by John Peel
Ian clambered to his feet, following the wire. The Doctor accompanied him. Between them, they located the box and cable. Gripping the wire firmly, they heaved on it with all their strength. It snapped free, sparking as it came from the box. The box itself started to smoulder.
‘I think we’ve fused the thing,’ Ian commented.
‘Well, that’s the least of our worries for now, Chesterton,’ the Doctor remarked. ‘Let the Mechonoids fix it.’
Barbara and Vicki now had the rest of the cable on the roof in coils. Steven had the other end, and began to wrap it about a ventilation shaft to anchor it. Barbara joined him, and they soon had it strongly tied.
Vicki realized that she had little choice but to go through with this. Glancing over her shoulder, she could see into the room they had escaped from. The door was open at the front, and several Daleks were in view. It was down the wire to escape, or certain death when the Daleks made it to the roof. Trying to convince herself that the climb down wouldn’t be all that bad, she forced her feet to drag her to the edge. Then she slowly looked down.
It was worse than she had feared. Her head felt light, and she could see that far-off ground swaying. A rushing sound filled her ears, and she felt sweat breaking out all over. Abruptly, her knees buckled, and she started to collapse.
Steven had seen Vicki’s faint coming over her, and dashed to grab her. Picking her up bodily from the rim, he carried her back on to the roof. ‘She’s fainted,’ Steven told the others. ‘We’ll just have to lower her.’
Ian nodded, bringing over his end of the cable. ‘Right, hold her steady. I’ll get this firmly around her.’ He started to work on knotting the cable comfortably but securely about the young girl.
As he did so, Steven glanced up, and sniffed. ‘Smoke,’ he said. ‘Can you smell it, Doctor?’
‘Yes. I think Chesterton and I started a fire when we pulled the cable free.’
That was exactly what had happened. As the wire had pulled free, it had sent an electric arc into the other terminals. This had in turn created a surge through the local network. Several systems overloaded, and melted. One was in a disposal area, where cut wood from the parks was stored to be destroyed. This had caught fire, and began a slow blaze.
That would not have caused too much of a problem had the city computer system been monitoring the area. Instead, it was occupied with the continued fighting between the Daleks and its Mechonoids. This in itself had caused much destruction, and the shooting continued.
The Daleks were badly outnumbered, but they were accounting for themselves well. The Mechonoids were unemotionally attacking, but the Daleks’ superior skill and fighting abilities were telling. For each Dalek destroyed, five or six Mechonoids were in flames. Each explosion caused more small fires, and within fifteen minutes of the start of hostilities, several raging fires had taken grip of the city. The ventilation systems and electrical conduits were acting like chimneys for the flames, spreading the inferno throughout the city.
On the roof, the travellers finally caught sight of the blaze. Steven pointed back down through the trapdoor in the roof. The concourse outside their room was now crackling and melting in the heat. ‘It’s spreading!’ he yelled. ‘We’ll have to hurry!’
The smoke was starting to get to them as well. Choking, they lowered the limp form of Vicki over the edge of the roof, and began to pay out their makeshift rope. They had very little time to escape...
The Dalek Leader realized that the assassination squad was doomed. Through the growing smoke, it could see that there were now only two other Daleks left. They had accounted so far for about forty of the Mechonoids, whose twisted metal wreckage littered the roads. Sounds of the fires drowned much of the fighting, and the smoke haze was getting very thick. Survival would be impossible, but there might still be a way to destroy the Doctor.
The Leader retreated to the room where the humans had been kept. There was a computer outlet there, as anticipated. The Dalek extended its arm, then connected with the input. Switching to its internal computers, the Leader tied its guidance systems into the main computer bank for the city. Then it began to work on the over-ride controls, feeding selected power surges down the network.
The battle outside was over. A fresh force of Mechonoids had emerged from a building behind the last two Daleks. In the withering cross-fire, the intruders had been obliterated. There was just the Leader left. The city computer tried to locate the last invader, but seemed to be having problems getting input from that quarter. Strange codes were running rampant in the systems. There was interference of some kind. False figures, incorrect data... The flood of information was blotting out the real data being fed from the area. It had to be the last Dalek. The computer ordered the Mechonoids to search, but it was already too late.
The Leader cracked the final codes, and then held them in its mind for a second: the self-destruct sequence. If the Doctor and the humans were still on the roof, this would finish them off. The Leader sent the signal to activate the destruction.
The city erupted in cataclysmic fires. The whole palce was consumed, and the wreckage twisted, melted and then collapsed into the jungle below.
Chapter 14
Home!
As the city above them exploded, Ian threw himself off the last few feet of the cable. He hit the ground, rolled, and then looked about. He saw Steven, who had been above him by about a hundred feet, flung aside, twisted oddly. He crashed to the ground in the depths of the jungle.
Barbara and the Doctor had already reached Vicki, and were hauling her away as fast as they could. Ian rushed to join them. All about them as they ran debris fell, still blazing. Only the fact that the ground was so waterlogged prevented the entire place from catching fire. The city above them warped, as the legs could no longer bear the uneven weight. The molten fury of the fires buckled the supports, and with an incredible sound, the whole place collapsed, shattering by sections. As Ian looked over his shoulder, he saw the main body of the city crash down on to the place where Steven had fallen. There was no hope for their young friend now.
Finally, when they had fled far enough, they stopped to catch their breath. Vicki moaned, and came around. Like all of them, she was pale, and soot-smeared. She blinked, coughed, and then looked about. When she realized that she was on the ground, she smiled.
‘What happened to the Daleks?’ she asked.
‘Oh, undoubtedly the Mechonoids destroyed most of them,’ the Doctor said, as though claiming the credit for this ingenious move. ‘The rest must have perished in the collapse of the city.’
‘Collapse?’ Vicki asked.
Ian grinned, ruffling her hair. ‘You really missed something there,’ he told her. ‘The whole place came crashing down about us as we fled with you.’
‘Then we’ve escaped the Daleks,’ Vicki said, with a sigh of relief.
‘I think that would be too much to hope for,’ the Doctor said, as gently as he could. ‘There are thousands more still on Skaro, don’t forget. Now they’ve acquired the power of time travel, I doubt they’ll leave us long in peace. They hate us so much that they won’t just give up tryingespecially after this.’
‘Well, we’ve beaten them this time,’ Barbara declared defiantly. ‘We can do it again.’
The Doctor chuckled, and patted her arm. ‘I hope so, Barbara, I hope so.’
‘Let’s get back to the TARDIS,’ Vicki said, happily. ‘I’ll bet Steven will be fascin—’ She looked around. ‘Where is he?’
Ian had been wondering when he should break the news. Obviously the time had arrived. ‘He was above me on the wire when the city began to collapse,’ he said gently. ‘He was flung under the city by the force. It... collapsed on to him.’
Though they had known Steven for only a short time, they all felt his loss keenly. Without his help and forethought, they would all be dead now.
After a moment of silence, the Doctor cleared his throat. ‘I’m sure we shall miss him,’ he said, brusquely. ‘
But we had better make our way back to the TARDIS while it is still light, hadn’t we? I for one do not relish the idea of spending another night in this jungle.’
The others nodded, and the party started wearily off through the strange growths, hoping to come across the path back to the TARDIS.
Steven was not dead. As he had been thrown from the wire, he had fallen on to one of the fungoids. The soft vegetable matter had cushioned his fall, though the predatory plant had been considerably damaged. Not wishing to stay around to see if it would recover, Steven had stumbled away. He felt very light-headed, and there was a terrible ringing in his ears. No, that was outside his ears! Giddily, he spun around, to see the entire city collapse into the area he had just escaped from.
He put his hand to his head, and it came away bloody. So that was why he was’so dizzy! He needed treatment for that! Where was the nearest hospital? He started to laugh at the thought probably about fifteen light years off—he’d bleed to death before he got there...
As he stumbled through the trees, he saw something that made him certain he was delirious... A large, blue container, marked ‘Police Box’— in English ! He crashed to the ground, certain he was dying...
It was harder finding their way back than the Doctor had expected. In the end, it was not the TARDIS that the small, tired group found, but the Dalek time machine.
The Doctor examined it with interest. ‘So this is what has been chasing us!’ he exclaimed, looking over the featureless cube.
‘Inside, it’s huge—just like the TARDIS,’ Vicki told him.
He blinked at her, and then smiled. ‘Yes, yes. You know, I had quite forgotten that you’ve had a trip in it, child. Most interesting. I’ll tell you what—why don’t you give me a conducted tour, eh?’ He offered her his arm. Vicki took it gravely, then smiled. She curtsied, and led him within.
Barbara and Ian stayed outside for a moment. Both of them had the same idea at the same time, and turned wondering eyes on one another. Tremulously, hardly daring to believe it, Barbara whispered: ‘Ian... we could go home...’
‘I just realized that, Barbara.’
‘Home.’ To Barbara, the sound of the word was wonderful. For three years, the Doctor had been trying without success to get them back to London , 1963. The Dalek ship could take them there in no time—quite literally.
‘You are sure you want to go?’ Ian asked.
‘Positive.’ Barbara looked up at him, her face radiant at the thought of getting back. ‘I never realized until this moment just how much.’ She gripped his hands, and asked: ‘And you?’
Ian thought back the school days, the walks in the drizzling rain, driving around London , the drinks in the pubs, the movies on Saturday nights... He thought about how nice it would be to put his feet up in front of a roaring fire, and not have to worry about being set upon by alien monsters. He missed the simple things in life the most. The TARDIS’s food machine was wonderful, but he wanted to eat fish and chips fresh from the shop, to drink a pint of bitter... He wanted to send Christmas cards, and even mark ink-stained homework again. He pulled his mind back to the present. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘And we’ll most likely never get an opportunity like this again.’
‘We’d better tell the Doctor,’ Barbara said, firmly. ‘Apart from anything else, we’ll need his help to show us how the time machine works.’
Hand in hand, they walked into the Dalek craft. They could see the Doctor and Vicki over at the controls.
Despite himself, the Doctor was quite impressed by the Daleks’ machine. It had some interesting insights that had never occurred to him—though it was more than his pride was worth to admit the fact. ‘A death trap,’ he said, solemnly to Vicki. ‘A veritable death trap! You were most fortunate to have survived your trip in this... this infernal contraption. Look,’ he explained, gesturing with his stick, ‘It’s powered by taranium ! Talk about unstable elements—and it’s just about the rarest substance in the Universe! Why, a setting just a fraction off true could disintegrate this machine into its component parts. Dear me, the TARDIS may be a trifle wilful, but I’ll take it over this cobbled-together monstrosity. Typical of the Daleks—to try and achieve flight through the dimensions of time and space by brute force! They lack subtlety and poetry, my dear.’
At that moment, Barbara and Ian wandered across. With a new audience to impress, the Doctor started up again. ‘Ah, there you are! Capital! I was just explaining to Vicki that...’ His voice ran down as he realized that the couple were not paying attention to what he was saying. ‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded. ‘Aren’t you interested?’
‘Yes,’ Ian replied, totally lost in his own thoughts. ‘Very.’
‘We...’ Barbara began, but had to force herself to continue. ‘We want to go home, Doctor.’
‘Home?’ he echoed, aghast.
‘You can’t mean it!’ Vicki exclaimed.
Ian stepped forward, and placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Vicki—but we do.’
‘This time machine is our chance, Doctor,’ Barbara explained. ‘We know you’ve tried to get us home, and never quite managed it.’
‘But you can’t!’ Vicki cried in horror. ‘This machine is a death trap! The Doctor was telling me how lucky I was that it didn’t blow up!’
The Doctor cleared his throat, embarrassed. ‘Ah, yes, well...’ he began. ‘I was simply drawing the worst-case scenario, you see. Ah... if things were not done correctly. Unstable... very...’ He trailed off. ‘If it were set correctly, of course—by someone such as myself—well, then it might be perfectly safe.’
‘Quite.’ Ian had a difficult time repressing his smile.
The Doctor was taken aback by the request that Barbara and Ian had made. Admittedly, in the beginning, they had been an infernal nuisance—they had forced their way into the TARDIS, following Susan. All because they were curious about her! The Doctor had had no option but to whisk them off into time and space. Now, though, after years together, he realized just how much he had become fond of the pair of them, and how much he had come to rely upon them. Losing Susan when she had stayed behind on Earth had been bad enough; now he would be losing two good friends also.
Or was it just two? With a terrible sinking feeling, the Doctor turned to Vicki. ‘And you, child?’ he asked, dreading the answer. ‘What about you?’
‘Me?’ Vicki was astonished. ‘I don’t want to go back to their time! I want to stay with you ! If you’ll have me.’
Trying hard to fight back any overt sign of emotion, the Doctor put his arm about her shoulders, and drew her closer in. He wouldn’t be alone, after all!
Barbara tried to explain more fully. ‘Neither Ian nor I can begin to say what you mean to us, Doctor. We’ve changed so much these past few years, since we first stepped into the TARDIS. There’s been a lot of trouble, but also a good deal of joy...’ She smiled, fighting back her tears. ‘It’s not you we’re leaving—it’s our own time that we’re returning to.’
Ian moved to Vicki. ‘Cheer up,’ he said. ‘You had to know it couldn’t just couldn’t go on forever. Barbara and I... well, we miss our silly old time, you know. We want to go home.’
Smiling bravely, Vicki nodded. Then she clasped him, and buried her face into his chest.
It was getting far too emotionally charged for the Doctor. He cleared his throat, noisily. ‘Well, come along, come along. I suppose you’ll want me to show you how to handle the controls.’ He shook his head in mock disgust. ‘After this, you two will simply have to learn to get along without my guiding hand, you know.’
He crossed to the controls, followed by the other three. He began to flick switches and set the dials. After a moment, he glanced up. ‘When do you want to return?’
Ian glanced at Barbara, then replied. ‘The day after we first met you.’
The Doctor shook his head and clucked his tongue. ‘I knew you’d have trouble without me to guide you. Think, Chesterton, think! You’ve aged three years gracefully pe
rhaps, but you have aged! Look at that tan! No London schoolmaster could pick that up overnight, you know. No, no, that won’t do at all! Not 1963, dear me, no. I think we’ll have you land back in... oh, 1965.’ He set the controls.
‘But how will we explain where we’ve been?’ Barbara asked.
‘Do you expect me to have all of the answers for you, eh?’ the Doctor snapped in mock severity. ‘Apply your minds to it! Now, Chesterton, pay attention.’ He indicated one of the main controls. ‘I’ve preset your course. Just press this, and you’ll be off. Now this—’ he gestured towards a red lever ‘—is the self-destruct switch. You have one minute after moving it to get free of the area. It will be a small, but satisfying bang. After all, you can’t leave a Dalek time machine lying around in 1965.’ He looked up at Ian. ‘Starting control, self-destruct switch. Do try not to confuse the two, eh?’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Ian laughed.
‘And there’s just one more thing,’ the Doctor added. ‘When you get home, you may find a need for money. I think you’d better come back to the TARDIS and pick up all of your things. I believe your wallet and purse will be among them, you know.’ He shook his head. ‘Really, do I have to do all of your thinking for you?’
The journey back to the TARDIS was a fairly swift one. The Doctor left the main doors open while he and Vicki helped Barbara and Ian to pack up their souvenirs and belongings. Finally, they returned to the Dalek time ship. After another round of goodbyes, Ian and Barbara entered the ship with their boxes.
Vicki held on to the Doctor. As they watched, the time machine vanished...
Steven came to, his head still a blazing mass of pain. That strange box was still there, with its door open. He had thought it a hallucination, but perhaps it was real? Staggering to his feet, he stumbled forwards, collapsing over the threshold. Then he was convinced he was hallucinating.
It was huge inside, like some sophisticated control room. He couldn’t think straight, but he remembered the Doctor claiming to have a time machine. Could this be it?