Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead (7 page)

The Black Guardian glided slowly towards the boy.

There was no doubting his ruthless, vengeful implacability. ‘I invade every particle of your being,’ he hissed. ‘You will never be free of me until our bond is honoured.’

‘The Doctor is a good man!’ protested Turlough.

‘I am the Black Guardian,’ thundered the stranger. ‘His good is my evil.’

‘No!’ screamed Turlough.

‘You will absorb my will. You will be consumed with my purpose!’ commanded the Black Guardian. ‘The Doctor shall be destroyed!’

Turlough knew nothing of the Doctor’s combat with the Black Guardian over the Key to Time, or of how he was a mere pawn in the evil creature’s game of revenge. He knew only that he was one with the forces of darkness. ‘The Doctor shall be destroyed,’ he whispered obediently.

The Black Guardian was visible no more and the astral Turlough returned to the sleeping body.

He twisted and turned between the sheets like a wild beast in a snare, then cried out and sat bolt upright, shaking uncontrollably.

The cube rested innocently on the bedside table.

Turlough gave it one look, tore back the bedclothes and rushed to the door. It was still locked.

He glanced nervously back at the table. The cube remained inert. He moved swiftly back to the bed, snatched up a blanket and with it smothered the crystal on the table. He hurled the bundle into the furthest corner of the room.

Turlough looked from the locked door to the half-open window. He peered down at the gravel, two stories below, then started to gather up the folded sheets from the spare bed.

The Brigadier was not given to flights of fancy. Indeed the Headmaster’s Dobermann was as likely to get up on its hind legs and recite the ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ as Lethbridge-Stewart was to admit to
intimations
.

The Doctor therefore took his friend’s untypical premonition very seriously. He, too, was worried by the level of coincidence in what they had encountered.

Synchrony across space and time — as if some cosmic influence was controlling their destiny.

But metaphysical speculation would not find the TARDIS for him, and he needed to establish the precise time of the Brigadier’s meeting with Tegan.

The old soldier shook his head. ‘That’s a tall order, Doctor.’

‘Don’t worry. Just relax. Think yourself back.’

Very gently, the Doctor coaxed the Brigadier across the years to what, for the subject of the Doctor’s experiment in regression, was the past, but which for Tegan was very much the present...

The Brigadier did not hang about. He explained his plan to Tegan as they left the hut and hurried in the direction of the obelisk. ‘We’ll get a message to Doctor Runciman.

He’ll be on Top Field for the bun fight.’ Without stopping, he looked round for a suitable emissary.

‘A bun fight?’ The young Australian had visions of some Brendon School version of the Eton wall game.

‘The celebrations,’ repeated the Brigadier impatiently.

‘What celebrations?’

The Brigadier looked mildly scandalised. ‘The Queen’s Silver Jubilee, of course.’ He spotted a passing boy.

‘Powell! I’ve got a job for you.’

Tegan looked at the Union Jack on the flagpole and the streamers of patriotic bunting. She remembered the music from Saint Paul’s.

‘Get hold of Doctor Runciman,’ the Brigadier briefed the young boy. ‘Tell him to bring his gear and meet me by the obelisk.’

The Silver Jubilee? They were in the wrong time-zone!

Tegan was appalled.

The Doctor was delighted. The Silver Jubilee! They could pinpoint the date exactly. ‘June the seventh 1977. Well done, Brigadier!’

The Brigadier was less enthusiastic. That last regression had taken him dangerously near the edge of the precipice.

‘Come on!’ shouted the Doctor. There was no time to lose. He needed to return to the transmat capsule.

And so did Turlough.

No one saw the boy as he slid down the rope of knotted sheets, ran across the lawn, past the lake and up the hill to the obelisk.

The Brigadier was not only angry that Turlough had escaped from the sick-bay a second time, but furious to be tied up with school discipline just when the Doctor needed all his help and attention.

‘He’s trying to get away in the transmat capsule.’

‘What’s that, Doctor?’ The Brigadier paused in his inspection of the empty sick bay.

The Doctor was staring at a piece of glass he had picked up from the corner of the room. ‘That is, if he can repair the beam transmitter.’ He continued to peer at the cube in his hand.

‘Turlough?’ The Brigadier frowned. What was it the Doctor knew about that wretched boy? It was time for an explanation.

‘No time for explanations,’ said the Doctor. ‘It could be done, you know. Then I’d never get the TARDIS back!’ He pocketed the crystal and rushed from the room.

‘He doesn’t change,’ thought the Brigadier, and followed him obediently.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart was wheezing like a grampus as he climbed back up the hill, while the Doctor strode effortlessly at his side. He consoled himself with the thought that the Doctor was a much younger man.

But it was not his exertions which caused the Brigadier to halt in the middle of the path. It was the strange feeling that he had been there before.

And indeed he had; not just that afternoon with Ibbotson, but six years ago. It was all coming back to him.

He had climbed the hill with Tegan in 1977. He remembered examining the Doctor’s homing device with which the girl was finding her way back to the TARDIS.

He remembered her sudden fear that the wounded man in the TARDIS might not be the Doctor after all. He tried to give an account of his conversation with Tegan as the young Australian rushed back to the obelisk to rejoin Nyssa and comfort the creature in the TARDIS.

The Doctor followed the Brigadier’s narrative as impatiently as if it was all happening in the present. ‘Tegan is absolutely right!’ shouted the Doctor. ‘I am not in the TARDIS!’

‘Then who is? Or do I mean was?’ The poor Brigadier was hopelessly confused.

‘You tell me!’ replied the Doctor, desperate for more news about the other time zone.

Nyssa stood outside the TARDIS looking down into the valley and willing Tegan to return with help. She turned to go back into the control room, reluctant to leave the Doctor on his own.

She entered through the double doors in time to see the injured man stagger to his feet. ‘Doctor, you’re better!’

He stumbled, and nearly collapsed on the floor again.

He grabbed at the side of the console for support, at the same time turning for a better view of the girl in the doorway.

His face had indeed begun to repair, but it was not that of the Doctor. Nyssa stood rooted to the spot.

‘Perpetual regeneration,’ the injured man muttered to himself, deliriously.

‘Regeneration?’ Was that what he was trying to say?

Regeneration! That would explain everything. Nyssa remembered Pharos and the terrible moment when the Doctor fell from the radio telescope. She remembered how, once before, they had comforted a Time Lord with the face of a stranger. ‘Doctor, you don’t mean it’s happening again?’

He groaned. ‘Life without end or form... changing...

changing...’

Nyssa had never seen the Doctor so wretched.

He tottered dizzily, and fell forward over the console.‘I shall regain strength soon,’ he stuttered.

Nyssa could see the wild, staring eyes desperately scanning the instruments.

‘My mind is clouded,’ he gasped. He focused on the girl.

‘You understand the navigation?’

‘Well, a bit,’ said Nyssa. ‘At the moment we’re still aligned with the ship,’ she added, trying to sound more positive.

‘Ah, that is well.’ It was as if he grew stronger. ‘Prepare to leave at once.’

‘We can’t leave without Tegan!’

‘At once!’ he screamed.

‘Doctor, you don’t know what your saying.’

But he was deaf to her pleading.

‘Tegan will be back soon.’

He was leaning over the console, struggling to breathe as Nyssa ran out through the double doors. He saw her leave from the corner of his eye. No matter – she would be back as soon as the Tegan person arrived, and then the TARDIS would be at his disposition.

How he relished the irony of it: he, Mawdryn, had been mistaken for this Doctor. Now, if the Doctor was the owner of the TARDIS he must be a Time Lord. Mawdryn reflected bitterly how it had been the Time Lords who abandoned him; condemned them all to eternal torment and despair. But now the ending would come.

He started to drag on the heavy red coat that Nyssa had brought with the blankets to keep him warm. He, Mawdryn, would
be
a Time Lord!

It was much safer, Nyssa decided, to wait for Tegan outside the TARDIS. The Doctor, in his half-regenerated state, was a frightening and unpredictable personality. If only Tegan would come back.

‘Nyssa!’

To her immense relief, Tegan came running from the trees. ‘Quickly!’ shouted Nyssa. ‘We’ve got to take off.’

‘Nyssa... that man in the TARDIS...’ She paused to get her breath back. ‘I don’t think he is the Doctor.’

‘But he
is
! The transmat process induced a regeneration.’

‘What!’

‘Don’t worry, I know all about regeneration.’ The Brigadier, striding purposefully up behind Tegan, spoke like a midwife reassuring a nervous father-to-be. ‘I’ve seen it all before.’

‘So have we, and the Doctor almost died.’

‘Come on,’ said the Brigadier, and disappeared into the TARDIS.

‘Who is that person?’ asked Nyssa, registering Lethbridge-Stewart for the first time.

‘Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, of course. Come on!’

The Brigadier stood in the doorway of the control room and smiled; it was good to be on board again.

A figure in a familiar red coat stood watching the screen on the far side of the console.

‘Doctor!’ The Brigadier held out his hand.

The man in the Doctor’s red coat turned slowly. Tegan and Nyssa, running in behind the Brigadier, screamed.

The injured creature from the transmat capsule had recuperated amazingly. But he was nothing like the Doctor as any of them had ever known him, with his bulging reptilian eyes, his high domed forehead and slimy flesh that crept and quivered like a stranded fish.

They confronted an alien.

5

It was one of the hottest days of 1983 and the Brigadier was sorely in need of a rest. But the Doctor urged him faster and faster up the hill to the obelisk.

‘Don’t you see, Brigadier? The TARDIS came to Earth in 1977, and so did the transmat capsule, carrying someone

— or something — from the ship in space.’

‘And Tegan and the other girl think — or thought —

that it was you?’

The Doctor was losing patience. After all, the man had been in contact with Tegan and Nyssa in 1977 when the alien arrived on the first visit to Earth of the transmat capsule. ‘You were there, Brigadier!’ He spoke as calmly as he could. ‘You tell me!’

The Brigadier recoiled, like a child presented with the dentist’s drill. ‘No, Doctor! Please don’t make me remember!’

‘You must! I need to know what happened so I can protect Tegan and Nyssa!’

The Brigadier knew he had failed his old colleague.

‘Even if I wanted to I couldn’t recall any more.’ He wished he could explain the inpenetrable barrier that walled off part of his mind.

The Doctor put a friendly arm on his shoulder. ‘We could have reached the cause of your nervous breakdown.’

‘Good heavens! Do you think so?’

The Doctor was thinking that an experience which had been traumatic enough to give Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart a nervous breakdown must have been terrible indeed. ‘Come on! We’ve got to get to the capsule before Turlough works out how to operate it. It’s the only way I can contact the TARDIS!’

It was beyond the Brigadier’s comprehension how a boy from the sixth form could understand the mechanism of a transmat capsule (whatever that might be). But, what was more to the point, neither did he know how he was going to make it to the top of the hill without collapsing in an undignified heap. He struggled to keep up with the Doctor.

The Doctor could already see Turlough kneeling beside the transmitter. They were just in time. He increased the pace, leaving the asthmatic Brigadier behind him.

Turlough had been relieved to discover that the transmitter was not as badly damaged as he had feared. It would be quite possible to cross-patch one or two back-up circuits, substitute components from the camouflage function for those damaged in the location transmission section and...

‘Where did you learn about transmat radiology?’

Turlough had been too engrossed to notice the approach of the Doctor who now stood behind him. He spun guiltily round. But the Doctor was already opening his tool-box from which he selected several pieces of equipment.

The Doctor explained how the police box had materialised in the wrong time-zone as he started work on the broken cylinder. Turlough was amazed that anyone should have such an intuitive understanding of the complex microcircuitry and was fascinated by the Doctor’s modifications. Of course, he was trying to contact his TARDIS which was within a few yards of where they were standing, but six years in the past. Surely, contact was impossible? And yet...

Neither Turlough nor the Doctor noticed a panting Brigadier beside them. In normal circumstances Lethbridge-Stewart would have sent Turlough back to school with a flea in his ear. In fact he said nothing, but stared at the silver sphere between the two trees; it would seem Ibbotson deserved an apology.

Turlough was impressed. The Doctor had arranged for the beam to be reflected off the ship in such a way that, with the warp ellipse absorbing the time differential, it would activate the communications system of the TARDIS

in 1977.

‘Will it work?’ asked the Brigadier bluntly.

‘Always the optimist,’ sighed the Doctor without looking up.