the answer.
“With that in mind, I am sending you the exact space-time coordinates you’ll require. Encoded in these coordinates is a sequence of timer instructions. You now have a countdown to launch, tapping out the time left on your console.”
In 1923, robots flew into consternation. The Master dematerialised his TARDIS. He sailed through the time vortex without difficulty. An energy spike indicated that another TARDIS was making much the same journey in reverse.
The robots aboard the 1923 version of the spaceship went into a panic. Their snare-generating equipment lost power. That wasn’t really what happened. The snare field simply couldn’t generate power quickly enough to cope with the presence of two functional TARDISes. This was overlooked. The robots might have instigated new plans, had they known what was going on.
Robots on the scene instinctively opened fire on the Master’s dematerialising TARDIS. The night’s thunder had started. Almost instantly, warning messages were beamed to the spaceship. One robot on the bridge noticed a familiar trail, and calmed the situation.
*Attention all troops. The Time Lord has moved his machine across space. He has only managed to escape temporarily. Pursue. At maximum speed.*
Metal men converged on what they thought was the rematerialised TARDIS, now located inside the Master’s abandoned base. Rose had arrived at the Grange. And she was about to face a small army of angry alien robots.
The Master landed in 1933, grabbed his gun, and set off in pursuit of every metal man on the planet. His landing-site was the same place, a decade on. No robots awaited his arrival. They’d removed their fallen companion, killed in 1923. In the alien control room, a real panic was on.
From their viewpoint, the aliens had to fight this escalating battle with diminishing resources. The Time Lord had shifted his machine across space in 1923, in defiance of snare technology. His attack on the robot guard, to gain entry to the TARDIS, made sense in light of that technological move.
In military terms, the Time Lord had shifted the battleground to a field of his own choosing. Most of the robot force went in gunning for him. (Though she was Rose, and not a Time Lord.) A few robots remained at the farm, to monitor activity aboard the spaceship. Thunder roared around the Grange that night. Gradually, the thunderstorm faded.
*We have been outmanoeuvred, and defeated by a Time Lord.*
*This is not the end. Other Time Lords have failed to materialise and provide aid. He is still trapped on this planet. We will show no mercy when we see him. He will surrender. And die.*
A short time later there was a sense of dismay in the robotic ship. On the bridge, it became clear that another strange energy field was interfering with the snare equipment. The trapped TARDIS was giving off a doubled energy signature. Just after that happened, the TARDIS winked out of existence. Events had outstripped events.
One robot was sent to investigate the scene at the Grange. All contact had been lost with the main force. A few shattered robot shells were lying around the grounds. The Time Lord had left a cold message for the robots.
*Clearly, we should leave this planet.*
*We must work to refine our snare. The Time Lord will return. That much, we know. We must be ready to face that threat.*
*Our numbers are depleted. We lack resources, to build another warrior group. Call home. Ask for reinforcements. Prepare for war.*
The robots were having a very bad day in 1923. They found that they had lost contact with the invasion fleet. All they could do was wait until the Time Lord reappeared. In robot terms, and in Time Lord terms, waiting almost a decade was nothing.
*
Rose Marion (call me Moneypenny) Tyler
Moneypenny Tyler had an alternative plan. The plan of sheer desperation. It wasn’t the best plan in the world, but it could be made to work. Effective, if desperate. Rose mapped it out in her tiny human mind. Using her tiny human thoughts.
She suspected that the Doctor, with his huge Time Lord mind, would probably applaud Rose’s desperate plan. After he’d thought it through using huge Time Lord thoughts. Most of the time he expended huge Time Lord thoughts on concepts like RUN, HIDE, RUN AND HIDE, and RUN. Her plan was simple.
One. Leave the TARDIS.
Two. Return to the Master’s workshop.
Three. Sell some gadgets for money. Lots of money. To hell with regular human development of electronics in 1923.
Four. Hope that the robots stayed away.
Five. Take the money and spend it hiring a bunch of men to knock the kitchen wall out.
Six. Have said men move the TARDIS outside.
Seven. Load TARDIS on lorry, and drive it out of town.
Eight. Pay men more money to lovingly restore the kitchen wall.
Nine. Go to work in Mrs Egan’s tearoom for almost a decade. Take a holiday, come the moment of truth in 1933.
Ten. Return to Fenby just in time to collar the Doctor, and lead him to the TARDIS.
Rose didn’t like the plan. It was simple, and it would work. There would be no TARDIS lying inside the Grange to upset events in 1933. The only disadvantage would be having to work in a tearoom for nearly a decade.
Maybe the Doctor would come through with all that spaceship information. She doubted it. How else would they switch off the signal? The Master wasn’t going to pop back into 1923 to help out again. She was sure of that.
Rose stayed away from the stray thought about her age if she lived life in one solid chunk from 1923 to 1933. She started to think like the Doctor, veering off into other thoughts. How old was she now? The Doctor had finally gotten into the habit of dropping Rose off on Earth for a few home-visits to mum. But they didn’t always coincide with the time she’d spent away.
One week she’d spent two weeks away, and returned after a week. So she was a week older than she was. Blimey. If the Doctor didn’t knock that on the head, Rose would end up looking prematurely old. She could be away for a decade of travelling, and return a day later. Looking like her own auntie, or, worse, her own gran. If you took things to their illogical conclusion.
Her plan was foolish. Suppose she did go through with it, and she aged a decade. Then she’d catch up to the 1933 version of the Doctor, and they could finally leave in the TARDIS. Rose would have to stay away from her own proper life back on Earth for a decade. What would her mum say?
“Where have you been for the past ten years? I thought you’d been murdered by aliens!”
And what would the story be, told to all the neighbours? There would be more than one tale. Rose Tyler. Nice enough girl. Went off the rails one day. Disappeared with this older man. The next time most of us saw her, she was in the company of this younger bloke. Not a normal geezer. After that, she vanished for ten years. Smuggling guns into a banana-republic, I heard. When she wasn’t doing all that charity-based work in the Amazon, the way her mother keeps telling it.
Rose Moneypenny Tyler managed a smile. If she had to spend her time living from 1923 to 1933, she’d keep a diary. On returning to her own time, adjusted for age, she’d write a very detailed historical novel about the life of a simple English tearoom girl. The waitress wanted to break free of her simple tearoom existence, and embark on a wild passionate life of…steady, girl. No bodices to rip, in that tale.
*
The robots went on alert when midnight rolled into 1933. Forces were stationed in town. No units went near the Grange. That site had been deserted since 1923. The robots couldn’t spare the troops. Day by day, tension mounted. The Metal Plague had emotions. Patterned after their fleshy creators.
Finally, as expected, the TARDIS arrived in 1933. How long had the Time Lord taken to travel from 1923 to 1933? In short, how prepared was the fleshy creature? Had the Time Lord gone straight from one point to another? Was the message in 1923 set down as a trick, to keep the robots here until 1933? The robots were about to find out. They moved in.
Rose and the Doctor were doing what they could to extricate themselves from a pond. Jolly japes in waders. They escaped the robot attack by moments, heaving off into the woods in search of a road. An atmosphere of evil pervaded the scene. The Doctor thought of Skaro. Not the holiday destination. The real place. Blasted. Petrified. Reaching a road, the time travellers paused to listen to twigs snapping.
Two robots had observed the TARDIS.
Why was it in the form of a blue box, stuck in water? Strange human-based disguise. A trick, to delay action? They left instructions. Cover that area. Place a third robot on patrol. Tracks led from the TARDIS. Two Time Lords. Flesh. Easy meat. The two robots went in search of combat. They maintained human shape in sight of the road. Time for combat.
*
“They don’t seem very friendly-looking.”
“Ah. They might have worked the fields back there. And found our blue box. Illegal dumping. We’ll play this one subtly.”
Rose watched the approach of the two farmers. She’d been around the universe a time or two, and didn’t care for the manner of their walk. They walked like monsters. Purposefully. Boldly. And, most importantly, in a very heavy way. Were they shapechangers?
“Doctor. Are they heavier than they look?”
“Yes, I was just starting to think that myself. When I say run, run!”
“Oi! Wait for me!”
“I said it twice, Rose, weren’t you paying attention? Come on!”
There was no negotiation. Rose felt the men spitting wind in her direction. That was the only way to describe the sensation. A huge rumble followed, just like thunder minus lightning. They’d split the air with their attack, and the separated walls of air collided and created a thunderclap. The slight slope leading to the road erupted in a shower of earth.
“Faster!”
The Doctor’s cry made perfect sense. An obvious alien wasn’t making any sense. It made the limited options sound rather bleak. What had Rose done to bother these aliens? She’d done stuff to bother other aliens. This was a bit rich.
“Surrender and die, Time Lord!”
“We are wise to your ways!”
Time Lord? The game was up. They know it all. TARDIS. Time Lord. Sonic screwdriver. The Doctor’s extended pension arrangements. Or lack of arrangements. Could Time Lords retire? What did they do after swanning around the universe? Go swanning around the universe?
Rose had done a great deal to the aliens. In her future, she’d destroy more than twenty of them in their past. Long after avoiding a nasty scene in a tearoom. In a few seconds, she’d improvise a weapon. Pretend to be a Time Lord. And buy the Doctor some much-needed time.
Would the Doctor’s adventures be easier to handle if he carried a gun, or would they be far more complicated? In a very short time, her heart would race and race. Rose would almost swear at an alien. She was losing the plot. In the end, the aliens were the ones who retreated.
“This shield will do more than protect me, you alien f…fiend. Fire away, and see your pathetic ray rebound into your face. Go on. I dare you.”
“Good work. I’ll just cut these waders off and we can pole-vault over a nearby fence. Keep talking. I think they aren’t as powerful as we thought. For creatures who can blow up the countryside.”
One alien farmhand, or possibly a farmer in his own right, lowered his shooting arm. The other stepped sideways. So much for that great plan. Unless she could make them believe her lies. They thought she was a Time Lord. Rose decided to act like one.
“Go on. Split up. Have your colleague walk behind my shield. This gas you see pouring out from the rear will neutralise your ray, even if you do sneak behind me. Gallifreyan technology is more than a match for anything the humans can throw at me. And for anything you might throw at me. Why don’t you surrender? And apologise.”
“That is not in our nature.”
“A vehicle is approaching.”
“We will continue this fight at your vessel. You must return to it, when you attempt to leave.”
The two aliens retreated in the direction of the pond. Two Time Lords had outwitted them, with a simple shield. The female seemed the more dangerous of the two. She kicked off shredded waders as they left.
*The Time Lord brought reinforcements. We weren’t able to reinforce our troops.*
*Modifications to our equipment will keep this TARDIS here. They must return to the vessel. That shield will be lowered when they enter.*
*I refuse to place faith in that slim option. Contact town. If the Time Lords go there, and engage in conversation with the humans, we will strike when the Time Lords are unshielded.*
*Transmitting.*
A sound plan. Dudley Simpson spirited the Doctor away. He also gave a lift to the Doctor’s secretary. The sound plan failed. Mrs Egan’s tearoom suffered. The van driver looked dazed. If Mrs Egan had caught sight of him a few seconds earlier, she’d have been screaming until her birthday.
The alien robot regained human form and managed to talk its way out of trouble. Regrettably, the aliens had fled. The Time Lord used his sonic device to shatter the window. That trick would no longer work on robotic bodies. Adjustments had been made.
What could the robots do? Patrol the TARDIS. Attempt entry. No joy. Back to the same problem. If one of the Time Lords could be disabled, or captured and used as a hostage, the robots would win. Two Time Lords didn’t create twice the danger. They provided twice the number of targets.
Smarting from the defeat a decade earlier, the robots tried to establish what was going on. The Time Lords had appeared, though not in force. Clearly, they had business in Fenby. Had they left equipment in town? Material which aided their ability to temporarily defeat the snare?
The Time Lords were trapped. They could travel short distances across space, and no more than a decade in time. The snare was a success. But forces were thin on the ground. Some robots had to stay at the ship. Three could wait at the TARDIS. More troops would close in if they had to. A few floated around the outskirts of town. Those Time Lords were scrabbling in the dark, trying to find a way out of their predicament. The most obvious way would be to attack the spaceship.
That attack didn’t come when expected. Instead, the Time Lords raced to the TARDIS. What were they thinking? One Time Lord managed to get inside. The other fled. Clearly, the female was the more technically able of the two. She managed to transport the TARDIS across space again.
A familiar energy source appeared on the bridge control screens. The blue box faded from the pond. Over in the woods, it rematerialised. Disguised, once again, as a tree. The robots set to work moving troops around.
They didn’t understand that Rose’s TARDIS was gone, hurtling back to 1923. The Master had arrived to destroy the opposition. His first robotic encounter was brief. He knelt at his latest target’s corpse, brought a spark of life to the defeated robot at his feet, and began recalibrating its circuitry. In the blink of an eye, he’d turned the robot’s head into a receiver.
The Master listened to frantic broadcasts between robot forces. Relocate to new location. Isolate TARDIS. Prevent the Time Lord from gaining entry. Signal strength would be increased to maximum output, to prevent the time machine from leaving.
Intolerable.
Tolerable or not, the Master had worked out the location of the spaceship – in a straight line. He moved to his right and took another fix. Two lines crossed. He had the location. Time to move in for the kill. He didn’t have to leave any of them alive, in order to preserve a complicated sequence of events. The Master was beyond those now.
Turning the robotic head in his hand, in a mockery of a Shakespearean gesture, the Master deliberately mangled the saying, and matched it to this scene. The robotic head said nothing. It had been defeated by inferior flesh.
“To be? Or not to be? I suppose you’ll have to settle for the latter.”
He tossed the metal trophy aside. That’s what villains did, after all. He checked the charge on his large gun, and hunted monsters. The Master showed no mercy. They were robots, and their deaths were bloodless. Still, he took great pleasure in ending their existence.
The last robot inside the spaceship was blasted to bits in a frenzy of revenge-driven fury. Robots. Thought they would live forever. Pathetic. The Master had seen forever. He looked around the control room. Situation? The Doctor was trapped in 1923. There was no reason to stay. The Master had to destroy the spaceship in order to cancel the boosted signal.
He studied the set-up. One scanner noted the positions of the remaining robots. Two were now in position outside the Master’s TARDIS. He ignored their transmissions. Another robot was wandering close to the town. A simple reactor overload would do.
This was an invasion force? Where was the rest of the fleet? He found a record of the lack of communication with home, dating to 1923. Political capital. The Master’s agile mind worked hard. Yes. He could make something of this. Carefully. Subtly.
The Time Lord watched as the power readings soared. He turned and walked away. The trip back to his TARDIS would be a violent one. Two to go. He’d leave one robot alive, in town, as a warning to other aliens who felt like messing with the Time Lords. The Master decided to leave one more letter. On the off-chance that the Doctor happened by.
*
Another Time Lord was piecing the story together a little while later, in the wake of discovering the melted spaceship. Rose was first to encounter the robots, in her pitched battle. The attack on the Grange in 1923. That’s why the robots were so pissed off on that road in 1933.
The robots had already lost. In the tactical sense. What they hadn’t known was that they’d been stitched up in the strategic sense. The Master had exacted a terrible revenge. In doing so, he’d saved the Earth from alien invasion.
That had been self-serving. The Master wanted to mount his own plans against Earth. Plans the Doctor had already foiled. The failure of the robot invasion made him feel slightly tainted. Having been helped by the Master.
The Doctor pocketed the letter he found close to the spaceship, and wondered how to solve the problem. Though the transmitter was destroyed in 1933, it was very much active in 1923. He had no sonic screwdriver, no ice brolly, no TARDIS, and no assistant. But he could phone a friend.
“Rose.”
“Hey, you. I have a plan.”
“Great. Mine went dead.”
“Oh. I was hoping not to have to rely on mine.”
“I’m sure it’s a great plan. Reel it off.”
“You have a last-minute high-tech thing up your sleeve. Much better than anything I could concoct.”
“Hey, you’re impersonating a Time Lord. So. That plan must be of Time Lord quality. Even fake. The only high-tech thing I have to hand is this phone. I could solve this mess in an instant if I had a…”
“Sonic screwdriver.”
“Yo-yo.”
“Yeah, of course. How else would the Doctor solve this problem? He’d use a yo-yo.”
“Too right. Now. Rose Tyler. Time Lady. Dinner Lady. Lollipop Lady. Lady of Some Repute.”
“Oi.”
“I said some repute.”
“Only some.”
“Oh. I take your point.”
“In the absence of a Doctor-inspired plan…what went wrong with your plan?”
“Spaceship melted. Long story.”
“You don’t have a map of the place?”
“The spaceship must remain intact in your time, Rose. Or else everything slides into the space-time dustbin. I’m having a think. But nothing’s come to me just yet.”
“What about the Master?”
“Been and gone. He melted the spaceship. Out of revenge for having his TARDIS slapped around.”
“Sounds a bit petty.”
“Yeah. He killed a bunch of robots, too.”
“Did he leave any clues, to help you?”
“He could have made things a hell of a lot easier for me back in 1923. But he didn’t. How like him. Let’s hear the plan, then.”
“Don’t laugh.”
“No.”
“Doctor. Don’t.”
“Go ahead. Promise.”
“One. Leave the TARDIS here inside the Grange in 1923. Two. Return to the Master’s workshop under the Grange. Three. Sell his gadgets for money. Lots of money. Some people might make astonishing advances in electronics without my help anyway. Who would notice, if I chipped in? To hell with regular human development of electronics in 1923. Four. Hope that the robots stayed away while I was off engaging in part five. Five. Take the money from the gadget sale and spend it hiring a bunch of men to knock the kitchen wall out of the Grange. Six. Have said men move the TARDIS outside the Grange. Seven. Load the TARDIS onto a lorry, and drive it out of town. Eight. Pay men more money to lovingly restore the kitchen wall. So that you couldn’t tell the difference. Nine. Go to work in Mrs Egan’s tearoom until 1933. Take a holiday just before the van incident. Ten. Return just in time to collar you, and lead you to the TARDIS in 1933.”
“Rose. That’s brilliant! There’s only one flaw in that plan.”
“Yeah. I age a bleedin’ decade!”
“No. Mrs Egan’s sure to remark on the similarity between Rose in 1933 and her usual helper who went off on holiday the day before. You weren’t going to call yourself Rose?”
“Yeah. Why not. Oh.”
“Hello dear. You look like a younger version of my waitress. She’s been helping out since 1933. Took the day off yesterday. Had a pressing engagement, she said. Don’t know what I’d do without my Rose Tyler.”
“I get the picture.”
“Brilliant plan, though. We can modify it. Just move to another village for most of the decade.”
“Charming. Any other bright ideas?”
“You’ll have to sneak into the spaceship.”
“I’ll never be able to do it. Too many robots.”
“Must be a way. Hey. I know why the robots were so mad at us on that road. They wanted revenge for losing all their soldiers in 1923. So, when they went after you…they did have a very good reason.”
“I don’t think it’s fair that the robots went after me for doing something I hadn’t done to them.”
“But you did. In 1923. Naughty girl.”
“I was forced into it. Or was I?”
“You had several options. Time is fluid. Just…don’t upset the glass holding back the deluge.”
“I’m really going in there. To that spaceship.”
“Yeah.”
“Could I bluff them?”
“How?”
“Tell lies.”
“Oh. That kind of bluff. Er. What do you have in mind?”
“I was hoping you’d have something in mind. This conversation can go on as long as you like Doctor. Just not…too long. A decade, for example.”
“Right. Important points, Rose. One. I’m very proud of you. Well done. So far.”
“Thanks for the carrot of comfort. Where’s the stick of reality?”
“Point two. The TARDIS can’t be found inside that house when we walk in. Not in 1933. There are three options there. Follow your plan. Like it.”
“I’m not so keen now.”
“Second option. Fix the faulty chameleon circuit on the TARDIS, and make her appear to be the inside of the building. A large gas stove, say. Which the Master once unkindly compared the TARDIS to. Or will unkindly compare the TARDIS to. That’s in his future. My past.”
“Did he really say that?”
“Boasted about it, after. Said she was a second-hand gas stove. Overweight. Underpowered. Called her an old museum-piece. And there were very hurtful comments about a lack of stabiliser control. Something you have been heard to mutter from time to time.”
“Don’t rub it in.”
“Third option. Slap the whammy on that alien ship and temporarily disrupt the signal.”
“Let’s not get into that side of things just yet, Doctor. The main point is that the TARDIS wasn’t inside the Grange in 1933. So we stand a good chance of fixing things to bring that reality about.”
“Yeah. Very good. Point three. Cracking that spaceship open is going to be one tough nut. Point four. I’m not there to help you.”
“Not in person. But you’re only a phone call away.”
“Careful. We’re here to fix a mess. Not come up with advertising slogans.”
“Go to work on an egg.”
“Fly to work in a TARDIS.”
“Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow before breakfast.”
“Been there. Done that. Designed the shirt.”
“Oh, I’m wearing one of those shirts.”
“What did it say?”
“Nothing. Not a very talkative shirt.”
“Might be shy.”
“I did have an idea for my shirt.”
“Involving Daleks?”
“Zutons.”
“Ah. Hey, you could walk in there wearing a shirt that had ATOM BOMB written on it.”
“And what happens when they zap the crap out of me?”
“Might never happen.”
“Doctor.”
“Might not. Bad plan. The sonic screwdriver is right out of this plan. And you can’t shield yourself with the ice brolly. The robots have to survive in 1923, so that they can be destroyed by the Master in 1933. Pointless, I know. But he has to do it. You can’t do his dirty work for him.”
“I don’t have to go right now.”
“No. Rest up. Take things easy.”
“As we’re here, on the phone, taking stock of a gloomy situation…”
“Are you going to force some deep and meaningful talk on me, Rose?”
“No. I was just going to listen. If you wanted to talk about…loss. On the other hand, daily life in your company is far from normal. And conversation in your company is the same. I doubt you could have a chat about loss without diverting into loads of other flaky subjects. We could just skip the deep and meaningful talk. As well as the deep and meaningful listen.”
“I don’t always win, Rose. Sometimes winning isn’t about saving the universe. It’s about saving the universe and the people in my company. I’ve lost friends. They died horrible deaths. And…if I weren’t a Time Lord, I’d have died horrible deaths too. Leaving my travelling companions stranded. For every UNIT soldier I could tell a stripper anecdote about, there’s another story about a guy on duty who was blown away in the prime of life during some senseless invasion of Earth.”
“Strangely, I expected you to veer off the subject there. But you didn’t. What’s the moral? That there is no real moral? You make mistakes? Stating the obvious. It isn’t all one great laugh, kicking around the universe with you? No, sometimes it’s a scream. So. You don’t always win.”
“Oh I do in the pub, come quiz-night. That’s going to be a puzzler. Finding a good place for our attempt. I’ve been barred from a lot of quiz-nights.”
“Just don’t give futuristic answers to here-and-now questions, and I’m sure we’ll get along fine.”
“An awful lot of quizzes. Still, we needn’t restrict ourselves to an Earth pub-quiz.”
“Doctor?”
“Come on, Rose. Twice around the lighthouse. And home in time for tea. That’s the spirit.”
“Yeah. We’ll go…in matching outfits. These shirts and jeans.”
“Right. Now. A good name for the team.”
“Who Killed the Zutons?”
“I did. During the invasion.”
“There wasn’t an invasion. You’re making it up.”
“Nonsense. There wasn’t an invasion – as I foiled it. Told the remaining Zutons to go back home.”
“To Liverpool .”
“No. To Zuton.”
“The Zutons…”
“Five-piece band from Liverpool , you said. I think you’re confused. You mean The Beatles.”
“Four.”
“There was a fifth Beatle. And another one. Need a good name for our team in this pub-quiz.”
“Nothing obvious.”
“The Time Lords.”
“We’re stuffed if a couple of Daleks glide in. They’ll make straight for us.”
“No problem. Unless you spill a Dalek’s pint. That tends to kick things off.”
“Wouldn’t want that.”
“I’ll talk to you in the morning. Monitor the scanner, and see if anything strange happens overnight. At least you’ll find out whether or not you managed to scare off the robots.”
“Yeah. I’m starving. Think I’ll raid my fridge. See what’s left in there.”
“Mm. Rose!”
“What?”
“You do still have the ice brolly, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Check the scanner and see if any robots are lurking.”
“Then what?”
“Go outside and write a message on the ground. For the robots.”
“How?”
“You can focus ice from the umbrella tip. It’s a novelty function. For leaving messages.”
“What am I supposed to say to the robots?”
“I’ll be back to finish this in 1933.”
“But I won’t be.”
“They don’t know that. The Master will end up doing your dirty work. Making good on your promise to finish the robots once and for all.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“No. Am I? If so, would I know?”
“Don’t start, Doctor. What’s the plan?”
“It’s your plan, Rose.”
“Knocking the wall down and moving the TARDIS.”
“No. The other bit.”
“Going to work in a tearoom, you mean.”
“A variation on that theme. Nip outside and leave the message. Then hurry inside, before some wayward robot slaps you one for being naughty.”
“I’ll be back to finish this in 1933. You robotic pricks.”
“Doesn’t sound very ladylike. Or much like a Time Lord.”
“Fair enough. Don’t wait up for me. Oh, no. Please do.”
“About this brolly…”
*
The scene was far from grim. Rose imagined that she could smell mangled metal. The Doctor’s instructions were complicated. She had less trouble operating the bloody TARDIS. Icy writing was something of an art.
She went for a wide beam and started to write in small letters.
Block capitals seemed to be the order of the day, though, so Rose switched rapidly to that style. She found it hard to refrain from making a comment about robotic pricks, but she managed. Seemed a shame. These creatures were after her on the roadway…in a self-defensive way. Responding to her earlier attack. Which happened later in her life, earlier in the century.
Time travel was bloody weird. Message sent, she retreated to the TARDIS. Rose hoped that was the last time she’d have to sonic the Grange door open and then shut again. She resumed her conversation with the Doctor.
“Job done. And no, I didn’t muck it up. Yes, I went against your advice and used a wide beam. They have to see the message. At least we know they understand English, from the conversations we had. Surrender and die!”
“Poor grasp of English, or a statement of the facts?”
“I still don’t see how I’m going to zap myself out of here.”
“Ah! The plan involves disrupting the alien signal. Best way to disrupt the signal is at the source. Alternatively, the signal can be disrupted by the presence of a second TARDIS. We have the Master to thank for that gem. But we won’t thank him, as he’s taken his second TARDIS off to parts unknown.”
“You know where, though.”
“And when. He bumps into me later. Several times. And regrets each occasion. Ha ha.”
“No need to gloat, Doctor.”
“Yes there is. He’d do the same for me. And, in fact, often did.”
“So, with a single bound I’ll be free.”
“Straight out of the fairy stories, Rose.”
“How?”
“Trust me. It’s complicated.”
“And involves spending a decade in a tearoom?”
“The logical upshot of monkeying around with your plan so that it doesn’t work. That’s what gave me the idea.”
“This has nothing to do with my plan, which might work, but everything to do with a failed version of my plan.
“Absolutely.”
“Don’t explain.”
“Oh come on. You’ll love this.”
“Will I have to age a decade?”
“No. Just a few seconds.”
“I’m all ears.”
