Doctor Who: Time Flight (8 page)

A whirring and a groaning sound filled the air, unfamiliar to all present save the Doctor.

Professor Hayter froze.

The TARDIS dematerialised.

The Professor's lips moved silently like an elderly goldfish that has just been fed. He finally articulated: 'We're hallucinating.'

Captain Stapley was equally surprised, but he knew when to believe the evidence of his own eyes. 'Is that how you travel, Doctor!'

The Doctor smiled. 'Not exactly the first-class end of the market, but a serviceable vehicle, Captain Stapley.'

Professor Hayter was still in shock. 'Some kind of miasma,' he stammered weakly.

The Doctor had had enough of this sour-faced Doubting Thomas. 'I do not wish to believe, therefore I hallucinate,' He rounded on the Professor. 'Is that your philosophy of Darlington Man?'

'What we've just seen isn't possible,' Hayter protested.

'Try explaining that when the Master materialises in the Sanctum.'

'Have you any idea where this Sanctum is?' asked Captain Stapley.

The Doctor wished he had. He might even be able to get there first.

Then Bilton remembered the wall that he and the passengers had been trying to demolish.

'Could be it,' said the Doctor.

But, as the Captain pointed out, it was odd that the Master should need brute force to unseal the hidden room. Why couldn't he walk in like Tegan and Nyssa?

The Doctor thought he understood. 'The power source is unstable,' he explained. 'One moment it works for the Master, the next against.'

It was time for the Doctor to take up the work started by the Master, and force his way into the rotunda in the great hall. He rejected the assistance of the Concorde crew since he doubted whether they would be able to resist the hallucinogenic radiation so near the power source. Captain Stapley was a little put out, however, when the Doctor decided to ask Professor Hayter to accompany him.

'The Profesor has shown formidable resistance,' he explained. 'Are you game?' he asked the old man.

Hayter had said nothing since the Doctor had attacked his academic integrity. His mind was in a turmoil. If this amazing young man was not, after all, a charlatan, then a lifetime's research had just been stood on its head. But suppose there was an entirely unknown dimension? He would publish a paper. There would be honorary degrees, lecture tours

...

'Professor?'

They were all looking at him. He smiled. 'Certainly, Doctor. Glad to be of help.'

'By the way.' A thought occurred to the Doctor as they were leaving. 'If the Master turns up again, don't be surprised. It may take him a little time to discover I left the coordinate overdrive switched in.'

The Doctor and Professor Hayter hurried down the corridor towards the great hall. The Professor chuckled. He had been thinking of his fellow passengers, toiling at the wall like Egyptian slaves. 'I'll say one thing, Doctor. For some of them it'll be the first honest day's work they've done in their lives ... Even if they do think they're bent wood hatstands,' he added spitefully. The great hall, when the Doctor and the Professor

arrived, looked more like an airport during a strike of baggage handlers.

Confused and angry passengers wandered helplessly around, the more militant amongst them demanding to know what was going on from anyone in uniform.

'Doctor, they've stopped hallucinating!' cried Hayter.

'That's not necessarily a good thing,' muttered the Doctor, as they heard the angry buzz of protest from Concorde's first-class passengers.'Are you good at explanations, Professor?'

Angela Clifford, the young stewardess, saw the Professor arrive with the stranger. She extricated herself from an overweight Milwaukee computer salesman who was telling her what he thought of British Airways In-Transit arrangements, and hurried across.

'This is the Doctor,' said Professor Hayter, neatly passing the buck. 'He's come to help us.'

Quickly establishing that the passengers were in good shape, the Doctor moved on to address the motley assembly, now close to mutiny, that were gathered around the rotunda. Keeping his account of the unlikely situation as simple as possible, the Doctor did his best to convince the stranded travellers that their only hope of a return to civilisation lay in a determined assault on the already half-demolished wall of the inner room.

The ladies and gentlemen of flight 192 were not an easy lot to convince, but through Professor Hayter's authority - developed from years of bullying on departmental committees - and the Doctor's charismatic charm, they were finally persuaded that a desperate situation required a desperate remedy.

They started work.

'It's incredible,' said Angela to Professor Hayter, as she watched the passengers, who so recently had been enjoying the luxury of Concorde, labour at the stonework like navvies. 'How could we do all this without realising it!'

Hayter did his best to explain the hallucinatory power, the source of which they would soon discover on the other side of the wall.

'Won't that be dangerous? What if the force returns?' 'Fight it!'

'How?'

'Focus your mind on something you're very sure of. Your family. Fish and chips ...'

Professor Hayter was thoroughly enjoying himself as he explained his own techniques of contra-suggestive resistance. Never, in the laboratory at Darlington, would he be able to conduct an experiment on this scale. 'Come on everybody!' he said turning his attention to the workforce. 'We haven't much time.'

The unlikely stonemasons were making good progress. 'Nearly there, Doctor! Doctor?' The Doctor, as usual, had wandered off. A Corinthian pillar at the far end of the hall had drawn his attention.

'The Master's TARDIS!' he exclaimed as the Professor joined him.

'That pillar?'

'Of course, that's where he's hidden the other passengers.' Hayter gulped. 'It's not big enough!'

'Something else for me to explain later,' said the Doctor casually.

The Professor's spine tingled. 'That revolutionises the whole concept of relative dimension!' He all but genuflected in front of the Doctor. 'Oh Doctor, if only I were a younger man and had the time to make use of your knowledge.'

'Time? That's another thing,' replied the Doctor tantalisingly.

Worlds within worlds, universes beyond the known universe kaleidoscoped in the Professor's mind. He was dizzy with excitement.

But something else had attracted the Doctor's attention. 'What's this?'

A cable snaked out of the half-open door of the Master's TARDIS.

'I want to see where this goes.'

He followed the trail. It soon became clear that the trunking encircled the rotunda. Various components were connected at regular intervals.'

'An induction loop!' cried the Doctor. 'So that's how he generated the time contour!'

Hayter looked at him, desperate now to understand more of the Doctor's amazing technology.

'Don't you see what this means?'

'I certainly do not,' said the Professor who would have given his pension to know the half of it.

A terrible new urgency entered the Doctor's voice. 'The Master's already harnessing the power in the loop. The Sanctum!'

He dashed back to where Angela was acting as unofficial site foreman on the demolition of the rotunda wall. The Professor, who could hardly wait for

a peep into the Master's TARDIS, followed reluctantly.

'We've got to get that wall down at once!' the Doctor shouted. 'Tegan and Nyssa are behind it!'

In Kalid's chamber Scobie was investigating the apparatus beneath the crystal ball. He was totally at sea with the outlandish components.

The return of the Master was heralded by the same whirring they had heard when the police box first vanished.

'Quickly!' shouted Captain Stapley, and he pushed Roger Scobie and Andrew Bilton into a dark recess.

The three men had hardly recovered from the further amazement of watching the TARDIS reappear when the Master opened the door and stormed towards the pedestal in the centre of the chamber.

Like a car thief, indignant that his stolen vehicle has broken dov/n on him, the Master fretted and fumed as he sorted various circuit boards from his own TARDIS. How typical of the Doctor to travel in a machine that was unserviced, unsafe, and light years out of date!

'I've got an idea,' whispered Captain Stapley. 'Roger, you wait here for the Doctor. Andrew, you come with me.'

Stapley and Bilton tiptoed across the chamber, right behind the Master's back, and into the Doctor's TARDIS.

As Bilton and Stapley walked through the double doors into the TARDIS

control room they staggered to a halt, stunned with the disbelief of any stranger who enters the time machine that something could be larger inside than out.

'I don't believe it,' said Andrew Bilton.

But wonder was a luxury they could ill afford. They had, possibly, only seconds before the Master returned.

'You're never going to try and take off!' Andrew was watching the Captain as he scrutinised the instruments on the console.

'Of course not. But somewhere there must be a control for those doors.'

'We lock the Master out of the TARDIS?'

'Maybe not out of the TARDIS, but at least we can keep him off the flight deck.' Stapley looked round, daunted at the array of unfamiliar dials and switches. 'Always assuming this is the flight deck.'

The Captain selected a control at random. 'Here goes.'

Only a buzzing resulted from Captain Stapley's intervention. He tinkered recklessly with more levers and buttons.

Andrew Bilton watched him anxiously. 'I hope you know what you're doing, Skipper.'

'Not the remotest.'

A sudden whir swung them round to face the screen which had opened with a view of the Master still at work in the chamber.

'Now that's more like it.'

They would now be forewarned of the Master's return.

'If only we can hold up the Master until the Doctor's got through to Tegan and Nyssa.' The Captain had another go at shutting the doors.

'Skipper!' Andrew could see the Master returning to the TARDIS with an armful of spare parts.

There was only one place to hide. Stapley and Bilton dashed through the inner door of the control room and into the corridor.

Leaving the door very slightly ajar, the two men watched the Master kneel under the console and insert the components from his own machine.

The Master stood up and reset the coordinates.

'He's going to take off again. We've got to get out of here!' Andrew whispered.

But the Captain had no intention of leaving. The Doctor's TARDIS is our only link with the twentieth century. Where it goes, we go!'

It seemed, for the moment, that the TARDIS was going nowhere. Lights flashed, the column jerked and thumped, but the Doctor's time machine refused to dematerialise.

A gleeful Captain Stapley turned to his First Officer. 'Engine trouble?'

'That's a bit of luck.'

The smile faded from the Captain's face as he realised the implications of a serious malfunction. He voiced his fears to Andrew Bilton If there is a fault in the TARDIS, we could be marooned in this wilderness forever.'

The rage and frustration of the Master knew no bounds. He pulled more units from the inner control systems and hurled them to the floor, then strode out through the double doors.

Captain Stapley dashed back into the control room and knelt under the console. He began to remove various chipboards.

'What are you doing?' asked Andrew.

'A trouble shared is a trouble doubled,' said the Captain, replacing the modules in a random order.

'Sabotage!' Andrew grinned.

'I only hope the Doctor knows how to put all this back.'

It was a mystery to the First Officer how the Doctor could begin to cope with the baffling technology that made such a machine work. He ran his eye over the intimidating control panels. 'I thought, after Concorde, you could fly anything. But I can't make head nor tail of this ...'

He would have done better, however, to have kept a watchful eye on the screen.

'I'm sorry the Doctor is not here to explain it all to you.'

Bilton and Stapley sprang guiltily to their feet. The Master had returned. He waved them away from the console with the Tissue Compression Eliminator.

'You seem to be having trouble with the TARDIS yourself,' bluffed Captain Stapley.

The Master had now quite overcome his feelings of exasperation. 'It is no longer important to me,' he replied with nonchalant charm, as he detached several more components. 'I now have all that I require. The TARDIS, for what it's worth, is yours.' Pausing only to realign the coordinates, he turned to the entrance and swept out.

To the dismay of Stapley and Bilton, no sooner had the Master passed through the double doors than they closed fast. Almost instantly a new sound came from the central mechanism. The column began to rise and fall; not falteringly as during the Master's attempted take off, but with a regular rhythm. They watched,