Doctor Who_ Castrovalva Part 5

' ... on zeroing the co-ordinate differential, automatic systems ... on zeroing the co-ordinate differential, automatic systems reactivate the real-world interface, see Main Door, The, Opening reactivate the real-world interface, see Main Door, The, Opening of... of... ' '

'I hope,' Tegan told herself, 'that it's as simple as it seems.' But she was really rather disappointed that it was so easy.

Her apprehension returned when she saw the approaching planet, a great swirl of emerald mist swimming onto the viewer screen. She knew this had to be where Castrovalva was, because the time column began to slow down of its own accord. From this distance the mysterious verdure of the planet didn't look particularly restful. Tegan imagined rain forests itchy with insects, and wondered if the TARDIS could provide her with Wellington boots.

The time column had chugged to a halt by this time, though it was still alight, indicating that the TARDIS had gone into hover mode. Tegan had to face the fact that it was her task to get the s.h.i.+p and its crew safely down to the planet suspended below them like a mossy tennis ball. She only hoped she could remember the landing procedure...

'Hmm... Well,' said Tegan to herself, approaching the console and selecting a lever. 'We can't hang about here all day...'

Whether she pulled the lever too fast, or in the wrong direction-or indeed whether she had picked the wrong lever altogether-Tegan would never know. The TARDIS gave a sudden stomach-turning swoop and dropped like a stone out of the sky towards the planet below. Tegan was thrown against the wall and held there by the acceleration, unable to reach the console. Perhaps this was just as well, because the TARDIS automatic circuits were able to take over, and helped to cus.h.i.+on the landing.

Nevertheless, the jolt was terrifying as the travel-weary Type 40 hit the planet surface.

Tegan picked herself up from the floor, which was now leaning over at a crazy angle, and her first thought was for the Doctor. The b.u.mp had shaken her badly, so what had it done to him in his fragile state? And then she remembered that he and Nyssa would probably not have felt anything at all in the Zero Room, which had its own local gravity.

In fact the rough landing did shake the Doctor, and saved his life. Nyssa had followed the smeary red trail back to the Zero Room without much difficulty. The big double doors were slightly ajar, just as the Doctor had left them in his haste to join in and help. But when Nyssa pushed them open she discovered to her horror that there was no opening behind them-just a continuation of the TARDIS wall.

She couldn't believe her eyes. She pulled both doors open wide and thumped her fists against the roundels, but the wall was completely solid. Hearing a faint grunt behind her, she turned to see that the Doctor, still slumped in his chair, had lifted his head to take in the situation.

'Jettisoned!' he hissed through his teeth.

Of course! Nyssa should have grasped that immediately.

The Zero Room had gone, as part of the random quarter of the TARDIS they had burned up to get out of the Inrush.

But a theoretical understanding of what had happened was not much comfort, and certainly no solution. Nyssa tried to rack her brains, but her mind was as blank as the wall itself. The Doctor was fumbling for something in his inside coat pocket. He brought out a long silvery device, about the size of a large ballpoint pen, with a small reflector at the end.

Nyssa recognised the sonic screwdriver, but had no idea what the Doctor expected her to do with it.

Her question irritated him. 'What do you think you do with a screwdriver? Unscrew the door hinges. If you wouldn't mind...'

She started on the left-hand door. The dull silvery metal was surprisingly light for the size of the door, but there was enough of its great bulk to drag on the heads of the screws as she undid them. The top screws were too high to reach, until she had the idea of borrowing the wheelchair to use as a sort of precarious step-ladder.

A desultory conversation with the Doctor accompanied the work. He kept dozing off and then jerking awake again with some irritating bit of advice, or a completely irrelevant observation. He wouldn't answer her main question, even though she kept putting it to him in different forms.

'But this won't get us into the Zero Room, Doctor. It's gone. We burnt it up.' She wanted to ask: So what is the point of all this uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g? But she didn't want to seem unwilling to help.

'Doors and hinges,' muttered the Doctor, slumped in the corner of the corridor where she had been obliged to deposit him while she commandeered the wheelchair. 'It's an open-and-shut case.'

She had to concentrate completely on the door as she removed the last hinge, because all the weight was pulling on one screw. Eventually she manoeuvred the door into a position where it was leaning against the wall. She was about to tackle the second door when she noticed the Doctor's head had almost completely disappeared into his coat collar. She knelt down beside him and turned his face to the light. The pastiness of complexion had begun to take on a bluish tinge.

'Cyanosis!' she exclaimed under her breath. 'We must do something quickly!'

She wasn't quite sure who she meant by 'we'-there were only herself and the Doctor, with Tegan away at the end of miles of corridor. 'I must do something,' she corrected. But it didn't sound quite right: if there were a solution waiting to be found she and the Doctor would have to find it together, because by herself she hadn't the faintest idea what to do. The Doctor knew; somewhere in that heap of crumpled flannel were worlds of wisdom. But he seemed to be slipping away into an ever-deepening coma, taking the knowledge with him.

Nyssa put her lips to his ear and whispered: 'Doctor!

Please! What do I do next?'

His skin was a pale, transparent blue now, and he seemed to be growing thinner by the minute inside the cream-coloured coat.

'There's no way into the Zero Room, Doctor. It's gone...

What do we do?'

That was the moment that, far away in the console room, Tegan chose to pull the lever intending to bring the TARDIS in to land. The almighty lurch that followed hurled Nyssa across the corridor, and at the same time the loose Zero Room door slipped from the wall where she had leant it, wavered uncertainly for a moment, then toppled, careering down towards the Doctor.

Nyssa heard the heavy thud and scrambled to her feet, expecting to see the Doctor flattened by the impact. But instead, by a miracle, the loose door had slammed into the opposite wall only centimetres above his head and jammed diagonally across the corridor, forming a sort of triangular lean-to with the Doctor underneath it. Nyssa went down on her hands and knees and peeked under the sloping roof made by the door. Partially enclosed by whatever substance it was that gave the Zero Room its unique qualities, the Doctor's pale face smiled back at her. He was still weak, but already visibly revived.

'Yes, yes, that's the idea,' he said delightedly. 'We'll make our own Zero Room with what's left.'

Tegan breathed deeply. After the characterless atmosphere of the TARDIS the air smelled sharp and clean, breezing against her face as she stood on a gra.s.sy knoll surveying the countryside. In front of her wild shrubland rolled down to a muddy stream. Further off the terrain seemed strangely convoluted, with tree-lined hills folding into themselves as far as the eye could see. Although not quite the sinister planet she had imagined, it was certainly untamed, and might even be dangerous, for the deep green foliage could house any number of unmentionable creatures.

The birdsong was rea.s.suring; liquid melody flowed up from the woods, calming her fears. To get a better view she strolled back to the TARDIS, where it lay half-buried in the ground, tilted over about twenty degrees to the vertical, as if half-heartedly pretending to be a small blue pyramid.

Touchdown had not been quite up to CAA standards, she had to admit, but a landing was a landing. The main problem had been getting out through the door, and she was grateful to whoever had designed the TARDIS for having the good sense to make the doors open inwards, otherwise her efforts would have been completely fruitless.

She hauled herself up the sloping wall and climbed onto the roof. It did cross her mind that perhaps she ought to be helping Nyssa with the Doctor, but the fresh air tempted her to postpone the prospect of descending back into the TARDIS. There is such a thing as a surfeit of corridors.

In any case, there was work to be done out here. Nyssa would want a report on the surface conditions, and it would certainly be a help to have some idea in which direction the Dwellings of Simplicity lay. From the top of the TARDIS she could see no signs of habitation. But half a mile away, along the gra.s.sy ridge that ran parallel to the river, a very tall tree promised a commanding view of the landscape. She was sure Castrovalva would be somewhere in sight of its top branches.

The spring-like suns.h.i.+ne and the marvellous clarity of the birdsong calmed her fears about wild creatures, and Tegan set off on a recce of the terrain.

6.

The Quest for Castrovalva Nyssa made two complete journeys from the Zero Room to the console room, transporting the doors one by one. The aluminium struts of the wheelchair reminded her with a constant protestation of creaks that they were hardly designed to take that sort of weight, but luckily they held out. When she went back to fetch the Doctor the blueness and the shortness of breath had returned. She picked him up (he seemed to weigh hardly anything), bundled him into the wheelchair and raced back to the console room at a breakneck speed that threatened to spill him out at every corner. Perhaps it was a peculiarity of the TARDIS architecture, or another of those psychological phenomena, but the distance between the console room and the Zero Room seemed, luckily, to be shrinking with familiarity, and she was able to restore the Doctor to the shelter of one of the doors before his condition became serious again.

While he recovered Nyssa propped the other door against the console and began to a.s.semble the ion bonder she had brought with her from Traken. It was a small device comprising a probe and a handgrip, and she carried the two parts in separate pockets for safety. With a deft twist of her fingers they came together; then she touched a b.u.t.ton and a fierce blue light sprang from the tip of the instrument. She adjusted a k.n.o.b until the light was barely visible and applied it to the door. Her hands were shaking from the exertion of all that transportation, so the line she drew wasn't as straight as she would have liked. The dull silver metal glowed in the wake of the instrument, spluttering up little rivulets of larva as she moved it slowly from the top of the door to the bottom. Then, with a snapping sound, the door split neatly into two halves.

It took a long time to cut the door into sections of the right size, and welding the parts together again at right-angles was even trickier. During the work it occurred to her to wonder what had happened to Tegan, not that Tegan could have been very helpful as there was only one ion bonder, and you needed a good deal of skill and judgement to use it.

Once the construction was partially a.s.sembled she tried to carry the Doctor over to it, but he had recovered most of his proper weight, and objected wordlessly at being moved.

It took a lot of diplomacy and brute force from Nyssa to get him to climb inside-and the whole idea had been the Doctor's in the first place. This was the 'open-and-shut case' he had been mumbling about, a kind of modestly proportioned sarcophagus built from all that remained of the Zero Room.

When she came back to him with the rough-cut shape cannibalised from the second door to form the lid, she was very pleased to see him smiling. If only his eyes had been open she felt sure they would have had something of the old twinkle in them.

'I'm sorry about the box,' she said lamely, as though it were her fault. 'It looks very small, Doctor.'

She hardly expected him to reply. But his lips moved and he whispered: 'And unlike the TARDIS-it is very small. Eh?' He cackled faintly, inviting her to join in the joke. And then he said, in a rather stronger voice: 'And don't call it a box. Very constricting little word. Call it a cabinet. That's it... the Zero Cabinet.'

At that moment Tegan slid in through the door, bouncing with confidence. 'OK, the travel arrangements are all organised. There's not far to go, anyway.'

'To Castrovalva?' said Nyssa. 'You've seen it.'

's.h.i.+nned up a tree. And it's an afternoon's walk from here. More or less.'

Nyssa waved towards the Zero Cabinet. 'We've got to carry the Doctor, don't forget.'

'Just the Zero Cabinet.' The voice came from inside the Cabinet, although the Doctor still had his eyes shut.

Tegan leant over him. 'What's that, Doc?'

'You won't feel my weight,' said the voice. 'I'll make it easy for you. I'll be levitating.'

Perhaps 'easy' wasn't the word for it, but in comparison with the rest of their adventures so far the business of setting off with the Doctor on the route to Castrovalva was fraught only with minor problems. The first appeared when Nyssa had finished fas.h.i.+oning the lid, sealed it down over the Doctor and with Tegan's help was carrying the Cabinet through the exit. Of all the calculations Nyssa had made in a.s.sembling the Zero Cabinet, she had not remembered to measure the real world interface of the TARDIS-the police-box doors. If the Cabinet had been a centimetre wider the result could have been a disastrous delay, but with much pulling from Nyssa and more pus.h.i.+ng from Tegan, they just managed to squeeze out into the open air.

Despite the Doctor's promises to levitate, the box itself felt rather heavy. Nyssa disappeared back into the TARDIS and returned with the wheelchair. As the two girls lifted the Cabinet onto it Tegan suddenly stopped.

'Ssh... It's the Doctor. He's tapping on the lid. He wants to say something.'

'It can't be,' said Nyssa. 'The Cabinet's supposed to be like a miniature Zero Room. You wouldn't hear him tapping.'

'You mean we have to open the lid to communicate with him?'

'We can't even do that. Once the lid's closed the material is self-fusing. Only the Doctor can open it from inside.' Nyssa hesitated. 'At least, that's how it's supposed to be...'

Apparently the Doctor did want to communicate, because their departure was further delayed by the lid sliding open a little way, to reveal the Doctor's face, which looked paler than ever in the suns.h.i.+ne.

He opened his eyes and attempted a smile.

Nyssa bent over him. 'What is it, Doctor...?'

He blinked in the light. 'I just wanted to say...'

'Yes?' Tegan drew closer too.

'Er... Forgotten. Never mind, plenty of time.:. It'll come to me.'

The sunlight seemed to be hurting his eyes, so Nyssa began to draw the lid shut. Then he blinked rapidly and said in a tremulous voice: 'No, no... Remembered. Thank you. Wanted to say thank you.'

The girls put the lid back into place, Nyssa started up the battery-driven motor on the wheelchair, and they set off along the ridge that ran above the stream.

One other small problem emerged at this point, and if they had been older and wiser they might have seen in it an omen of the terrible events to come. But as anyone arriving on a new planet knows, it is proverbially easy to mistake features of the landscape. Tegan's simple recipe for the journey was to find the tree she had climbed and travel from there in a bee-line towards the small white townscape she had sighted on the distant hill. This would almost certainly be Castrovalva, there being no other town on the planet according to the TARDIS data base.

The problem was, Tegan couldn't find the tree.

The town, according to Tegan's sighting (and she was sure she hadn't been dreaming) was on the other side of the river, quite a long way upstream. It seemed sensible to continue along the ridge until they found what looked like a good crossing place. The going was good; the suns.h.i.+ne and mild air were rapidly dispelling the acc.u.mulated claustrophobia of the TARDIS, and with the motorised wheelchair the transport of the Doctor became a very simple procedure.

When Tegan thought they had gone far enough she pointed diagonally across the stream. 'I definitely saw it.

More that way, I think.'

The bank was steep in places, and as they descended they discovered treacherous muddy patches, so that while Nyssa steered, Tegan had to hold on to the Zero Cabinet to keep it perched on the wheelchair. As they got nearer the stream it became harder and harder to control the load, and the wheelchair began to drag them down the slope.

''Strewth, look out!' Tegan shouted. 'The Doctor!' The Cabinet was starting to run away with them, but as they grabbed at it the wheelchair tumbled away from under it, turned round and began racing backwards towards the stream.

They put the Cabinet down and heard a splash from below. Nyssa ran down after the chair, but it was too late; when she got to the bottom of the bank it was cutting a V of white spume in midstream, upside down, with a wheel missing. What was worse, Nyssa tried to stop too suddenly, slipped on the mud, tripped and fell in after it.

When they looked back on that long journey to Castrovalva they both agreed that the crossing of the stream marked a turning point. They had set out in high spirits, to the accompaniment of sunlight and birdsong.

The sunlight and birdsong continued on the other side of the stream, but other elements began to creep in: mud, weariness, brambles and frustration.

The opposite bank was welcoming at first, and thick with gra.s.s and flowers. Tegan found a dry spot, and lay on her stomach to cup her hands into the clear water and cool her face. The Zero Cabinet lay in the long gra.s.s beside her.

'Are you sure I can't give you a hand,' she called out, leaning her face back to dry it in the sun. Behind her a suggestion of a path ran alongside the stream. They had hauled the wheelchair up there, and Nyssa, still damp from her rescue efforts, was crouched beside it, checking it over.

'No, it's all right.' Nyssa had managed to salvage the other wheel; replacing that would be simple enough. But the one that had remained attached to the axle was badly warped, and what was needed was some dexterous re-dimensioning. Tegan was a willing enough helper, if impetuous at times, but the job needed technological skill, and the ion bonder.

Nyssa drew the two halves of the instrument from her tunic, a.s.sembled them, and pointed the probe at the wheel.

Nothing happened. She shook it doubtfully, flicked open a catch in the handgrip, and a trickle of water dribbled from the mechanism.

A rather unscientific oath escaped her lips. The wetting had shorted out the power packs, and the replacements were back in the TARDIS. She stowed the device away and walked over to where Tegan was sunning herself. 'We'll have to carry him from now on. The wheelchair's finished.'

Above the path rose a stretch of shrubbery, where the dense rubbery leaves and yellow flowers the size of small cabbages might provide cover for any number of the wild animals Tegan had feared. But the two girls were at that moment too concerned with the loss of the wheelchair and organising themselves for the further portage of the Zero Cabinet to pay any further attention to the vegetation.

Even if they had, it is not likely, with all the general rustle and sway of the leaves in the wind which was now rising, that they would have noticed one particular branch being drawn slightly aside, as a hand parted the foliage. From the ha.s.saradra bush, Ruther's warrior scout, in the majestic garb of the hunt, gazed down upon the two visitors.

With the abandoning of the wheelchair, the quest for Castrovalva became a struggle. The path, such as it was, soon petered out and they found themselves carrying the Zero Cabinet through weeds that snagged at their clothing.

The strain was beginning to show in Nyssa's voice when she said: 'Are you sure this is the right way?'

The trees grew denser here, and were closing in over their heads. 'It had better be!' said Tegan, trying to put a good face on it. But as they struggled deeper into the wood even the exotic call of the birds seemed to take on sinister overtones. There were brambles and thorn bushes everywhere now, and the ground beneath their feet had become muddy and uncertain.

The wood went on for a long time, and all the while the Doctor seemed to be getting heavier and heavier. Tegan's apologies lost their breeziness, until she had run out of ways of saying sorry. She even began to wonder if the tall tree by the river, and the view from the top branches, had been a dream after all.

Eventually they came upon a patch of drier ground where it seemed safe to put the cabinet down and collapse onto a nearby log. 'Sorry...' said Tegan for the umteenth time. 'I was sure it was this way.'