 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...
~~~
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!
~~~ |
