Doctor Who: Terminus (2 page)

Tegan said, ‘Why don’t I dig out Adric’s notes for you?’

‘I really ought to do it myself.’

‘Come on, cheat a little. My old teacher always said if you don’t know, ask.’

‘That sounds fair enough.’

‘I know, but then she’d whack us for not paying attention in the first place. What do you say?’

Nyssa shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t know where to look.’

But Tegan was already on her way to the door.

‘Adric kept files, didn’t he?’ she said. ‘Besides, it gives me a chance to check up on you-know-who.’

Tegan was on her way to a surprise. Turlough was not, as she was expecting, making a big heap of Adric’s possessions in the middle of the floor of his new room; he wasn’t even in his new room. As soon as Tegan had left him, he’d switched off his smile like a lightbulb and followed her to the door; he’d watched as she stood out in the corridor and struggled for self-control, and when she’d disappeared into her own room he slipped out and tiptoed past. He was tense, ready to alter his manner in a moment; the Doctor was out here, somewhere. If they met, Turlough had a plausible story ready. He wasn’t quite sure what it might be, but extemporisation to suit the moment was his main talent. It was why he’d been chosen.

He’d annoyed Tegan. Well, so what – Tegan wasn’t the one who mattered. As far as the Doctor was concerned, Turlough’s act so far had been flawless.

Anything the two girls might say would look like jealous sniping; it would help his case and weaken theirs. He couldn’t lose.

In spite of the uncertain nature of the tour that he’d been given, he’d fixed the main points of the TARDIS

layout in his mind. It was much as he’d been led to expect. He got to the console room without meeting the Doctor, and outside the door he stopped and listened for a few seconds. He heard nothing other than the regular motion of the time rotor, and after a moment he strolled in.
Turlough, wide-eyed and innocent,
come to see if he can be of any use around the place...
He let the attitude drop as soon as he was sure that he was alone.

With the exception of an old beechwood coat-stand that the Doctor had found useful in one of his more flamboyant incarnations, the console room was empty of furniture. Not that it would have been difficult to single out the TARDIS’s main control desk; the angular structure with its central rotor dominated the chamber, the translucent core rising and falling as if in time with the very breathing of the craft. Turlough circled it, slowly. The technology was alien to him, the layout of the controls unfamiliar. A wrong move now could ruin all that he’d achieved. He’d come so far on his own. Now it was time to get help.

He reached deep into his pocket and brought out a tiny cube. It looked harmless enough. If he’d been searched he could have claimed that it was some kind of memento or souvenir, a worthless crystal mined by a great-uncle and passed down through the family for its sentimental value. Turlough didn’t know whether he had any great-uncles or not; if he did, the chances were that none of them had been engaged in anything quite so honest and hardworking as the mining trade.

The point was that the story sounded plausible. He set the cube on a flat surface of the console, and then he crouched to stare into it.

The crystal structure of the cube had been altered to key in with Turlough’s mindwave. Only he could unlock it. After a few moments’ concentration, the cube began to glow; Turlough waited for it to reach peak brightness before he spoke.

‘I did as you said. They’ve accepted me.’ He kept his voice low, knowing that it would still be possible to lose the game even now that he was within reach – literally

– of its end. There was a pause before the voice of his unseen controller, harsh and distorted, came through.

‘
Acceptance is not enough. You must destroy.
’

‘I’m in the console room. Tell me what I have to do.’

A series of terse instructions followed. As Turlough was following them through, lifting one of the access panels beneath the console and identifying some of the major components beneath to give himself some orientation, Tegan was crossing the corridor some distance away on an errand that she would never complete.

The interior of the console was unbelievably complicated; without step-by-step guidance, Turlough wouldn’t have had a chance. He rested his finger-tips against the sides of the single element that the search had led him to. It felt slightly loose in its mount; a decent grip and a good pull would probably get it free completely.

‘What will this do?’ he whispered.

‘
You are touching the heart of the TARDIS. Rip it free!
’

But Turlough immediately withdrew his hand a little. ‘And what happens to me?’

‘
You will be saved. I am ready to lift you away. You’ll live
forever at my side.
’

Being saved and living forever sounded attractive enough, but Turlough wasn’t so sure about the prospect of eternity spent at the side of the owner of the unseen voice. It was probably just the Black Guardian’s way of saying he’d be grateful. Turlough certainly hoped so. He suppressed a little shiver, and re-established his grip on the component deep inside the console. He pulled.

The console reacted immediately. The time rotor locked in place and started to flicker, the lights in the console room dimmed momentarily, and alarm buzzers on the control panels started to make urgent noises. The component came half-way out, and then jammed.

Turlough pulled harder, but he couldn’t get it free.

Half a job would accomplish nothing; worse, it would ruin his cover with the Doctor and destroy the Black Guardian’s confidence in him. Desperately he tried again; he lost his grip and some of the skin from a knuckle as his hand slipped free.

‘It’s stuck,’ he told the contact cube. ‘It won’t move any more.’ Turlough’s mind was racing; if he couldn’t succeed, how could he patch up the situation and give himself a second chance? Come on, he told himself, think on your feet, it’s what you’re good at, but just when he needed his talent most, it seemed to have taken a walk. He pushed the component back into place as best he could. It didn’t feel right – he’d probably broken connections that would have to be re-made by someone who knew what they were doing, but for now he would have to be satisfied with making everything look normal. He withdrew his hand and started to replace the cover panels.

The Black Guardian didn’t like it. ‘
Continue!
’ The cube pulsed. ‘
Continue!
’

‘I can’t. There isn’t time.’

‘
The breakup is beginning. You must...
’

Turlough snatched the cube from the console surface and pocketed it. His controller was silenced, the glow which signified contact dying as soon as he picked it up. He raised himself from his knees and looked around; the rotor was still locked and the alarms were still sounding. He could run from the console room, but if the others were approaching it would be a big mistake; no amount of explanation could remove the appearance of guilt even from the Doctor’s mind. He could claim some innocent act of incompetence, perhaps knocking a control without meaning to, but that could be easily checked. At best, he’d be barred from the console room and closely watched whenever he came near to any area of importance; there would be no second chances that way.

He’d have to stay where he was. He’d heard the alarms and had come running to see if he could help.

That ought to do it.

With an eye on the door, Turlough started to work on the expression he’d be using when they caught up with him.

Some problems, the Doctor believed, were best solved through quiet reflection. Many of the decisions that he’d had to make in the recent past had been made under pressure – and they hadn’t, he had to admit, all been for the best. He was, he thought, a social animal –

more so than any other Time Lord that he’d known, although he’d always regarded himself as something of a rebel – but there were times when he needed to be alone. It was a basic requirement, human or otherwise, and it was in recognition of this that he’d asked Tegan to install the newcomer in Adric’s old room. But as far as the Doctor was concerned, staying in one place for too long made him restless; when there was a problem to be tackled, like the resolution of the spiky relationship between the two girls and Turlough, he preferred to be out and roaming.

There was also another advantage. It meant that you couldn’t easily be found and distracted.

But as the Doctor emerged on his wandering from the half-lit tunnels where the inhibitor crystals were stacked in their pressurised tanks, the urgent, half-panicky note in Tegan’s calling told him that there was more serious business to be attended to. His name echoed faintly through the corridor complex, and he started out towards its source.

Something was badly wrong. Tegan had always been wary in strange situations, but she was no coward; and as the Doctor reached her and she spun around to meet him, it was obvious that she was scared.

‘All right, Tegan,’ the Doctor said, aiming to calm her down in order to get as much information as he could, ‘what’s the problem?’

But Tegan could only shake her head. She was breathless from running. ‘You’d better come,’ was all she could say, and so the Doctor nodded and followed as she led the way.

Crisis had improved Tegan’s navigational ability considerably. She made straight for the residential corridor leading to the console room, and as they rounded the final corner it became obvious to the Doctor why he was needed. He stopped for a moment, and then walked forward slowly.

He’d never seen anything like it, not on the inside of the TARDIS. One complete wall of the corridor was starting to break away. The effect was difficult to appreciate. The wall seemed to shimmer from floor to ceiling, as if it wasn’t a solid surface at all but a cut-out piece of a waterfall; it sparkled with drowned stars and pulsed like the heartbeat of a sick machine. The Doctor was tempted to touch it, but he knew better.

‘What is it?’ Tegan said.

The Doctor was still watching, trying to make out whether the breakup was stable or getting any worse.

It seemed to be deteriorating. ‘It’s the matrix,’ he told her. ‘We’re in trouble.’

‘And Nyssa’s on the other side!’

The Doctor stared at her for a moment, and then he turned and headed for the console room at speed.

Tegan followed, only a couple of paces behind.

Turlough was already there when they entered. He seemed lost and confused by the console alarms, and his relief when the Doctor arrived was obvious.

The first thing the Doctor did was to look over the telltales on the console. There was no clue to the cause of the problem to be found there, but the rotor was still jammed and flickering. ‘What was Nyssa working on?’ he asked.

Tegan was still by his side. ‘Nothing that would cause this,’ she said emphatically.

The Doctor didn’t press it further. Tegan didn’t have a hard-science background, but her grasp of the uses and consequences of technology was good.

Besides, Nyssa wasn’t likely to be dabbling in anything that would have this kind of effect. She hadn’t told him what she was proposing to do – mostly because she was afraid of being given helpful advice when she really thought she should manage alone – but her field was the biological sciences, not high-energy physics.

And now she was trapped in a section of the TARDIS that was tearing itself apart.

The Doctor started lifting panels to get to the circuitry inside. The breakup that he’d witnessed was something that simply shouldn’t happen, but it was useless to insist on the point. Safety cut-outs were an integral part of the console; whatever happened to the TARDIS, it was designed to keep its internal structure solid right up to the end.

But tell that to the TARDIS. He started to trace the lines in and out of the matrix generator, looking for anything that could give him a clue about the cause of the trouble. As long as Nyssa hadn’t actually been in contact with the inside wall when the trouble started, she was probably still all right; but unless he could arrest and reverse the instability, it would creep forward and surround her and then, finally, absorb her. And then the rest of the TARDIS would start to follow.

There seemed to be nothing wrong, nothing at all.

Every line was intact and there were none of the telltale signs of failure that would
have
to be there before such a deterioration could take place. His hand came to rest on the main cut-out stack; the stack came free.

He realised with horror that he was able to pull the component nearly all of the way out; the TARDIS was holding together almost entirely on its subsidiaries.

The Doctor looked up sharply. He said, ‘Has anybody been lifting these panels?’

Turlough looked immediately at Tegan. ‘Not that I know of,’ he said. Tegan started to blush, even though there was no reason why she should. She couldn’t help it. ‘The cut-out’s been disturbed. The stabilising control on the space-time element. It’s what holds the TARDIS together.’

Turlough came in for a closer look, and the Doctor had him hold one of the contacts closed as he worked.

Tegan watched for a minute, but she couldn’t stay silent; ‘What about Nyssa?’ she said.

The Doctor reached across the console to operate the switch that would uncover the large screen on the console room wall. ‘I’m trying to re-focus the exterior viewer on the inside of the TARDIS,’ he said, and as he spoke something crackled inside the console and threw out a rain of sparks. It made him hesitate, but only for a moment. ‘Watch the screen,’ he said, ‘and tell me what you see.’

The screen cover rolled back, and the Doctor’s attention returned to the depths of the console. Tegan watched as the screen came alive, but there was no recognisable picture. ‘Just a mess,’ she reported.

The Doctor glanced up. ‘Dimensional instability,’ he said, shaking his head. There was no way that he could do a fast repair on the cut-out. It was a lengthy and intricate job, and the danger to Nyssa – already considerable – was increasing minute by minute.