Doctor Who_ Castrovalva Part 2

He slipped the bat back into the green Wellington boot, and was drawn once more by his image in the mirror.

Among his old sporting gear he had found a cream-coloured garment that was too summery to be a morning coat but too long to be a sports jacket. He tried it on now, and consulted the mirror for its opinion. The coat was not altogether right for him, but then he had to admit he wasn't altogether right for the coat either. He was on the point of arriving at the decision that they would give each other a try, at least for the moment, when a rumbling, running sound made him stop to listen.

The noise halted abruptly, punctuated by the banging of a door slammed shut, which echoed eerily down great distances of corridor. The Doctor caught his breath, tolled back instantly from his leather-and-willow dreams of village greens. 'That's it! That's the door!' he exclaimed, and moved off quickly in the direction of the sound.

He hadn't gone far, at least by the standards of the TARDIS corridor system, when he stumbled on Nyssa and Tegan. Worn out by the uncountable rooms they had looked into by now, the two girls had heard the door-slam too and were running towards it from the opposite direction. Meeting them almost forcibly at a junction, the Doctor reeled back unsteadily, and with no social preliminaries shouted: 'The Zero Room door. I heard it slam.'

'Doctor! Thank Heavens! Are you all right?'

The Doctor focused on Tegan. 'Fit as a fiddle, Vicky.

But there's something very peculiar going on in the TARDIS. The Zero Room-have you seen it anywhere about?'

Tegan pointed along the corridor. 'The noise came from this way.'

The Doctor seemed content to follow them, as though he were no longer certain of his own judgement. But it was hard to be sure of anything, this deep in the TARDIS, where the corridors were twistier than ever. But one feature attracted the Doctor's attention, and he stopped to examine the TARDIS wall.

'h.e.l.lo,' said the Doctor, greeting the thin uneven red line with a courtesy he had denied the girls, 'a carmine seepage.'

Tegan held up her lipstick dispenser. 'Matter of fact, Doctor, that's me.' They had been round that way already, and as an aid to navigation Tegan had had the idea of marking the walls.

The Doctor took the small gold cylinder from her and held it up for inspection. 'That's a relief. I thought the TARDIS auto-systems were playing up again. Dreadful...

always going wrong. It's time we went to Logopolis to get it sorted out once and for all.'

Tegan was about to point out that they had already been to Logopolis, when Nyssa, who had been continuing her methodical search for the room called back along the corridor: 'Doctor... What does the Zero Room look like?'

The Doctor answered distractedly-he was balancing the lipstick dispenser on a small shelf that ran along the corridor-'Zero Room? Oh, well... it's very big. Empty.

Grey...'

Nyssa stood in a doorway, looking into a room that exactly fitted that description.

Tegan had never seen anything like it in her life before, although later, when she thought about that moment of entering through the big double doors, she realised that it wasn't particularly the look of the Zero Room that so impressed her. Certainly the place was big-vast, in fact, in its pinkish-grey emptiness, bathed somehow in a warm light reminiscent of a late-summer afternoon. The walls were indented with the familiar TARDIS roundels that you saw everywhere else on the s.h.i.+p-but here they were huge, forming high curved shelves big enough to climb onto.

The really remarkable thing was the sensation of utter peace that descended on the three of them the moment they were inside. The Doctor came to his senses quite suddenly.

'Thank you,' he said, turning to Tegan with a very polite if slightly crumpled smile that matched the cricketing outfit perfectly. 'You must be Tegan.' He had remembered her name! It was like having the old Doctor with them again. He gestured to where the other girl was standing, craning up at the high ceiling, hypnotised by the deep silence. 'It'll work even better if you shut the doors, Nyssa.'

Nyssa reached out into the corridor and pulled on the ornate bronze handles. As the doors closed, the silence, if such a thing were possible, seemed to become deeper still.

A cool, slightly sweet odour pervaded the air, which took Tegan a moment to identify. 'Roses?' she said in a whisper.

The Doctor nodded. 'Yes, I've never understood why.

Quite peaceful, isn't it.'

Nyssa had known peace something like this before. It reminded her of her home planet before the devastating arrival of the Master. 'Will you have to stay in here for long, Doctor?' she asked.

'Just until my dendrites heal again. The nervous system's a very delicate network of logic junctions...'

'The synapses, yes,' Nyssa nodded seriously.

The Doctor smiled. It had slipped his memory that bioelectronics was her strong point. 'Yes, well, my tussle with the Master came at exactly the wrong moment. When the synapses are weak they're like radio receivers, picking up all sorts of jumbled signals.'

Tegan was anxious not to be left out of this technical conversation. 'I get it-the Zero Room cuts out all the interference.'

'Completely. Even the gravity's only local.' The Doctor jumped lightly up and down on his toes by way of demonstration, but the exercise made him yawn.

'Goodness me, I'm tired.'

The girls looked round the vast baroque emptiness, but there was no bed to be seen, not even an armchair. The Doctor seemed to read their thoughts. 'I don't need a bed.

Not in the Zero Room.' And very slowly he began to lean back on his heels, until he reached an impossible angle, whereupon he lifted his feet and rose until he was hovering about four feet off the floor.

He smiled at the astonished expressions on the faces of his two friends. 'One of the great advantages of stark simplicity.'

'Strewth!' exclaimed Tegan. 'Can anybody do that?'

The Doctor gracefully rotated into a completely horizontal position. 'You don't do it. It... sort of... comes upon you.' He yawned again. 'Like sleep. Very like... sleep.'

He closed his eyes, and with a slight gesture of one hand which they understood immediately, gathered the two girls towards him. Now his voice seemed to come from very far away. 'We only just reached the Zero Room in time. This regeneration is going to be difficult, and I shall need you all, every one of you. You, Tegan, have it in you to be a fine Co-ordinator, keeping us all together during the Healing Time. Nyssa of course, has the technical skills and understanding. The information you will need is all there in the TARDIS data bank-I'm sure you'll find your way to it.'

'We already have, Doctor,' Tegan told him eagerly.

The Doctor's voice was receding further and further into the distance. 'Good, good, of course you have... And Adric, with his badge for Mathematical Excellence... Adric is the navigator. He knows the way, and he knows me, my old self. Adric, you must help me heal the disconnection.'

The voice was faint now, and they had to strain to listen to the last words. 'Your role is crucial...'

And then the voice was gone. The Doctor was utterly still, suspended in his death-like trance.

Adric! Nyssa and Tegan exchanged a glance. But if the Doctor didn't know where the boy was-then who did?

Should they wake him with the news that they had lost their Navigator? Together they stood beside the Doctor for a long time, and it struck Tegan how perfectly natural, in the context of the Zero Room, the otherwise extraordinary phenomenon of his floating on air seemed to be.

Everything in the Zero Room seemed, in its own way, to float-even time itself. But the next thing that happened came with heart-stopping suddenness.

Nyssa was the first to see it. She had raised her head to survey the huge domed ceiling, and now she gasped and pointed towards one of the nearby walls. Tegan turned to look, and her hand rushed to her mouth to suppress a scream. Up on one of the roundels, spread-eagled in the centre of the circle like a fly struggling in an invisible web, was their friend Adric.

Nyssa called out his name, running towards the desperate figure of the boy, who seemed to be fighting for breath and trying to communicate with them.

'Adric... What are you doing?' Tegan almost screamed, but there was no echo in the Zero Room, and the sound died away immediately.

The boy managed to force out a few choked syllables. 'A trap... He set a trap... The Master...'

Nyssa cupped a hand to her ear to catch the words. 'The Master! Where?'

'Me! I'm the trap. I locked the co-ordinates... Event One...'

Tegan had been looking round for something she could use to climb up to him. 'Just you hold on. I'm coming to help you,' she shouted with a confidence she did not feel, for the vast room remained resolutely empty.

Adric tried to shake his head, but the wall was sucking at his hair. He seemed to be warning the girls to stay back.

'This isn't me! It isn't me! A projection... Block Transfer.

Tegan-the co-ordinates.' And even before they had grasped the meaning of his words, the image of Adric began to break up, like a television set in need of repair, shattering the peace of the Zero Room with the hiss of static.

And then the image was gone, leaving the girls to stare up in horror at the empty roundel where their friend had seemed to be.

The Master chuckled, looking up at the boy from the console that had been controlling the projection. Adric hung, quite lifeless now, suspended in the electronic web of glittering little wires that criss-crossed through his flesh.

Only his wide-open eyes betrayed his will to live and to escape.

Master was conscious of this problem, but then new technologies always had their development difficulties. 'So, these simulated projections are real enough to have a will of their own. Almost.'

Adric stared insolently back. 'Can't reach me in the Zero Room...'

Master's smile was like a sliver of ice. 'Is that what you thought? But my dear young man, it is your own computational powers that make the Block Transfer possible. If escape were that easy, Adric, we could all be free of this nasty world.' And with that, the Master worked a lever on the console. Breath sighed out of the boy's body, and his angry eyes closed. 'We must save your energies.

There is so much yet to be done.'

'We can't tell him now. He's in a dangerously unstable state.' Nyssa glanced back at the Doctor, who was still suspended peacefully in his levitational trance. Clearly Adric had been trying to warn them of something, but they were going to have to work out what it was without the Doctor's help. She ran over in her mind the few words Adric had been able to utter. 'The co-ordinates. And something about a trap,' she said aloud, but Tegan was as baffled as she was.

And then a rather unpleasant thought struck her. There was no point in alarming Tegan with it, if, as she hoped, there was nothing in the idea, but it certainly needed investigating. She called over her shoulder to Tegan: 'You stay here and keep an eye on the Doctor.'

Tegan ran into the corridor after her. 'Where are you going?'

'Console room. You look after the Doctor.' And before Tegan had time to argue the girl had disappeared around a bend in the corridor.

Tegan pulled the double doors shut, and the monumental stillness of the Zero Room closed around her again. She couldn't help raising her eyes to the roundel where Adric had appeared. She found it hard to believe that it was just a projected image, but Nyssa knew about these things, and had a.s.sured her it was possible. But if that wasn't really Adric, where was he? If only there were something she could do to help him.

She heard a soft b.u.mp behind her, and looked back to find that the Doctor had come to rest on the floor. He opened his eyes and asked, in an ordinary tone of voice: 'What's the matter?'

'Sorry,' said Tegan. 'I didn't mean to wake you.'

The Doctor sat up, brus.h.i.+ng a few of the newer creases from his cream-coloured coat. 'Excuse a note of carping criticism, but there seems to be something distinctly wrong. I can feel it.'

Tegan struggled with herself. It was so tempting to tell the Doctor everything, but she remembered Nyssa's warning.

Nyssa loosened her collar. The corridors were warm after the Zero Room, and as she followed the lipstick trail that Tegan had been sensible enough to leave, they seemed to get warmer and warmer. Her first conjecture was that this must be some sort of psychological effect, like the sense of descending that had accompanied them on the way towards the Zero Room, a phenomenon now matched by the distinct feeling that she was going upwards. But then she noticed that in places the lipstick trail was beginning to drip down the wall.

She stopped to touch it, and the stain came off on her finger like liquid. Perhaps it was her imagination, but the wall at this point seemed noticeably warmer than usual.

The important business was getting back to the console room to check the flight information and see if there was any truth in the unpleasant thought that had occurred to her, so she pushed the question of the walls and their unnatural warmth to the back of her mind. But when she arrived at the junction where the Doctor had put down the lipstick dispenser the sight of it standing on the corridor shelf with red liquid oozing out of its base reminded her again of the heat problem.

She picked it up, and some of the contents spilled onto the floor. Gingerly she put her hands on various parts of the corridor walls. There was no doubt about it-the ambient heat level was up, and rising.

She began to walk briskly now, driven by the realisation that there might well be a connection between this new phenomenon and her uneasy speculations about the possible fate of the TARDIS. And at that moment, as if the TARDIS systems had made the same connection, a doleful tolling sound came rolling towards her down the corridors.

She recognised the cloister bell, the warning mechanism that signalled only the direst emergencies.

Inside the Zero Room, faintly, the Doctor and Tegan heard it too. The Doctor held his finger to his lips, and for a long time stood frozen in that gesture of silence, listening to the omen as if its nuances carried some special message for him.

'We're in danger, aren't we?' said Tegan eventually.

'Worse than that. The TARDIS is in danger. Who's in the console room?'

'Nyssa...' Tegan said quickly, hoping that the inevitable question wouldn't follow. But it did.

'And Adric?'

The thought of having to lie to the Doctor made Tegan very uncomfortable. 'Adric? He's...'

'Well, is he or isn't he?' asked the Doctor, showing signs of irritation.

Tegan took a deep breath. It was no good-she would have to tell him. But impelled by growing impatience, the Doctor was already heading for the Zero Room door.

Tegan ran to stop him. 'No! You're not to go out there, Doctor!'

Before she could get to him the Doctor had pushed open the big double doors. It was just as well she reached him when she did, because an invisible concrete wall seemed to be waiting for him in the corridor, and he walked straight into it. His knees buckled and he reeled back. Tegan managed to catch him, and dragged him into the Zero Room again as fast as she could.

The Doctor recovered quickly, although his breathing was still fast. 'Adric,' he said, 'you mentioned something about Adric.'

'Adric isn't...'

'Adric isn't what? Tell me...'

'Adric isn't relevant,' said Tegan, her mind made up.

'Look, Doctor, you're obviously going to be perfectly OK as long as you stay here.' And before he could interrupt, she was already at the door. 'I'm going to the console room to sort this all out. After all, I am the Co-ordinator.'

The lipstick trail had led to the trail of the Doctor's clothes, and by following that Nyssa found her way back to the console room relatively easily, although with the rising temperature thin fingers of smoke had begun to trickle up between the floor plates. She closed the door, muting the continuous moan of the cloister bell, and ran over to the console, where a message was flas.h.i.+ng on the small screen.