Who Knows Where The Time Goes...?

A little further down the page, the internet generation can find out what it was like to grow up with Doctor Who in an age without Twitter, DVDs or even other fans, but first, a guest post from Ella, the big-hearted and frankly inspiring @shootthesmiley - a tale of modern fandom...

Part 1 - Being a Whovian

When Doctor Who was reintroduced to TV screens in 2005, I was seven years old. My parents had never been particularly avid fans of the show in its first run, so naturally I was unaware of the new series and it ended up being through a friend, rather than family member, that I was introduced to it. And yes, when I was initially told to watch it I do remember my response being something along the lines of, “I’m not really much of a fan of medical programmes, sorry.” My friend insisted, however, and the following day I became hooked by a show that would stay with me for years.

Much like a lot of people, it seems, I have very little memory of actually watching my first episode of Doctor Who, despite knowing for a fact which episode it was (unsurprisingly, it was Rose – starring the fabulous Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper). I can also remember the discussions I had about it with my friend the following week at school; about how terrified we now were of shop dummies, and how we both aspired to be like Rose when we grew up. This, I like to think, is where the ‘slippery slope’ began, because from that point onwards, I became infatuated with Doctor Who. By the time we had moved up in the school from year 3 to year 4, I was officially considering myself a fan.

Towards the end of my time in year 4, we had said farewell to Eccleston and hello to David Tennant. I feel that my increasing levels of adoration for the show at this point were perfectly represented in how much money my Mum was spending in Newsagents. Every week I would venture into the shop to find a nice, shiny new issue of the Doctor Who magazine – a magazine which I am still a proud collector of – and on the way out, if I was lucky, my Mum would often be swayed into buying me a couple of packs of Doctor Who trading cards. These cards, coupled with the enormous amount of gifts and stationery from the magazines, are why I like to refer to this part of my Whovian life as ‘The Merchandise era’. No one had to ask what I wanted for Christmas or for my birthday anymore, because each year it was the same; anything Doctor Who. I had books, action figures, posters, magazines, puzzles and more, all of which I still own today!

However, despite the amount of love and enthusiasm I had for the show at this point in time, and the vast amount of books and annuals I had to keep me occupied between seasons, I rarely had anyone to talk to about it. The friend who introduced me had become less and less interested in it, as had many of my other friends, so I was limited in how much I could go on about it – and that was where Matt Smith and the wonderful World Wide Web came in….

On New Years Day, 2010, my family and I were staying with friends in Norway (which was also, by pure coincidence, where we were staying when I watched my first episode of Sherlock, another great passion of mine!) Shamefully, I can quite distinctly remember my first words upon seeing Matt standing in the Tardis being, “Well, I don’t think I’ll be watching that again!” I was cruel not to give him a chance, but as someone who had only witnessed one regeneration prior to Tennant’s, the change in personality of the Doctor was odd and distressing. Quite honestly if I’d had my way at the time, David would have played the Doctor for decades more!

Needless to say, however, I was soon hooked again and regretted every doubt I ever had about Matt. Sure, he was incredibly different to Ten, but his childlike mannerisms and slightly odd food choices began to grow on me. Even better, with a new Doctor came a whole new era of ‘fanhood’ for me. I joined twitter during Matt’s second series, and was thrilled to find that I really wasn’t alone, and that there was a whole community of fans just like myself who I could talk to non-stop about the show. I say community, but really these people have become more of a second family to me, and I couldn’t ask for a nicer one than the Whovians. No one is left out, or made to feel less of a fan, and every single new fan is welcomed with open arms into the virtual Whovian family.

Obviously, I am in no position to speak for people who experienced the first run of Doctor Who, but I do think I speak for a number of newer fans when I say that being a fan of the show today really is an experience that never leaves you. We can watch episodes, old and new, at the touch of a button, or discuss characters and monsters with fans living miles and miles away, sometimes even on the other side of the globe!

At the risk of sounding too clichéd, I really do owe so much of my current life to Doctor Who. The friends I have made, and the experiences I have had as a result of watching it are incredible, and the memories I have of it will forever be ones that I treasure. It truly is an honour to be part of such a vast, friendly community of people, and I am certain that the memory of the 50th anniversary will be one that I will never, ever forget.



Part 2 - "Ssh, Granddad, go back to sleep" (title courtesy of Simon Guerrier)

I was a little over four years old.

My first clear memory of Doctor Who is from the 22nd October, 1966; episode 3 of The Tenth Planet. The Cybermen being shot down with their own weapons. It’s no longer a real memory, of course, having been overlaid with impressions from the now-numerous times I’ve re-watched that scene. But it still has a special meaning for me; I held onto that memory for 16 years, until the spring of 1982, when the ‘Did You See?’ programme celebrated the return of the Cybermen in Earthshock by showing that clip (among others). In those days, such chances to see moments of old Doctor Who were very few and far between—and for those, like me, too poor to invest in a video recorder, all too fleeting. All of Doctor Who was like that for me in those days; gone the moment it had come. Memories were almost all you had to sustain your interest.

Of course by 1982 there were some more tangible things to hang on to, but back when I first became fascinated by the programme, there was almost nothing. What did I have? The first Doctor Who Annual (featuring Zarbi, Voord and Sensorites from the TV show), and three novels (Daleks, Zarbi, Crusaders – you can see why one might grow up in the latter sixties thinking Zarbi were terribly important. They still are, to me), all featuring the Hartnell Doctor, of whom I had no actual memory at all. But his character came through fairly clearly in the stories I did have (the first annual of course being written by David Whitaker, not that I knew it at the time. All I knew was that the illustrations were too good to waste sitting sedentarily on the paper so I…cut them out…), so that oddly, although I must have watched almost all of the Troughton era, the second Doctor was in some ways the most elusive for me.

I remember seeing, in Woolworths, what looked like an impossibly exciting annual with Troughton, Jamie and a Cyberman on the cover. But I never owned that book (and I never have, perhaps because the cover looks a good deal less impressive to me nowadays).

Memory is a strange (cheating) beast. I know, for example, that I watched The Ice Warriors because I distinctly recall seeing the trailer for The Enemy of the World that followed the final episode, but I remember nothing about the Ice Warriors itself, or anything else about Enemy, come to that. I think I remember Power of the Daleks, but that may just be because the Dalek production line sequence was much discussed in the playground. No memory of the Macra. No definite memory of The Moonbase. (No memory of Polly! Well, I was young, after all…) I do remember thinking that the Dalek-ised humans in the latter stages of Evil of the Daleks were rather silly, but that memory probably comes from the repeat showing. I certainly did not think the Cybermen in Tomb were silly, as the emergence from the tombs and even more, the Cyberman struggling to hold open the hatch (and looking terrifyingly like it might manage it!) made a very deep impression on me. That really stuck. I recall Web of Fear, but not the Abominable Snowmen, other than being aware that there had been two Yeti stories, which gave rise to a dispute with my best friend about the exact appearance of the Yeti. (If memory serves, I think his idea was much closer, certainly to the Web Yeti—we were both unaware, of course, that they’d actually changed quite substantially between the two stories. There was no merchandise to speak of, either, to help us in these disputes…except for Daleks, of course. Lots of Daleks. We had a tall (about one foot—sorry, 30 centimetres) blue domed one, a medium size silver/grey one, and several smaller ones of various colours with no bottom on their base units. The silvery one may even have had wheels. Of course hardly any eyesticks or guns survived the battering they got.)

Season six was a little clearer, and I’m fairly certain by this time I missed no stories, even if I have no memories of The Krotons or The Space Pirates (some might say understandably). Zoe and Jamie were firmly fixed in my mind, at any rate, so that when Wendy Padbury moved on to The Freewheelers I knew who she was, and similarly with Frazer Hines’ arrival in Emmerdale Farm (as it was then). I watched the former but not the latter (not even when Blake’s 7’s Sally Knyvette ended up there later…though I do now regret missing out on Jenna Coleman’s appearances). What impressions remain from the stories are entirely predictable: White Robots, Quarks, Ice Warriors and, most of all, the coolest-looking Cybermen yet, walking through London (though I don’t think I called anything ‘cool’ in those days, nor for some time to come). I remembered the War Games and its significance, though I don’t remember feeling any particular sorrow at the departure of the main cast. Possibly I was more interested in monsters those days.

(After the sixth season of Doctor Who, it was replaced on Saturday nights by a new American series, the only clear recollection of which I have is a sequence where they all clung to their chairs while the bridge rocked. I got quite fond of it in time, as did the rest of the world.)

Pertwee was where it all really kicked off for me. From here, I know I made a conscious effort never to miss an episode, and at age 7, I was perfectly poised to enjoy an era full of soldiers fighting monsters. Slightly less predictably I seem to recall having a crush on Liz Shaw. It was during this era that information about the programme and its past started to become more accessible; there was The Making of Doctor Who in 1972, which listed every adventure (and had a photograph of a Yeti for us to argue over further). Bear in mind that this was the first time there was any official listing of the stories for public consumption—the first time I’d even heard of the Toymaker and The Drahvins or been aware that the Daleks apparently tried to take over Mr Spock’s home planet. As for what would be on Doctor Who next year, there was never any hope of knowing that. We didn’t even know how long stories were going to be—I remember being quite pleased with myself for having noted that Day of the Daleks and Curse of Peladon were both four parts long, and waited confidently for The Sea Devils to end with part four. Of course it didn’t.

By this time I was clipping out the Radio Times billings for the programme, a practice I’d started with the first instance of that glorious Pertwee era tradition, the Christmas Omnibus repeat. The Daemons had been a treat the first time around, like being allowed to watch a horror film at Saturday teatime—how unimaginably wonderful to see it again! And the billing and accompanying illustration (by Frank Bellamy) was something I kept, along with most of the Pertwee era clippings and bits of the beginning of Baker, for 20 years, until I gave them to another member of the local Doctor Who group.

Something happened in 1972 that I think illustrates the one of the biggest differences between watching the programme then and watching it now. During the winter of 1972 there were strikes, resulting in power cuts. One those cuts happened at 6pm on 19th February—ten minutes into the final episode of Curse of Peladon. And in those days, that was it. No video/DVD release, no iPlayer, no Youtube, no bit torrent—the only way I could get to find out what happened at the end of the story was by reading the Target novelisation, which appeared two and a half years later.

Ah, Target. The Target books were then pretty much the only source of memory-jogging detailed information about the adventures of the Doctor. There is no way to overstate their importance at the time they appeared. I had extremely fond memories of what we used to call ‘dummies’ crashing out of shop windows, but to actually be able to read the entire story of ‘The Auton Invasion’ and put those scenes back in context…after seven years of watching Doctor Who and having to let each story fade into a dim memory, suddenly they were appearing in printed form at what seemed incredible speed. I remember reading the Daemons under a very dark sky, rain spitting, on a boat on the Thames—clearly I was not terribly interested in sight-seeing that day, not when I could get back to Devil’s End. And then, towards the end of 1974, something unbelievably exciting—a Patrick Troughton novel, with Yeti! And then the Cybermen (unseen bar brief glimpses for the entire Pertwee era, mutter grumble…)! Suddenly the previously inaccessible past of Doctor Who was opening up. And when Tom Baker started, and the Robot novel came out a mere two months after its transmission, you could compare your still-fresh recollections with the way the story was written!

But, I need to backtrack a little. Something else happened just before the Target range got underway—and that was Doctor Who’s Tenth Anniversary. Apart from the return of Troughton and Hartnell and all the accompanying Radio Times hoohah, this brought unimaginable new wealth of information in the shape of the Radio Times Anniversary Special. Endless photographs – one for every story, if memory serves – interviews with old companions, with special effects people…

This was still early days for organised Doctor Who archiving, and the special is notorious for taking the first episode title to be the title of an entire serial—so a generation grew up referring to The Nightmare Begins instead of The Daleks’ Masterplan, or The Roof of the World instead of Marco Polo. But what we did have, finally, were episode counts for each story, so we could marvel at the epic length of some of the sixties adventures, and note the oddity of seasons 7 and 8 before the programme settled into its long-running format of 26 episodes divided into four- and six-parters.

But in some ways most startling of all was the unbelievable peek into the future; a list and short outline of the stories that made up the next season of Doctor Who! The Time Warrior, Invasion of the Dinosaurs (so changing of the name of the first episode didn’t work too well on those of us who’d read the special), Death to the Daleks, The Monster of Peladon, Planet of the Spiders…never in the history of the programme had there been such tantalisation! Hard to grasp now, but this was literally the first time we (and I assume I speak for the majority) had EVER had any idea what was coming next.

There was also, around this time, the first Holiday Special, featuring a few photos that were not printed elsewhere (including a lovely one of Roger Delgado that I used for my submission to the Key To Time book, years later). There were small stand-up figures in Weetabix cereal boxes. All told, the Pertwee era was the golden age, both for my interest in the show and for the sudden proliferation of information and product. It was also the only time I regularly bought the annuals (I never had a Tom Baker annual, though that probably had more to do with my discovery of Marvel Comics mid-1975 than anything else. Only so much pocket money, you see).

I continued to watch through the 70s, with admittedly diminishing interest, but I never defected to Buck Rogers like so many others, and the only thing that interrupted my viewing was getting a job that forced me to work Saturday evenings; I missed parts of season 17 and most of 18. At about this time video recorders were coming into use, but being poor, I didn’t even rent one until about 1987; the first episode I ever recorded was Time and the Rani, episode one. I didn’t keep it long. I had audiotaped the first Davison season when it was on, and parts of the Five Faces repeat season, but by the time the McCoy era rolled around my interest lay in other areas, so the videotapes filled up with…tennis.

By that time there were ways to watch older stories. In 1983, the first commercial videotape, Revenge of the Cybermen, had appeared. Those who complained recently that buying Web of Fear and Enemy of the World cost about £3 each more in the UK than the US might like to remind themselves that the first Doctor Who release cost a few pence shy of £40. For one story. In 1983. The next jump down was to £25, and it was only with the advent of the £10 line that I was able to even contemplate buying a single story.

Of course if you were lucky enough to know the right people (as I was from about 1987/8) you could get Doctor Who stories another way – VHS copies of Australian/US broadcasts, or even leaked from the BBC archives. But these were often fourth or fifth generation; the insistence of some people on having to have colour meant that in the first copy of the Daemons I saw it was difficult to distinguish between the Doctor and Mike Yates. For a time in the early 90s the coolest thing imaginable was to have a copy of The Ice Warriors without BBC time-coding on it. In practice this tended to mean that you could quite happily spend more time enthusing about the sound and picture quality of a copy than actually watching it…

This is already too long, but I hope it’s given any newer fans who’ve lasted the course an idea of what it was like to experience Doctor Who in the pre-digital age. One last thought; I did finally get to see the end of The Curse of Peladon, via the Doctor Who and the Monsters repeat season in 1982. It only took ten years.

Think about that, next time you feel sad about having to catch up on an episode on iPlayer, later the same evening…

This Time, This Place (Part 5) - 50th Anniversary fiction

For 'this is not an adventure' disclaimer and notes on the Sororiate, see Part 1

Part 4 here



From the private journal of Sexaginta-Soror-Hortus, Year of Grace 1347:

There was a shooting star in the night, just before dawn, and all the Sororiate believed it landed in the lake. I went to look, with Viginti-Discipulus-Hortus. No one else would venture near the place.

Discipulus-H has come on remarkably in the last year or two; I still recall her utter panic at the apparition of the stranger who was not the Doctor, when she was a mere seventeen. For a long time that encounter left marks in her psyche; now, her love for the blooms overcomes all else. I could see she was afraid of what we might discover, but she would not hear of remaining behind.

As soon as we neared the lake I could hear that we were not the first. Discipulus-H and I peeped cautiously from behind the last of the Ventus bushes, and saw a small man, in a light jacket and dark trousers with a narrow-brimmed hat on his head, and a young woman in black, with a jacket decorated with many small insignia. They were walking along a deep furrow in the earth of the shoreline, which ended where a large, shining canister was half-buried in the damp ground, with water lapping around one end. The canister was open, and appeared to be empty. It was about the length and width of two people.

Neither the man nor the young woman seemed to be armed, although the man carried a stick with an elaborately-curved handle and some kind of membrane wrapped around it, and the girl hefted a heavy-looking black bag on one shoulder.

They approached the canister slowly, moving around it and peering warily into the corners until they were satisfied it was empty. Then the man stood with his stick resting on the rim of the canister and his chin resting on the handle of the stick, while the young woman moved up the shoreline, still looking around.

I beckoned to Discipulus-H, and we started down the path. The man did not see us but his companion noticed us almost immediately, and came back towards him.

‘Professor.’

The man was muttering to himself, and did not look up until we were almost upon him. The young woman looked wary but had apparently decided we represented no threat, as she kept still.

‘Ah,’ said the small man. ‘Soror Hortus, if I’m not mistaken. Or is it Dam by now…? No, I think…’ He trailed off, as if regretting what he had said. He turned to the canister and tapped it with his stick. ‘You appear to have had a visitor.’

‘This is not yours, then?’ asked Discipulus-H.

‘Wouldn’t be caught dead in that thing,’ said the man’s companion.

‘Well, Ace,’ said the man thoughtfully, ‘it’s quite advanced. Environmental control, entertainment centre, nutrition feed—you could survive in here for a month or more before being caught dead.’

He bent to examine the edges of the opening, and it was only then I noticed a large segment of curved metal a little farther into the water. It seemed about the size and shape of the opening in the canister. Before I could say anything, more voices came to my ears.

‘This way…this way, that’s it. Keep up, Victoria…’

The small man seemed once again absorbed in his examination of the canister, but the rest of us looked around. Three figures appeared over the crest of one of the slopes: a short, dark-haired man in a black coat too large for him, and close-patterned trousers, holding a small box which seemed to be guiding him; a young man in a loose shirt and what appeared to be a dark, patterned knee-length skirt; trailing slightly behind, a young woman in a light jacket and dark breeches, her hair reaching to her shoulders.

‘Professor…’ said the young woman called Ace.

The small man looked up. He followed our gazes, looked stupefied. Then his heavy brows came down, and he expelled a long breath. ‘Well, this should be interesting…’

The dark-haired newcomer stopped short. ‘Oh,’ he said. He looked at the device in his hand, made a small adjustment and put it into the capacious pocket of his jacket. He stretched his head sideways, squinting at the canister. ‘Does that thing belong to you? We were tracking it…’

‘With a focussed etheric beam locator, I see.’ The small man lifted his stick and pointed it at the newcomers. ‘Where did you find that?’

The dark-haired man covered his pocket with both hands as if afraid the device would be taken on the spot. ‘It was…well, I don’t see that’s any of your business…’ He trailed off and stared hard at the small man. He took three steps closer. There was not much difference in their height. ‘Oh.’ He retreated a step. ‘Are you…?’

The small man nodded.

‘Well, you’re breaking the rules, you know,’ said the newcomer.

‘Who was here first?’ snapped the small man. ‘And look who’s talking – three times, I recall, at the very least…’

‘I don’t know what you mean…’

‘Perhaps not, at this point in your timeline, but—’

‘Professor,’ broke in Ace. ‘Who is he? Who are they?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the dark-haired man, breaking into a smile and stepping forward to offer both his hands to Ace, ‘I’m sorry, I’m the Doctor,’ and, turning, ‘and this is Jamie, and Victoria.’

Ace looked at the small man. ‘Professor…?’ She turned quickly back to the dark-haired man, but pointed at her companion. ‘This is the Doctor!’

‘Well, perhaps…but not yet.’

The small man strutted forward, swinging his stick. ‘And what precisely does “yet” mean to a time traveller…? If you’re trying to establish some kind of precedence…’

The dark-haired Doctor drew himself up, trying to look down his nose. ‘You know very well what I mean. As for precedence, well…’ he half-turned away. ‘I should have thought that was taken for granted.’ As ‘the Professor’ prepared his retort the Doctor dodged past him and bent over the open canister. ‘So, found anything yet…? Mmn, this is interesting…’

The young woman called Victoria stopped next to the young man. ‘Jamie, what’s happening? Who are these people? That man, he can’t be—’

‘Mebbe he can.’ Jamie bent his head close to Victoria. ‘Polly told me—he changes. Face, voice, everything.’

‘And rarely for the better, I’m afraid,’ said the Doctor, straightening up from the canister.

‘Professor—he’s you?’ Ace appeared desperate to hit something. I confess I was a little confused and frustrated myself. Discipulus-H simply looked dazed.

The small man sighed. ‘He was.’

The Doctor walked around to the other side of the canister, ignoring the water lapping around his ankles. ‘A little rude to use the past tense when I’m standing in front of you, don’t you think?’

The ‘Professor’ leaned on the canister, putting his face close to the Doctor’s. ‘When I’m standing in front of you, I think you’ll find you are past tense.’

They locked eyes for a moment; blue on blue. Then the hatless Doctor (the other I will continue to call the ‘Professor’) looked down into the canister and folded his hands on his chest. ‘So, what d’you make of all this, then?’

A moment as the tension still hung in the air, and then the olive branch was accepted, and they peered together into the canister’s interior. ‘Lots of minor interior damage,’ the Doctor mused. ‘Perhaps the occupant panicked?’

‘Or was in the grip of some kind of fit.’

‘Possibly…the door has been knocked clean off, you notice.’

‘I had noticed. With an indentation in the centre consistent with a large boot.’

Jamie had moved closer during this discussion, ignoring a mildly threatening glare from Ace. ‘Doctor…’

‘Not now, Jamie. Now, from the sophisticated design I think we can assume considerable intelligence on the part of the occupant…’

‘So,’ the ‘Professor’ added, ‘the question becomes what could induce panic in such an occupant.’

‘Well, no….what worries me…’ the Doctor moved around, tentatively touching the slightly warped edges of the canister’s opening, ‘is the possibility of some kind of mental aberration in a being with this kind of strength. I think panic is unlikely, so we’re left with the alternative hypothesis…’

‘Doctor…’ Jamie was looking along the shoreline. He stepped to the Doctor’s side.

‘Which was my suggestion of some kind of fit,’ said the ‘Professor’.

‘Or,’ the Doctor straightened up, ‘some kind of malfunction, if the occupant was robotic…or cybernetic.’

‘Cybermen?’ said Ace and Victoria almost simultaneously.

‘Now let’s not jump to conclusions,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s none of the—oh, what is it Jamie?’

Jamie ceased his tugging of the Doctor’s sleeve and pointed at the waterline. At first I could see nothing, but after a few moments I was able to discern faint marks in the earth, visible through the shallow water.

‘That’s where the scumbag went,’ muttered Ace, starting forward, but the ‘Professor’ held her back. ‘No, Ace; we have no idea what we’re facing…’

‘But this person could be hurt,’ spoke up Discipulus-H suddenly. Everyone looked at her. ‘It is our duty, surely, to…’ She trailed off as she became conscious of the eyes upon her.

‘Perhaps,’ said Victoria, ‘if we all went together…?’

And so it was we followed the marks along the lakeside, then up across one of the far slopes where they were barely discernible on the dried-out ground and only Jamie could make them out. We moved among the gentle dips and rises until the lake was out of sight. Jamie was leading but both Doctors were close behind him, and Ace kept a little distance from the rest of us—while staying level with the leaders.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Victoria said to me and Discipulus-H at one point. ‘It’s always like this; we rush in to save the day and we have no time to introduce ourselves properly. I’m Victoria Waterfield. That’s Jamie McCrimmon, and that is the Doctor…oh, and so is that, I gather. That will take a little bit of getting used to. I’m afraid I don’t know—’

‘Ace,’ I said, and then gave Victoria our names. She managed a quiet ‘oh’ and then, after a moment or two of silence, asked: ‘So, you’re a religious order?’

Following Discipulus-H’s enthusiastic affirmative, I said: ‘In the oldest sense, perhaps, of a return to the source of things. There is no real dogma here, no requirement for belief in a supreme being. We meditate, and we work, and we live from day to day and attempt to maintain clarity.’

Discipulus-H was looking at me a little warily, and I realised I must be careful not trample on any aspect of her faith. ‘We embrace all manifestations of the spirit,’ I added.

Victoria nodded, and lowered her head as we walked. ‘My father was a scientist, and I always felt…a little ashamed that I still believed.’ She looked up. ‘But I can’t see how it’s possible to believe in nothing—I mean, in pure accident, in the whole universe being some sort of chance happening…can you?’

‘That is absurd,’ said Discipulus-H. ‘I have felt the presence. There is no doubt the cosmos is…guided…’

I looked at her in surprise, which I quickly masked. Victoria’s face reflected her gratitude.

‘Wait…’

Ahead of us, the others had halted. Jamie was holding up a hand. The Doctors were either side of him.

‘Whatever the beastie is, it’s just behind that great rock.’

‘Well, then…’ the Doctor beckoned them back, and they came closer to us. ‘Now then,’ the Doctor was rummaging in a pocket, ‘whatever it is is quite probably afraid, and to avoid frightening it further I think one of us needs to approach it alone.’ He pulled out a coin. ‘So, I propose—’

The ‘Professor’ put a hand over his. ‘With that coin? I prefer to trust to one of my own.’ He whipped something out of his own pocket.

The Doctor put away his coin, looking unhappy. The ‘Professor’ flipped. ‘Call.’

‘Heads.’

The coin was held up. ‘Tails. I wonder if you’ve got into the habit of saying “heads”...?’

The Doctor put his face close to the ‘Professor’. ‘Just be ready, that’s all.’

‘I’ll come wi’ you, Doctor—’

‘No, Jamie, I think it’s best this way…’ The Doctor took one look at his namesake, adjusted his jacket, and moved forward.

Ace came closer, reaching into her bag. The ‘Professor’ put out a warning hand and then brought his finger to his lips. Ace took her hand from the bag, but re-inserted it as soon as she thought all eyes were once again on the Doctor.

The Doctor disappeared from view behind the jutting outcrop that Jamie had indicated. It felt as if we were all holding our breath.

There was a kind of growl.

‘Oh my word…’

The Doctor reappeared. He was running, but going nowhere, as his legs were not on the ground. He hung suspended from the huge hand of a towering ape-like creature dressed in rough clothes, which advanced towards us holding the Doctor aloft with apparent ease.

Even Jamie and Ace seemed cowed by this unexpected apparition, but the ‘Professor’ leaped forward and levelled his stick at the chest of the creature. ‘I order you to put him down, or—’ His words turned into a kind of yelp as the creature seized the end of the stick with its free hand and hoisted him into the air.

‘Well, a lot of good that did!’ snapped the Doctor as they faced each other a few feet apart.

‘Well, try soothing him with that flute you carry, why don’t you? “Considerable intelligence on the part of the occupant”…’

‘It’s a recorder! And I don’t have it with me!’

‘Professor! Doctor! Cover your eyes…!’

Ace had lobbed a small object onto the ground in front of the ape-thing. A moment later there was a flash, a bang and a cloud of smoke. I covered Discipulus-H with my arms and body.

There were shouts, growls from the creature, sounds of scuffling. I looked up; the smoke cleared to show Jamie grappling with the slightly dazed creature. Both the Doctors were picking themselves up; Ace helped the ‘Professor’, and Victoria went to the Doctor.

Jamie came flying through the air, to land half on the Doctor as Victoria was helping him scramble clear.

‘Ace—no!’

Ace paused in the act of throwing. The ‘Professor’ stayed her with a hand, scooped up his fallen stick and planted himself in a defiant pose.

‘Ogron!’ he roared. ‘You’re surrounded. You’re outnumbered. We have many weapons! Nitro Nine! Umbrellas! Kilts! Spoons…recorders! Surrender is your only choice. Give up now and…and…’ He waved an imperious finger at the creature as he thought furiously.

The Ogron’s response was to produce a compact, two-barrelled object from a pouch on its belt and, grasping the device by its handle, point it directly at the shouting man.

‘Professor, get down!’ Ace threw herself on the man as the device discharged. There was a faint hum and a dim blue haze at the end of the barrels, but the shot seemed to miss. We all sought what cover we could, Victoria huddling with me and Discipulus-H, and Jamie and the Doctor flattening themselves against a slight slope while Ace dragged the ‘Professor’ to safety.

The Ogron turned this way and that, covering all of its foes. Ace propped her Doctor against a small rock. Jamie and his Doctor raised their heads cautiously.

The Ogron let off another blast. No one seemed to be hit.

The Doctor sat up, resisting Jamie’s effort to pull him down. He peered intently at the Ogron until, all at once, his eyebrows shot up. ‘Ah.’ He climbed to his feet. The Ogron swung to cover him.

‘Now, now…’ The Doctor took a step forward. ‘Jamie…’ he muttered from the corner of his mouth, ‘if you’d like to get around behind this fellow…’

Jamie scrambled stealthily to obey. The Doctor walked forward. The Ogron fired.

‘You see,’ the Doctor said, still walking, ‘your weapon can’t hurt me. Why don’t you hand it over and we can all be friends?’

The Ogron fired again. The Doctor stepped forward, spreading his hands, his head cocked slightly on one side. ‘You see?’

The Doctor advanced. The Ogron backed away—and fell over Jamie, balled up close to the ground in answer to the Doctor’s surreptitious signals. As the Ogron fell, the Doctor skipped to one side and snatched up the device as it fell, aiming it at the creature. The device discharged once.

Jamie scrambled to his feet, but he was held back as he prepared to leap on the Ogron. ‘I don’t think that will be necessary, Jamie. He won’t hurt us now.’ The Doctor turned to look for the rest of us. ‘You can come out—it’s quite all right.’

The ‘Professor’ was first there, and the Doctor beamed at him and tossed him the device, which he caught and examined. After a few moments he tossed it back. ‘Yes. I see. Very clever.’

‘Just a matter of using my eyes. I recognised the design.’ He extended a hand to pat the shoulder of the other. ‘Just as you apparently recognised this creature. Fearsome brute, isn’t he?’ The Ogron was sitting up with what might be described as a smile on its simian features as if in direct repudiation of the description. ‘He does look familiar, if only I could think from where… Have you—I—we encountered them often?’

‘Two or three times—often in thrall to the Daleks.’

‘Ah. Well, thankfully, not this time, to judge fr—’

‘Professor, what happened?’

Yes,’ Victoria joined Ace. ‘What did you do? What is that weapon?’

The Doctor beamed, then suppressed it as if afraid to look immodest. He gestured at the ‘Professor’. ‘Perhaps you’d care to explain…’

The ‘Professor’ gave him a sidelong glance. ‘It’s not a weapon at all,’ he told the others. ‘It’s a kind of pacifier; mild medication, electronically administered. But of course he didn’t know that,’ indicating the Ogron. ‘I suppose he must have been put in the escape capsule by his owner,’ he looked towards the Doctor, who nodded in agreement, ‘presumably to save him from some kind of disaster in space. I imagine we’ll never know.’

‘Surprised you didn’t remember what that thing was, Professor,’ said Ace. ‘I mean if he’ indicating the Doctor, ‘is an earlier you, then shouldn’t you have his memories?’

They looked at one another. ‘The Blinovitch Limitation effect,’ they said, almost simultaneously.

‘Well,’ said Jamie, eyeing the Ogron, ‘what do we do wi’ him now? Cannae leave him sittin’ here.’

‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘I suppose we’ll have to drop him off somewhere.’ He turned to me. ‘Unless…a place could be found for him here…?’

I was taken aback by the suggestion. ‘Is…is it—he still dangerous?’

‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ The Doctor turned the pacifying device over in his hand. ‘This is solar-chargeable and more or less unbreakable. One dose a day, he’ll be perfectly manageable.’

‘Doctor,’ squawked Victoria, ‘we can’t leave that…that monster here with the Sisters!’

The Doctor nodded. ‘I know, I know, I was just thinking of the difficulty of returning him home—you know what the TARDIS can be like…’

‘Problem solved,’ said the ‘Professor’. ‘I have perfect control over the TARDIS. We can take him anywhere.’

‘You don’t have to sound quite so smug,’ said the Doctor. ‘Some of us relish a little mystery in our lives, you know.’

‘Oh aye...’

‘Quiet, Jamie.’

‘We can take him,’ said Ace. ‘We’ll have no trouble with some stupid ape-thing, right Professor?’

‘Please,’ I said, before anyone could answer, ‘it is not necessary. If you will leave me the device, we will keep him here—at least for the time being.’ They all looked at me. ‘It seems likely his masters, whoever they were, have perished, or abandoned him. It is possible he is used to service, and we will treat him more kindly than others might—I will make certain of that.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Victoria. ‘He’s so big…if he got out of control…’

‘There are tasks here we find it difficult to accomplish easily. The movement of the stores, for example. There are storms, periodically—damage. A little brute strength would not go amiss.’

The Doctors looked at me. I longed to ask them questions now, feeling I had begun to understand who they were. Who he was. But there were too many people here. Too much confusion. I had to trust that whatever power ordered the universe would bring him this way again, and that perhaps we would finally talk in openness and true friendship.

I looked at these two faces, one kindly and gentle beneath the dark mop, the other with a twinkle in the eyes that failed to hide the depths behind. They were more alike in some ways than any other two who had come to this place bearing that title, but also utterly different.

As the sun dropped from view Discipulus-H and I left them by the shore of the lake; Jamie, Victoria and Ace had all taken their turn to sit down in front of the Aeturnums. And that very special bloom was currently a blend of two very similar shades of blue. As we crested the slope with the unnamed creature walking obediently at our side, we could hear the faint piping of a wind instrument and the clink-clack of metal accompanying it. They had made the most of their accidental meeting. I doubted there were many such strife-free moments in his life.



Part 6 here