Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord : The Ultimate Foe (6 page)

‘This is an illusion! I deny it!’

‘Not this time,’ the Valeyard’s voice proclaimed.

As if in confirmation, another predatory hand poked through.

And another.

‘This isn’t happening!’

Two more hands joined the assault.

The beleagured Doctor tried to pull his feet from the sucking, burping quicksand – but a sixth hand emerged...

and his leg was captured..!

The obscene fingers locked firm.

‘You are dead, Doctor,’ shouted the Valeyard as the remaining disembodied hands grappled for their quarry.

‘Not yet!’ The denial was firm... but his attempts to release his ankles were proving unsuccessful.

He tried to kick them free.

The sinewy grip on them did not slacken.

If only he’d had his umbrella he could have beaten them off. Instead, all he could do was pummel at those vice-like fingers with his fists.

A mistake.

In bending, he lost his balance...

And fell flat on his back...

In the muddy pool of quicksand...

‘Goodbye, Doctor,’ Valeyard called.

Goodbye it seemed indeed. The Doctor’s torso... neck...

then curly head sank beneath the mucilaginous slime...

To Be Or Not To Be!

Where was Glitz?

Like the Doctor, he had passed through that office door.

But fractionally after him. Sufficiently delayed to land in a different area of the dunes.

The bleak aspect appalled Glitz. Not a person in sight.

Not a house. A tavern. Or a tree. Nowhere to hide...

Ever since he’d met this trouble-prone Time Lord he’d been ‘up the creek without a paddle’! Chapter of disasters: lost his mate Dibber; been dumped in that worst of all places, a courtroom; and encountered a homicidal lunatic called Valeyard!

The Valeyard! The reminder of the vengeful prosecutor jolted him into action. Running across the dunes, he clambered, puffing and panting, to the crest of a mound – a vantage point from which he hoped to clap peepers on the Doctor.

He saw him all right.

At least, he saw his sneakers, his orange spats and the cuffs of his yellow and black trousers.

Waving.

Kicking.

Sticking out of a seething pool of mud! The rest of him

– body and head – had already sunk...

‘Doctor!’ Glitz’s plaintive wail floated on a melancholy wind. ‘Doc – tor – r!’

Acting the Good Samaritan – or whatever the equivalent was in his quadrant of the galaxy – did not come naturally to Glitz. But those pathetically struggling limbs stirred what little heroism existed in his soul. Slithering in the soft sand, he floundered towards the submerging Doctor.

‘Hang on! Don’t give in!’

He grabbed the Doctor’s ankles. Yanked hard – and toppled backwards!

Recovering, he became aware he was holding the orange spats!

His gaze transferred to the mud. No sign of the Doctor.

Just a few burping air bubbles rupturing the slimy surface.

‘What a way to go.’ He stared mournfully at the gulping bog. ‘All in all he wasn’t a bad old codger. Honest, of course.’ A definite impediment in this recidivist’s book!

‘But apart from that...’ Using his sleeve as a duster, he brushed specks from the spats. ‘Still, nobody’s perfect.’

‘And that’s the clue,’ boomed a sepulchral voice.

‘Nobody is. Not even the Valeyard.’

Glitz slumped to his knees. Trembling. Clasping his palms together in supplication, he realised he was clutching the spats – and slung them from him as though in fear of contamination!

A single, regurgitating bubble devoured them...

‘Oh Great Cosmic Protector of grafters and dissemblers, save me,’ prayed Glitz. ‘A voice from the grave!’

‘No,’ came the response. ‘Merely a grave voice.’ How the Doctor loved a pun! For it was he who answered.

Not from below the ground but from above it... his tall form levitating from the flats nearby. ‘Bad joke. Then, everything here is a bad joke.’

Glitz, almost mesmerised by the apparition, gawped at the resurrected Doctor. ‘But you – you –’ he indicated the mud in which the Doctor had been interred.

Only there was no mud.

Just dry sand.

He squinted at the Doctor’s fair curls, pink cheeks and brightly coloured coat. Despite their dunking, they were unbesmirched. ‘No mud... yet I saw...’ His inspection centred on the Doctor’s feet. ‘And your ankle armour...’

Clean and unsoiled, the spats nestled comfortably beneath the unsullied trousers. ‘I don’t get it! I just don’t get it! I
saw
you going down! Saw you! Tried to pull you out, but you were a goner for sure!’

‘Oh do concentrate, Glitz. How often must I tell you we’re not dealing with reality?’

‘Why waste your breath on that simple-minded oaf?’

The clipped, incisive rhetoric could only have one source...

His long black gown, its stiff cape collar edged with white, billowed about the Valeyard as he stood, a stark figure against the skyline. ‘You cannot speak as if reality –’

The Doctor turned, but before he could locate him, the Valeyard had disappeared. Literally.

To reappear closer. On the opposite side. ‘– is a one dimensional concept,’ he continued.

Again the Doctor turned. And Glitz. Again the vanishing act... and a reappearance. Nearby. To their right.

‘Fortunately there is a reality that you and I can both agree on. The ultimate reality.’

‘Death?’ said the Doctor.

‘ "The undiscovered country from whose bourn," ‘

quoted the Valeyard, ‘ "no traveller returns." ’

‘ "Puzzles the will" ’ supplied the Doctor. ‘
Hamlet
. Act three. Scene one.’

A scowl of disapproval at his own failings wrinkled the Valeyard’s features. ‘I really must curb these urges!’ He smoothed his straight, dark hair now unfettered by the tight-fitting skull cap he wore in Court. ‘I’ve no wish to be contaminated by your whims and idiosyncrasies.’

‘Yes... quite,’ agreed the Doctor absently. ‘What I don’t comprehend –’ Another vanishing trick!

‘Over there, Doc.’ The black antagonist was on the left now. ‘Slippery customer your other persona.’

The Doctor swung to his left. ‘What I don’t comprehend, is why you want me dead.’ Second thoughts.

‘No. No. Let me rephrase that.’ Too late. The evanescent Valeyard had done it again!

Glitz spotted him. ‘Top of the dune!’

‘What I mean is,’ shouted the Doctor. ‘It would satisfy my curiosity to know why you should go to such extraordinary lengths to kill me.’

‘Come now, Doctor. How else can I obtain my freedom?

Operate as a complete entity, unshackled by your side of my existence?’ Another disappearance... and reappearance on the Time Lord’s right. ‘Only by ridding myself of you and your misplaced morality, your constant crusading –

your... your...’ Passion clouded his mind, forcing him to grope for the correct expression.

‘Idiotic honesty,’ suggested Glitz, understanding the thesis since it was akin to his own.

‘Oaf! Microbe!’ stormed the Valeyard, looming above Glitz and hissing the epithets into his ear.

‘Pardon me for trying to help!’ Glitz dug a forefinger into the earhole as if to remove an offensive blob of wax.

‘I’m neutral in this set-up, you know.’ In case his neutrality was not recognised or honoured by this disparaging genie, Glitz moved resolutely behind the Doctor.

The Valeyard ignored him, returning his attention to his true victim. ‘Only by releasing myself from the misguided maxims that you nurture, can I be free.’

‘Sounds like Armageddon’s beckoning you, Doc,’

muttered Glitz when Valeyard was no longer to be seen.

‘With you destroyed,’ a distant declaration from far off,

‘and unable to constrain me, and with unlimited access to the Matrix... there will be nothing beyond my reach!’ A triumphant swirl – and he vanished completely.

Relief surged through Glitz’s veins – until he saw the Doctor striding determinedly across the flats.

‘Here, where’re you off to now?’

‘To trace the Valeyard.’

‘But he was here!’ This crazy world inside the Matrix was too much for Glitz: suffocating bodies that didn’t suffocate; persons that appeared and disappeared like rabbits out of a magician’s hat; gurgling green gunge that became dry, golden sand... Madness! If this was the way honest people carried on, thank goodness for crime!

‘Illusion, Glitz,’ said the Doctor, maintaining his trek.

‘The shadow not the substance.’ He pounded towards the shore. ‘Of course, if you don’t wish to come, you can always stay and build sandcastles. I’m sure if you think hard enough, you can conjure up a bucket and spade!’

‘Tell you something,’ called Glitz, reluctantly trailing in the rear. ‘When you two meet face to face, five grotzis’ll get you ten that Valeyard’ll be first past the chequered flag!’

The Doctor came to a sudden halt – a thick, dense mist was rising from the sea...

‘Hey, Doc, what’s that?’

Tentatively the Doctor sniffed the air.

‘Back pedal, Glitz!’

‘Not another illusion?’

‘Alas, no.’

Gathering momentum, the cloud was rolling inexorably towards them.

‘Sea mist? Fog?’

‘Asphyxiating nerve gas. This is in deadly earnest!’

‘If you must make jokes – steal them. Your own are schlock. Most comedians do, you know.’ He was whistling in the dark, hoping against hope the Doctor was wrong.

‘Change a name here... a word there. Impossible to prove it’d ever been pinched –’

‘Run!’ Despite his tendency to plumpness, the Doctor raced across the sands.

So did Glitz: terror lending wings to his heels. The cloud’s progress accelerated.

‘Run, man! Run!’

‘What-d’you think-I’m doing?’ complained Glitz, labouring in the shifting sand. ‘Playing intergalactic hopscotch!’

In fact he could well have been. His progress was spasmodic. Every now and again he was pausing for breath, mouth wide as he gulped in air.

‘Faster!’ Despite having to negotiate the soft sands, the Doctor was covering much more ground. ‘Faster, Glitz!’

Trying to comply, Glitz stumbled.

Lungs aching, gasping and spluttering, he attempted to getup...

‘Can’t... breathe.. can’t... no air... can’t breathe...’

11

‘Come on!
Do
something! We can’t just sit here! We’ve got to help him!’

Mel’s impassioned pleading had a minuscule effect on the serried ranks of Time Lords. In unison they turned away from the Matrix screen where they had been watching disaster overtake the stumbling fugitives on the beach.

‘The Doctor chose to enter the Matrix,’ reproved the Inquisitor. ‘We are not empowered to interfere.’

‘You parade of stuffed dummies! He needs help!’

On the screen, the Doctor, lugging the spluttering Glitz, was managing to stay ahead of the ruthlessly pursuing cloud... Just!

‘He’s a Time Lord! One of you!’

The Gallifreyans remained impassive, unyielding.

‘Call yourselves a superior species! No human being would see another in such terrible danger and do nothing!’

‘If I may, My Lady?’ The Keeper awaited assent from the Inquisitor. It was bestowed. ‘Young woman, you are applying logical thought to a situation that recognises no logic.’

Mel clattered from the witness box and bustled across the well of the Court. ‘Give me the key to the Matrix! I’m going in there!’

‘Return to your seat!’ instructed the Inquisitor. ‘In my Court you follow orders.’

‘Not a chance,’ blurted Mel, and dashed towards the Keeper, making a grab for the Key. Nipping aside, he stuck out his foot.

Mel tripped and sprawled, full length, on the floor...

Scattering pebbles, the Doctor tugged the retching Glitz down a shingle slope, gaining temporary respite from the advancing cloud of gas.

‘Come in, Doctor...’

Blinking, the hard-pressed Time Lord rubbed smarting tears from his eyes. The summons came from a dilapidated beach hut.

‘You’ll be perfectly safe...’

Deciding it was Hobson’s Choice, the Doctor bundled Glitz into the tar-stained hut – to be confronted not by rickety deck-chairs and sun-faded parasols... but the sophisticated control room of a TARDIS.

Blundering to the console, coughing and choking, the Doctor rested on the central control, sucking uncontaminated air into his burning lungs...

Then he registered the pulsating tab of a Chameleon Circuit ...

A functioning Chameleon Circuit? His own was defunct. The police box could not change its shape to meld with any surroundings, but this TARDIS could... A fact that prompted the Doctor to wonder whether he hadn’t jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.

‘I never thought I’d welcome the sight of you,’ he stuttered between gasps.

‘It will not happen again,’ came the uncompromising rejoinder.

‘What puzzles me – is why it’s happening now.’

The muzziness induced by the gas was beginning to recede: self-preservation ousted relief, and he hastily put the bulk of the console between himself and his malignant host.

‘The explanation is quite simple. I want the Valeyard eliminated. You are the most likely candidate to achieve that,’ purred the Master.

‘Hang on!’ Glitz wheezed in the midst of a hacking cough. ‘I don’t get that! You told me – this flashy, fair-haired geezer was – the one you wanted to croak.’

‘Silence, worm!’

But the truth was out. Glitz was exposed as the Master’s lackey. A traitor. Sent to decoy the Doctor.

Being a traitor did not bother Glitz. There was even a degree of glamour attached to the status of a spy.

But to be called a ‘worm’! Not on your life! ‘Hey, show respect there! Nobody talks to Sabalom Glitz like that and gets away with it!’

Seizing the opportunity to exploit the split, and mindful of the maxim ‘there’s no honour among thieves’, the Doctor fanned the embers of mistrust. ‘Especially not a business partner. What was it, Glitz? A fifty-fifty arrangement? Or were you the forty-nine per cent?’