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 he face staring back at me was very familiar. The expression was tired and worn with the suggestion of a boyish smile about to break forth. But the image was frozen, like a photograph; like a ghost, it seemed to hover within one of the roundels on the TARDIS walls, and it was there for but a brief moment before my attention was suddenly drawn by my peripheral vision to a green light flashing on the console. I blinked and spun around, but the image had vanished. So many lives ago...
The flashing ceased and the gentle hum of the ship in flight dropped a tone or three as my hands swept over the stabilising controls. We would be landing soon, the TARDIS and I; I had been travelling unaccompanied for several months now, and K9 was in bits and pieces in my laboratory. Just me now - all by myself...
Myself...Yes, the fleeting apparition had reminded me that I hadn't really been feeling quite myself lately. It was understandable, I suppose. I mean, after all, my first body had lasted for well over seven hundred Earth years, but recently I had been going through regenerations like there was no tomorrow. Or a yesterday, come to that.
You see, the frightening thing is that one never really knows just how many regenerations one has left, and I realised that if I were to keep on living as dangerously as I had been - what with running straight into giant radio-active spiders, and what not - well, I should very quickly find out! Still, I told myself, that is what makes my life so particularly interesting. Mmm...Much more exciting than wasting thousands of years with crusty old Time Lords. The problem was that I never got a proper chance to settle into any new incarnation and get to know 'me' better, and just then I was under the alarming impression that my identity was slipping away from me. And now this ghost from the past, staring at me from the TARDIS wall. Strange, you know...
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he Time-rotor ground to a halt. Materialisation had taken place, and new adventure lay beyond the TARDIS doors.
At once, I busied myself around the console, checking read-outs on atmosphere, gravity, and radioactivity. They were all quite normal. rather like Earth, in fact, which meant 'life'. Could be interesting, or were those read-outs too normal? The scanner was on the blink again; that was the trouble with clock-work television - sometimes you just had to go out and look for yourself...
I was shocked to find myself in a cavern. Although it was dark, the walls seemed to glisten with a green and purple light, the source of which I could not readily discern. The ceiling was several feet above my head, and yet I somehow felt the need to remove my hat and keep looking around me for I sensed danger!
Moving away from the ship, I suddenly tripped on something. I knelt down and produced my atomic pen-torch. I had stumbled upon a metal rail that ran along the floor of the cavern and into the shadows. Could this possibly be a mine-shaft?
And then I saw it! Silently did the ugly form move along the rail and into the eerie light - Davros! Yes - Davros!: that ghastly mutant, half Dalek, fused into his weird wheelchair. He did not see me, he came to a halt a yard or two from me and simply sat there, muttering away to himself, that third eye winking with a cold blue light as he spoke.
And then - I should have known - Daleks! Two silvery Daleks glided out of the darkness and conversed with their maker, their shells reflecting the green and purple glow. But what were they saying? I crept closer. They repeated something twice or thrice. What was it? Did they say, "The Doctor"? They were talking about me! But how could they have known...? Of course - they must have heard the TARDIS! Noisy TARDIS!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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Doctor...Who?
