by John Peel
‘Master Shakespeare,’ she said, coldly. ‘Many people have been talking of your latest play. They tell me that your figure of Falstaff is based on none other than Sir John Oldcastle.’ After a short silence, she prompted, ‘Well?’
The playwright took a deep breath, wondering what his chances were of living to pen another line. Finally, he decided that perhaps telling the truth was his best course. ‘Ah, yes, your majesty, he is.’
‘Aha!’ Elizabeth exclaimed, glaring triumphantly at Sir Francis Bacon. ‘I thought so. Well, pay it no further mind. I myself have an excellent idea of the subject for your next play.’
Shakespeare was caught between relief that he had been let off so lightly and apprehension that he would be strictly told what to write in future. ‘And—ah—what might that be, most gracious lady?’
‘You shall write,’ the Queen began, and then paused, dramatically, ‘of—Falstaff in love.’
His smile definitely forced, Shakespeare bowed. ‘An... excellent idea, your majesty.’ He started to retreat, only to run into Francis Bacon behind him. The two men left the room, and Shakespeare felt Bacon’s hand on his shoulder.
‘I, too, have an idea that you might wish to use,’ Bacon said.
Was there no end to this? Shakespeare took a deep breath. ‘Indeed?’
‘Have you heard of the history of Hamlet, prince of Denmark ?’ Bacon sounded as though he had discovered the Holy Grail.
Shakespeare sniffed, loudly. ‘Not my style at all, I assure you,’ he said quickly, and then left.
Bacon stared at the open door in disgust. ‘Scribbler!’ he snarled in contempt, and turned back to the court.
Outside, Shakespeare paused, in thought. ‘Hamlet,’ he mused. ‘Then again...’
The picture broke up. Ian laughed, and put his arm round Barbara’s shoulder. ‘Is that what you wanted to know?’
‘I’m not sure. I only wondered if Shakespeare had really written his own plays, or if Bacon had been their real author. It was a chance to find out for certain what literary scholars have argued over for centuries.’
None of this mattered to Vicki, who cared nothing for plays or poetry. Instead, now that it was definitely her turn, she dived for the controls and began to manipulate them. Finally, she grinned in satisfaction. The other three turned with her to watch her choice on the screen.
It was clearly some sort of a television programme that Vicki had tuned into. Judging from the clothes, it was from the 1960s. Barbara felt a strong twinge of homesickness. One man, with a microphone, smiled professionally at the cameras. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘the... fabulous... Beatles!’
The camera switched to the famous foursome, which immediately broke into a song that neither Ian nor Barbara recognized. It was ‘Ticket to Ride’, written two years after the teachers had been snatched away in the TARDIS by the Doctor. By the look on Vicki’s face, though, she recognized the tune—and seemed somewhat disappointed.
‘Don’t you like the Beatles?’ Ian asked.
‘What? Oh, yes, they’re good. It’s just that... well, I didn’t know that they played classical music!’
‘Classical?’ Barbara spluttered.
Ian raised an eyebrow. ‘Get with it, Barbara—times change, times change.’ He couldn’t help laughing at the expressions on both of their faces. ‘I’11 bet that by Vicki’s time they’re into something really weird and calling it music!’
Before either of them could respond to this cheek, a loud tone from the mushroom-like control panel brought them round. Vicki’s hands caught the settings on the Visualizer, and the picture faded.
The Doctor, the episode with the Visualizer now forgotten, moved towards the panel. ‘We’re landing,’ he announced. Barbara and Ian could not help looking at one another in a mixture of hope and worry. Where in all of time and space were they going to appear?
Chapter 3
The Sands of Death
The scanner showed nothing but sand and rocks in all directions. The sky held two suns, which immediately dashed any hopes that the TARDIS had stumbled back on to the Earth again. The sky was completely devoid of clouds, and the whole place looked totally lifeless. After a few more minutes fussing with the controls, the Doctor looked up.
‘Everything’s perfectly all right,’ he announced, cheerfully. ‘Oxygen a bit high, gravity a little greater than on Earth.’
‘It looks hot,’ Barbara observed.
‘And small wonder,’ the Doctor replied. ‘Those twin suns are very close, cosmically speaking.’
Ian was in good humour. ‘Just right for a day on the beach, eh?’
‘As long as you don’t go looking for the water,’ the Doctor quipped back. ‘I think it’s safe to go out.’ He opened the doors, and led the way. Ian lingered to put on a flashy-looking blazer; might as well look the part of a day tripper, he decided.
Outside, the heat would have been oppressive, had the air not been so dry. It did indeed seem like a day at the beach. Vicki, ever impatient, asked: ‘Are we going to explore?’
Not fancying a walk in this heat, Barbara said dubiously, ‘Doesn’t look like there’s much here.’ Shading her eyes against the glare, she looked about. ‘Just miles and miles of sand.’
Facts weren’t enough to dampen Vicki’s enthusiasm. ‘But you don’t know that for sure ,’ she cajoled. ‘I mean... just over that sand dune over there might be a city—or a space station or, or anything !’
Affectionately, the Doctor patted the teenager on her shoulder. ‘Always have to know what’s on the other side of the hill,’ he smiled. ‘Well, go along child. I don’t see what harm you can come to.’
‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘No, no, no, no, no. I’d find walking in all this heat a little strenuous.’ He glanced around at Ian. ‘Chesterton, you go with her.’
Laughing at the Doctor’s attempts at avoiding exercise, Ian agreed. ‘All right,’ he told Vicki in mock tones of severity, ‘but only to see over the next ridge.’
‘Of course,’ Vicki promised, in a tone that suggested nothing of the kind. She grabbed his hand, bursting with energy now that they were free of the TARDIS again. ‘Come on !
‘I’ll stay with the Doctor,’ Barbara said, before she could get invited along on this little trip. Ian laughed, and then gave in to Vicki’s insistent pulling, and set off with her.
The Doctor chuckled to himself, then returned to the TARDIS. In a moment, to Barbara’s surprise, he returned with two deckchairs. ‘May as well enjoy the sun,’ he suggested. Barbara accepted a chair gratefully, noticing that it had ‘ Blackpool Beach ’ stamped on it. As she settled down in it, she idly wondered what the fines on a chair several hundred—or million—years overdue were...
Vicki had already made a find. She was kneeling beside a peculiar stain on the sand as Ian caught up with her. ‘Over here,’ she called. ‘Look at this.’ The stain glistened wetly, a dark-red colour. She touched it, and it felt warm and slimy. ‘Ugh.’
Ian crouched beside her. ‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’ She looked up, scanning the sands. ‘There’s more of it over there... and beyond that. It’s like a sort of trail.’ She rose to her feet, and Ian stood too.
‘I think it’s blood of some kind,’ he announced, grimly. So this world wasn’t lifeless, after all. ‘Let’s just take a look where it leads—but any sign of trouble, and we go back.’
Nodding, Vicki started along the pathway of—blood? Ian, still disturbed by this, moved after her. He would have been even more disturbed had he glanced back.
By the stain, the sand was shifting slightly, stirred from below. Slowly, something began to emerge from under the surface, rising vertically. It was a dark, sandy colour, like the stem of a large plant. In its tip, however, was a multi-faceted eye which stared after the two figures that plodded off into the dunes...
Barbara rolled over slightly, luxuriating in the warmth of her skin. It seemed to her that far too few of the pl
anets they visited were as peaceful as this. No monsters, no alien menaces, no running for their lives, no getting involved in a history that had once only been preserved in books for her—just relaxing in the sun. ‘I suppose with two suns I’ll get brown twice as quickly,’ she murmured.
The Doctor wasn’t listening. Instead, he was letting sand slip through his fingers, enjoying the warmth. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he recalled a time like this when he had been young, many centuries ago. He had learnt a song—had been rather good at it, as he remembered. The words came back now, and he started to sing it softly to himself, quite content and at peace with everything.
An electronic whine roused Barbara. Sitting up, she asked, ‘What’s that awful noise?’
‘Mmm? Awful noise?’ His mood broken, the Doctor sat up, indignant. ‘Not a nice thing to say about my singing!’
‘No, not that awful noise,’ Barbara said without thinking. ‘The other one. Listen...’ They both paused, and could hear the whining sound.
‘Oh, yes, yes,’ the Doctor sighed. ‘In all the excitement of landing, Vicki must have left the Visualizer on. Barbara, my dear, would you switch it off? Mmm? Thank you.’
That was typical of the Doctor, Barbara knew—blame Vicki first for leaving on his latest toy, then try and flatter her into turning it off. She rose to her feet, knowing that she’d better turn it off; it was obvious that the Doctor aimed simply to laze about.
Watching her enter the TARDIS, the Doctor settled back, and started to hum to himself. ‘Awful noise indeed,’ he muttered. ‘Huh! I could charm nightingales out of the trees with my voice in my youth...’
Inside the TARDIS, Barbara crossed to the Visualizer. The screen was showing broken images, the speaker making this terrible humming. None of the controls was set, and it was simply tuning in to the random pathways of the Vortex. Realizing that the Doctor hadn’t told her where the off-switch was, she began to hunt for it. While she did so, the images on the screen began to resolve themselves, tapping into the latest disturbances in the ether. The first Barbara knew about it was when the speaker stopped humming, and instead a terrible, familiar voice issued from the box.
‘The Dalek Prime is ready to receive your report!’
Barbara stared at the screen in terror. She saw the Black Dalek glide through a doorway into a large laboratory. Within was a Dalek that was larger than most, and painted a uniform golden colour. Behind it were panels of screens, mounted from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall. There must have been a hundred of them, and all showed exactly the same picturethe TARDIS in the very desert where it now stood. ‘Doctor!’ she yelled. ‘Doctor! Come quickly!’
The Black Dalek drew to a halt before the Dalek Prime. The room contained several other Daleks moving about and clearly hard at work—but at what? ‘The report is ready,’ the Black Dalek intoned.
Entering through the door, the Doctor was wiping his brow with a large handkerchief. ‘What is it?’ he asked, irritably. ‘Can’t I relax for even...’ He stopped dead as he saw what was on the screen. ‘Daleks!’ he spat.
The Dalek Prime finally spoke.
‘Give your report.’
‘Our time machine has been completed. Our instruments have detected the enemy time machine in the Sagaro Desert on the planet Aridius. The execution squad has begun.’
Barbara paled. ‘Doctor... on the screen... the TARDIS—here!’
‘Even more importantly,’ the Doctor added quietly, ‘he referred to the TARDIS as the enemy time machine.’
The Dalek Prime continued. ‘Those who control the TARDIS have interfered with too many of our plans! They are to be destroyed. If necessary, the assassination group will pursue them through all eternity. Exterminate them !’
Swiftly, the Doctor turned off the Visualizer, a very worried expression on his face. ‘This machine only picks up things that have happened in the past,’ he announced grimly. ‘Perhaps only a few minutes ago, but the past none the less.’
‘Then that means the Daleks are already on their way here,’ Barbara whispered in horror.
‘Or worse—are already here! They’ve obviously built a time machine that can follow the TARDIS, and you heard their orders. We are to be exterminated!’
The Doctor, Ian and Barbara had faced—and narrowly defeated—the Daleks twice before. Both times, they had known that there was a possibility that the Daleks might win. The reaches of time and space had always seemed so safe there was always the chance that if they were being overwhelmed, they could flee. But if the Daleks could now track them down through eternity, then how could they ever feel safe again? Barbara shuddered. ‘Can we get away from them?’ she asked desperately.
‘Yes, yes, yes, I think so,’ the Doctor snapped. ‘But we must find Chesterton and the child—and we may have very little time! They know nothing of this, and are just having a carefree stroll, remember!’
‘The trail just stops,’ Vicki observed, in disappointment. Just when things were getting exciting! The sand ahead of them was devoid of further patches of the gooey blood.
‘Yes,’ Ian agreed. ‘And we’ve come a long way from the ship...’
Catching the worry in his voice, Vicki nodded. ‘I suppose we should start back, Ian. The others’ll just be worried about us.’
Bending down, Ian tested the sand with his fingers. It was fine, almost like the kind they used in hour-glasses, he noted. Then his fingers touched something hard, barely an inch below the surface. ‘Strange,’ he muttered, hunkering down. ‘The sand’s only a few inches deep. Then there’s a rock or something.’ Puzzled now, he began to sweep the rock clean. Her earlier resolution forgotten, Vicki joined in helping him, until they had cleaned a patch a couple of feet across.
It was not rock beneath the sand, but glass—or something very like glass. The rays of the twin suns danced off it, but there was no way to see into the depths. Light seemed to fall into it after a few inches. It was like nothing either of them had seen before. Even as Ian watched, the light seemed to be a darkening orange hue. Then he realized that it was no trick of the glass, but the fact that both suns were almost on the horizon. Vicki followed his gaze.
‘We really had better go back now.’ Vicki started to rise, brushing the sand from her palms on to her dress. She gasped with shock as Ian suddenly clutched her hand and dragged her down again.
‘Look at this, Vicki!’ he exclaimed in wonder. ‘Now the suns are setting, you can seethere’s light below this stuff!’
Faintly, in the depths of the glass, Vicki could see what Ian had noticed. There were lights in the material, twisting and moving—or were they under the material? Some hidden world below the surface of the sands? Both of them pressed down on to the glass, shielding all stray light from their eyes, trying to get the utmost definition from the lights below.
Behind them, close by the last drop of blood on the trail, the sand began to stir, and then rise. Something rose a few inches, a large trapdoor. There were no lights beneath this, but an impenetrable darkness. Suddenly, from this Stygian cavity, a long tendril lashed out, whipping about Vicki’s outstretched foot.
No sooner had it touched than its thick muscles began to contract, drawing its prey back towards the hole. Vicki screamed, twisting to try and see what had caught her. All that was visible was the tentacle, thick, rubbery and oozing that mucous liquid they had mistaken for blood.
At her scream, Ian had twisted around. Veteran of many combats on numerous worlds now, he prepared to defend his companion. Both he and she had forgotten that they were standing now on cleared glass. Neither could catch their footing. Vicki screamed again, struggling to find a handhold to slow her slide into the dark hole, but there was nothing save smooth glass and shifting sands. Ian finally managed to slide forward, reaching to grab her, but before he could do so, a second tentacle whipped from the trapdoor and snared him also. Caught off balance, Ian pitched into the blackness, struggling wildly.
The creature below dragged at Vicki. She tried
clutching the edge of the trap, but it had been worn smooth, and her hands simply slid off. With a despairing cry, she followed Ian into the depths.
Slowly, the trap began to close on them.
‘Ian! Vicki!’ Barbara stood still and called again, cupping her mouth. She listened, but there was no reply. ‘Ian!’ she called, getting worried now. Surely they couldn’t have gone far? It was almost sunset, and they were bound to have started back. She and the Doctor had been walking for almost fifteen minutes now, looking for them. Barbara shivered, drawing the cardigan she had picked up closer about her shoulders. The days were intensely hot, but as in so many deserts, the night promised to plummet below freezing. Already a strong breeze was getting up, caused by the temperature differential.
The Doctor came back into view over the rise, puffing heavily. It was no simple task, walking in the sand, and his silver-capped cane was of little use to help him keep his footing. Before Barbara could ask, he shook his head, and coughed. ‘I followed their footprints as far as I could, but then this wretched wind sprang up!’ He drew his silk scarf tighter about his neck. ‘It’s wiped their tracks out completely.’ Barbara’s eyes glistened, and she wiped them. Pretending that this was because she had sand in them, the Doctor murmured, ‘It is blowing up, you know. And getting quite cold.’
‘Let’s get back to the ship,’ Barbara said. ‘They might have found their way back by now.’ She turned and started back, only to be brought up short by a yell from the Doctor.