Doctor Who: The Chase

by John Peel

  Doctor Who

  The Chase

  By John Peel

  Based on the BBC television series by Terry Nation by arrangement with BBC Books, a division of BBC Enterprises Ltd

  Content

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1 The Executioners

  Chapter 2 A Speech in Time

  Chapter 3 The Sands of Death

  Chapter 4 The Victims

  Chapter 5 Deadline

  Chapter 6 Flight through Eternity

  Chapter 7 Nightmare

  Chapter 8 Journey into Terror

  Chapter 9 Fallen Spirits

  Chapter 10 Who’s Who?

  Chapter 11 To The Death!

  Chapter 12 The Mechonoids

  Chapter 13 The End of the Hunt

  Chapter 14 Home!

  Author’s Note

  This book is not strictly an adaptation of the televised version of The Chase . It follows, for the most part, the original scripts for the show, as written by Terry Nation. As is the case with most series, the original scripts were rewritten for various reasons—to make scenes less expensive, to perform the actions in a simpler way, or to add character touches to the story. In the case of The Chase , the changes made from Terry’s original scripts were sometimes quite extensive.

  Faced with the task of novelizing either Terry’s scripts or the televised ones (presumably the changes having been made by then-story editor Dennis Spooner), I have in most cases opted to stay with Terry’s versions. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, the original scripts delve more deeply into the alienness of the creatures that the Doctor and his companions meet. On the television, a lot of this was cut simply because it would have been too expensive to film. In a book, I am under no such constraints. Secondly, the television version of The Chase exists in its entirety, and may some day be seen again by British audiences. (American viewers are better off, since they have the story in their syndication package.) Thus, it seemed to me to be more interesting to novelize the scripts that cannot be seen.

  However, I did elect to retain certain sequences that exist in the filmed version of the tale and not in Terry’s scripts. I also made a number of changes in the Mary Celeste sequence, to fit the final novel into the known facts about that most mysterious of ships. Readers with enquiring natures can find an excellent account of the facts in Mystery Ship , written by George S. Bryan, and published by Lippincott in 1942.

  Finally, this note would not be complete without mention of Kate Nation—Terry’s wife—who unearthed the original scripts for us; and of Nan —my wife—who read and made relevant comments and suggestions throughout the work. Accordingly, it is to these two ladies that this book is dedicated. Without their help and encouragement, life would be considerably more complex and less enjoyable.

  Chapter 1

  The Executioners

  The room had a background pulse, like an electronic heart slowly beating. The lighting was subdued, too dim for human eyes. There were no human eyes present, merely the computer-augmented lenses of the Dalek monitoring staff, and that of the Black Dalek. On an elevated ramp, it moved backwards and forwards, slowly and patiently, its eyestick turned to survey the instruments in the pit below. Flickering lights played across the many instruments and sensors, though none in the pattern that the Black Dalek’s inbuilt computer was waiting for.

  Finally, the screens lit up with an electric-blue pattern, shifting and changing, spiralling inwards on the main monitor. The Chief Scientist spun around. ‘The enemy time machine has been located,’ it reported formally, though the Black Dalek was already aware of the fact.

  ‘Location?’

  ‘It has just left the planet Xeros,’ the scientist answered. ‘Our projections place its next destination as the planet Aridius.’

  ‘Acceptable,’ the Black Dalek replied—its highest compliment. ‘Order the special squad to assemble in the Project Room.’

  ‘I obey!’

  The Black Dalek moved out of the room, heading for the Project itself. Years of planning were finally reaching the day of action. For decades, the Daleks had been balked in their plans to expand and take their rightful place as the masters of the Universe—chiefly through the activities of a single being. Now, however, the balance would be restored, and their greatest enemy would be destroyed. Ahead of the Black Dalek, a door slid open, and it entered the special Project Room. An elevated ramp allowed it to look down at the featureless box in the centre of the room. This stood some eight feet square, with a door on what was obviously the front. Nothing else marked it as being the single greatest achievement of Dalek technology.

  Below the ramp, another door opened, and the special team entered, to form a precise line in front of the box. Their eyesticks raised to face the Black Dalek, expectantly.

  ‘Our greatest enemy has been located,’ it informed them. ‘His location is being programmed into your instrumentation. Your instructions are to follow —locate—and destroy!’ It turned to trigger the large monitor screen on the far wall. It sprang to life, showing what appeared to be a London Police Box of the 1960s. ‘The TARDIS!’ the Black Dalek exclaimed.

  ‘TARDIS!!’ the assembled Daleks echoed.

  ‘Our enemy is the Doctor. His appearance has changed many times over the years, yet our instruments have determined his basic metabolic pattern. This has been programmed into your computers. You are to locate and exterminate him. Exterminate !’

  ‘Exterminate!’

  With satisfaction, the Black Dalek watched as its Daleks filed into their own time machine. Shortly after the final one had entered, there was a strange, electrical tension in the air. With a rush of wind, the box vanished.

  The executioners were on their way to intercept and destroy the Doctor. The Black Dalek paused for a short while, then turned and left the room. It would wait in the monitoring room for the inevitable report that the Doctor had been exterminated.

  Chapter 2

  A Speech in Time

  The Space/Time Vortex exists outside of any normal frame of reference. Within it, light, darkness, matter and energy all blend, divide, shift and change. It underlies the whole of Creation, touching the normal Universe only slightly. Its pathways are twisted, unstable and hard to follow. A journey through these strange dimensions might take a moment and carry a traveller a million years and a billion light years from his/her/its origin. Alternatively, a journey of months in the Vortex might end in a shift of six feet and ten days in conventional space. Without being able to calculate the pathways, there was simply no telling.

  The TARDIS ploughed through the Vortex without any kind of plan. It was a time and space craft whose exterior belied its sophisticated construction. It looked like a Police Box on the outside, but within its apparently cramped confines lay a huge, technologically advanced craft. It was quite capable of choosing any of the myriad paths through the Vortex and passing along them—provided the navigator knew what he was doing. In this case, the navigator was known simply as the Doctor. He had very little knowledge of what he was doing in terms of guiding the ship. He had simply—well, he liked to call it ‘borrowed’, but other people have stronger and blunter words for it—the craft. He had lost the operational notes he had taken some years before in the prehistoric dawn of the age of man on Earth. As a result, the TARDIS simply followed the shifts and changes of the Vortex wherever they might lead.

  The Doctor was not at all bothered by such random wanderings. He was getting on a bit in years—almost 750 by now—but had not yet undergone his first regeneration. His body was a bit wornthin, aged (‘matured’ was the word that he preferred), and with a mane of flowing white hair. He had developed a number of traits that marked him indelibly in people’s memories�
��brusqueness, self-congratulation and irritability being among his good points.

  This was the third day of the current trip (all time being measured from the stately ormolu clock in the control room), and the inhabitants were getting rather bored. Ian Chesterton—one-time science master of Coal Hill School —sat reading in an elegant Queen Anne chair. A tall, handsome and well-built man in his mid-thirties, he had undergone many changes from teacher to a seasoned traveller in time and space. He was now quite absorbed in his book, however, much to the annoyance of Vicki.

  She was the latest member of the TARDIS travelling party, having been rescued from a crashed spaceship on the planet Dido, some time in the twenty-fourth century. Vicki was a healthy, cheery teenager, and had accompanied the travellers expecting excitement and adventure. Three days of being cooped up in the TARDIS were driving her crazy. She was, after all, still a typical teen—whatever century she was born in—and she hated doing nothing. Peering at Ian, she asked, ‘Is it good?’

  ‘Mmm?’ Ian, still engrossed in the story, looked up. ‘Not bad. Bit far-fetched.’ Then he went back to reading. Vicki glanced at the title, Monsters From Outer Space , with its lurid illustration of a multi-tentacled alien attempting to clutch a virtually naked woman. The things he read! Still, he was too absorbed to pay her any attention, so Vicki wandered off through the doorways and into the activity room.

  Barbara Wright was in there, working away with scissors on a dress. She was a pretty, strong-willed and capable woman of about thirty and had once been the history teacher in the same school as Ian. Both had followed their mysterious pupil, Susan, back to her home one night. They had stumbled into the TARDIS and been whisked into a journey stranger than even Scheherazade could have told. Susan had been left on the Earth of the future to marry the man she had fallen in love with. It had been hard for the Doctor to abandon her, but he seemed to have taken Vicki into his heart as a surrogate grand-daughter in Susan’s place.

  ‘I,’ Vicki said, striking a dramatic pose in the doorway, ‘I am a useless person.’

  ‘Mnnsnsn,’ Barbara muttered, and then removed the dressmaking pins from her mouth. ‘Nonsense,’ she repeated. ‘Come and give me a hand.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Adapting some of Susan’s clothes to fit you. You can’t wear one dress forever, you know—even if it is dirt-repellent and self-cleaning.’

  ‘Do you think Susan would mind?’ To be honest, Vicki had been getting bored wearing the same outfit constantly.

  ‘I’m sure she won’t. Come over here and put this on. Let’s see how well I’ve—’

  Whatever she might have said was totally lost in an incredible ear-splitting whine that came from nowhere. Both of them slapped their hands over their ears in agony, wincing in pain. They ran into the control room, to find Ian likewise in agony, and staring at the Doctor.

  Giving the Doctor time to tinker about in the TARDIS was always dangerous, but he had seemed to be happily absorbed in the harmless activity of working on a machine he had dragged out of the TARDIS laboratory. It was basically a screen surrounded by a complex array of instrumentation. A pile of plastic cards lay scattered about it, and the terrible whine was coming from the speaker mounted just above the screen. Ian rushed over, only to be pushed rudely aside by the Doctor, who was armed with a large screwdriver, and intent on attacking further controls.

  ‘What’s the matter with it?’ Ian yelled at the top of his voice.

  ‘What?’ the Doctor howled back. Then he shrugged, and turned his attention to the device. After a moment of concentration, he applied the screwdriver, twisted, and the howl died out. His three companions shook their heads to clear the lingering effects of the noise and sighed.

  ‘I asked what the trouble was,’ Ian said. ‘Are you trying to deafen us, Doctor?’

  ‘Deafen?’ the Doctor echoed, as though the possibility had never occurred to him. ‘No, no, no, no, no, dear boy. Just an unfortunate juxtaposition of the sonic rectifier and the lineal amplifier.’ He stared at the machine again, like a lion-tamer in a cage of hungry carnivores.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Ian muttered, sarcastically. ‘I should have known at once.’

  Barbara was staring at the machine in fascination. The TARDIS was so vast, and so cluttered with the junk that the Doctor had accumulated, that she had no idea what the device might be. ‘Just what is this, Doctor?’

  Muttering to himself about work never getting done, the Doctor turned around. ‘I told you,’ he exclaimed, though he had not. ‘It’s a space/time visualizer.’

  Staring dubiously at it, Barbara pressed her luck. ‘Apart from making that terrible noise, what does it do?’

  The Doctor tucked the screwdriver absentmindedly into an inside pocket, then gripped his shabby coat’s lapels. Striking his stance as a lecturer, he informed her: ‘It taps into the continuum of the Space/Time Vortex, converting the photons there into electrical impulses.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ Ian enthused. ‘I’ve always wanted one of those.’

  ‘Do I detect a note of sarcasm, Chesterton?’ the Doctor demanded haughtily.

  Trying to stave off an argument, Ian apologized quickly. ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, but you rattle off explanations that would have baffled Einstein, and expect us to know what you’re talking about.’

  Muttering something about small minds of human beings, the Doctor decided he had better explain or he’d never get any peace. ‘Oh, very well. Have you heard of Venderman’s Law? “Light has mass and energy intermixed, therefore—” ’

  ‘—therefore energy radiated by photons and tachyons is equal to the energy absorbed,’ Vicki finished.

  ‘Splendid, child, splendid,’ the Doctor approved. ‘It’s nice to find one sharp mind at least.’ He glanced pointedly at Ian and Barbara.

  ‘It’s quite simple, really,’ Vicki interposed. ‘It just means that anything that happened anywhere in the Universe exists as light particles within the Space/Time Vortex and can theoretically be reconstructed electronically.’

  The Doctor beamed at her. ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’

  Vicki started to look over the Visualizer in fascination. ‘You know, when I left Earth, scientists were trying to invent a machine to tap into the Vortex and record the patterns there. Then we could just tune in and witness any event in history!’

  ‘And that’s exactly what this does,’ the Doctor finished for her, with a certain amount of what he felt was justified pride.

  ‘A sort of... time television!’ Barbara exclaimed.

  ‘Precisely.’ Having established his superiority, the Doctor was quite magnanimous. ‘I’ll give you a demonstration. Chesterton—think of an event in history.’

  Ian laughed. ‘All right.’ He thought a moment. ‘Now, what do you need to know?’

  ‘First of all the planet.’

  ‘That’s easy—Earth.’

  The Doctor moved to the control panel, and began adjusting the controls. Having punched in a long code, he picked out one of the plastic cards, and inserted it. ‘Now the time and as accurate a location as you can manage.’

  ‘ Pennsylvania , USA ,’ Ian said firmly. ‘November 19th 1863.’

  Nodding, the Doctor worked further controls. The screen came to a flickering life, as the Doctor adjusted the settings. Finally, it came into a burst of colour, and the picture focused. The three onlookers leaned over the hunched back of the Doctor, staring at the screen. It was as if a camera were zooming through narrow streets of wood-built houses, until it narrowed on to a field. There was a rough platform, on which a tall figure stood. Behind him stretched marker after marker in neat order. Before him, a crowd of people waited expectantly. The picture settled on the man, and his familiar features clarified.

  ‘Fourscore and seven years ago,’ Abraham Lincoln began, slowly, clearly, sonorously, ‘our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’
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br />   Ian and Barbara looked at one another, astounded. Vicki glanced at the Doctor, impressed. The Doctor, naturally, gripped his lapels and looked rather smug.

  ‘That’s—Abraham Lincoln!’ Barbara exclaimed.

  ‘That’s what I asked for,’ Ian laughed, not quite believing it. ‘The Gettysburg Address.’

  Unconscious of these strange watchers, Lincoln continued. ‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war...’

  The time travellers watched, with rapt attention, through to the end of Lincoln ’s speech.

  ‘It is for us to be rather here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that great cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that the government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth.’

  Lincoln paused, his speech over. Thunderous applause greeted him from the assembled crowd, as the Doctor adjusted the controls, and the picture faded away. There was silence a second, then Barbara pressed forward. ‘Can I choose something, Doctor?’

  ‘And me!’ Vicki exclaimed. ‘Please—can I?’

  Smiling benevolently, like Santa at Christmas, the Doctor nodded. ‘All in good time, all in good time. You can both have a turn. Come along, Barbara—you watched me at the controls. Now you select a slice of history for yourself.’

  Barbara bit her lip, concentrating, then moved forward to manipulate the instrumentation. ‘There is something I’ve always wanted to know,’ she said, wistfully.

  ‘Oh?’ Ian leaned over her shoulder. ‘What?’

  ‘Come on,’ Vicki laughed. ‘Tell us!’

  Barbara pulled a face. ‘You’ll see in a minute.’ She pressed the actuator, and all eyes turned to the screen. The interference cleared, and a picture began to form. It seemed to focus on a window, then pull back. About the leaded glass was highly polished wood. As the picture clarified, it revealed a tall, thin man in Elizabethan costume. He was staring at a second, more rotund figure in disgust, as if he had been some insect crawling over the floor. The picture was finally complete as it also included a stately woman on a throne. She was obviously past her best, her skin powdered a pure white, her hair a hennaed red. This was clearly none other than Queen Elizabeth the First. She regarded the portlier man with some degree of hauteur.