Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead (11 page)

‘We have known for many years that the process is irreversible.’

Nyssa moved to the Doctor’s side. ‘There must be something you can do to help them.’

‘Don’t interfere!’ The Doctor silenced her angrily. ‘I cannot will my own destruction.’

‘So be it,’ said Mawdryn wearily. ‘Leave now with the rest of your companions. But accept the consequences of your own actions.’

The other mutants began to murmur in protest. ‘Go quickly,’ urged Mawdryn.

‘That sounds like good advice.’ The Brigadier grabbed the Doctor by the arm and propelled him towards the door.

‘We have experimented for centuries,’ clamoured the mutant lying next to Mawdryn.

‘We have tried to discover a remedy,’ cried his companion.

‘There is no remission,’ moaned another in despair.

‘Only the power in you, Time Lord!’

‘Only you can help us, Doctor. Share the life-force with us, that we may grow old and die!’

The Doctor stood watching them like a sailor who has seen his shipmate fall overboard, and knows that, while the boat sails on, the castaway must surely die.

‘Come on, Doctor,’ urged Tegan. ‘There’s nothing that any of us can do.’

The Doctor turned reluctantly to go. Filled with dismay, the mutants struggled to free themselves from the regenerator.

‘To the TARDIS, the lot of you!’ roared the Brigadier and shepherded the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa out into the corridor.

The mutants howled like abandoned children and would have rushed into the passageway to drag the Doctor back into the laboratory had they been strong enough.

‘My friends, do not despair,’ Mawdryn comforted his fellow exiles. ‘The Doctor will return, and of his own free will.’ He detached himself from the machine and stood, tall and strong, as any normal creature. Only the ulcerous sarcoma on the right of his face branded him as unnatural.

‘There is work to be done,’ he announced gravely. His seven comrades looked at him, hardly daring to hope.

Then he spoke the words they had waited over two thousand years to hear. ‘Prepare our ship for the ending!’

As they rushed along the sombre corridors towards the TARDIS, Tegan noticed how out of breath the Brigadier was getting. The poor man had certainly gone to pieces in those six years since she was at Brendon School – put on weight too, she observed, as he paused to get his breath back. ‘I’m Tegan by the way,’ she said, introducing herself with a friendly smile. ‘We have met, but it was rather a long time ago.’

‘Miss Jovanka, could I ever forget,’ puffed the breathless Sir Galahad of Jubilee Day.

‘Doctor, what are we going to do about Turlough?’

asked Nyssa.

‘Turlough will have found the TARDIS by now.’

‘And the other Brigadier?’

‘I can only deal with one Brigadier at a time!’ snapped the Doctor, desperate to reach the police box and get clear of the alien ship.

‘What’s that?’ Lethbridge-Stewart pricked up his ears.

The Doctor explained to the horrified old soldier the presence of his six years’ junior on board Mawdryn’s ship.

The senior Brigadier was none too happy about the way the Doctor proposed to leave part of him adrift in space.

‘You were perfectly all right in 1983,’ the Doctor explained impatiently. ‘Obviously your 1977 persona came to no harm.’

The Brigadier, who by now didn’t know whether he was coming or going, entered the TARDIS with the two girls, still grumbling about spending six years in limbo.

‘No sign of Turlough,’ said Tegan, looking round the control room.

‘Never trusted that boy,’ muttered the Brigadier testily.

‘Maybe he’s exploring the TARDIS?’

‘I hope so,’ said the Doctor, already setting a course out of the warp ellipse, ‘because we’ve got to get the TARDIS

away from here.’

‘Look!’ Nyssa pointed to the scanner.

Running down the corridor, terrified that the TARDIS

was leaving without him, was Turlough.

Turlough had felt rather pleased with himself at trapping the younger Brigadier so neatly inside the dormition chamber. That would settle a few scores with the cantankerous old pedagogue — albeit prospectively. He grinned at the paradox: the prisoner from 1977 was, as yet, a stranger.

There were no congratulations, however, from the Black Guardian; no voice; no glowing presence. He took out the cube – a mere piece of glass.

Turlough strolled along the marble ambulatories, exploring libraries and galleries, luxurious salons and halls of recreation.

He began to feel lonely. Perhaps the Doctor was already dead; and the girls; and the older Brigadier. He had been abandoned!

He was on the point of returning to open up the dormition chamber — if only for the doubtful company of the junior Brigadier — when he heard the voices.

From behind a gilded buttress, he could see the Doctor and his companions, alive and well and on their way back to the TARDIS. Could the Doctor be escaping? Had the Black Guardian failed? Turlough followed at a distance, and saw the Doctor, the girls and the senior Brigadier all disappear into the police box.

It suddenly occurred to the boy that, with the TARDIS

gone and the Black Guardian, maybe, defeated, he would be marooned on the ship. He rushed panic-stricken towards the time-machine.

To Turlough’s surprise, the Doctor met him in the doorway.

‘Turlough, listen very carefully.’ An unusually agitated Doctor explained the problem of the two Brigadiers.

As if it were one of Canon Whitstable’s anecdotes, Turlough pretended he was hearing it all for the first time.

‘Find the Brigadier and take him to the transmat capsule,’ ordered the Doctor.

‘But the transmat beam doesn’t work.’

‘The capsule is locked in to the TARDIS homing device. When you operate the capsule it will transmat to the centre of the TARDIS.

Turlough nodded.

‘When you arrive in the TARDIS, stay in the capsule.

Don’t let the Brigadier out until I tell you it’s safe.’ The Doctor slammed the door. The light on the police box flashed, there was a grinding sound — and a rather bemused Turlough was alone in the corridor.

The Doctor was delighted to have escaped from the red ship so easily. ‘It takes a very cunning setting of the co-ordinates to clear a warp ellipse,’ he boasted from beside the console.

The two girls were more subdued. ‘Will the mutants really travel for the rest of time?’ asked Nyssa.

For some reason the Doctor would not look either of them in the face. ‘Sometimes you have to live with the consequences of your actions,’ he replied coldly.

‘That’s terrible.’ Nyssa was close to tears; but the Doctor pretended not to notice.

‘Doctor!’ shouted Tegan suddenly.

‘Something’s happening,’ Nyssa gasped.

‘Not at all,’ replied the Doctor, still concentrating on his navigation. ‘We’re on course for Brendon School in 1983.’

‘Doctor!’ The Brigadier, who had been watching the two girls for several moments, cried out in horror. The Doctor spun round. Nothing could have prepared him for the appalling sight of his two companions.

Tegan’s auburn hair had turned white. Wrinkles raced across her face like cracks in thin ice, and her teeth were beginning to leer from shrunken gums; she was suddenly as old as the hills.

Nyssa’s skin, too, was a network of puckering pleats and lines, her mouth gaunt and twisted as a crone’s.

‘What’s happening!’ shouted the Brigadier.

The Doctor just stared, amazed beyond belief, at the time-worn faces of the girls.

‘Doctor, do something!’ cackled the senile Nyssa.

‘Please... Doctor!’ Hardly more than a death rattle came from Tegan’s throat.

‘Tegan... Nyssa...’ stammered the Doctor helplessly.

The young girls’s clothes hung limply round the bodies of the shrinking hags. Older and older grew the two companions as the TARDIS travelled through time and space. Soon their flesh would be dust.

‘Like Mawdryn in the lab,’ whispered the Brigadier, peering aghast at Tegan and Nyssa’s withering bodies.

‘Mawdryn!’ cried the Doctor. ‘They’ve been contaminated...’ He had only the merest intuition of the terrible syndrome from which, within minutes, both girls would surely be dead. He wracked his brains for some quick antidote. ‘The transfiguration can be contained,’ he muttered, desperately near panic.

‘Stop!’ Nyssa’s strangled cry was barely audible, but the Doctor immediately leaped to the console.

‘Stop! That’s it!’ He instantly reversed the co-ordinates.

‘Travelling through time has accelerated the degeneration.’

The Brigadier looked over the Doctor’s shoulder at the flashing lights on the console. ‘You’ve stopped the TARDIS?’

‘More than that.’ The Doctor stared anxiously at the mummified faces of Tegan and Nyssa. ‘We’re going back to where we started. I just hope it induces a proportional remission.’

The younger Brigadier’s knuckles were raw with banging against the walls of his prison. He had explored every inch of the sealed chamber and attacked the surround of the door with penknife, pipe-cleaners and ballpoint pen, but to no avail. If ever he caught up with that impudent whippersnapper, Turlough...

He found himself staring at the ornamentation around the door. Part of the frieze seemed to be loose. He ran his hand gently over the entablature; there was a click, and the door swung back. He was free.

Weak with relief the Doctor knelt over the two exhausted girls.

‘It worked!’ observed the Brigadier gruffly, equally gratified to see Tegan and Nyssa returned to their normal selves.

‘Doctor, what went wrong?’

The Doctor tried to describe the infection they must have picked up when they carried Mawdryn into the TARDIS; a viral side-effect of the mutants’ constant experimentation. The Brigadier wondered, ominously, whether he too would succumb to his brief contact with the creature in the laboratory.

‘So we can’t travel through time?’ said Nyssa, as she realised the implications of what the Doctor had just told them.

‘We don’t need to time-travel,’ interrupted Tegan, who only wanted to get back to Earth.

The Doctor shook his head. ‘I have to programme a temporal deviation to escape the warp ellipse.’

‘Look!’ The Brigadier pointed at the scanner. Standing, like a guard of honour, outside the TARDIS, dressed in their finest robes, were Mawdryn and his brothers in exile.

‘They knew this was going to happen.’

‘That’s why they let us go so easily,’ said the Doctor bitterly.

‘You mean we’re stuck on this ship?’

‘I wonder!’ The Doctor returned defiantly to the console. ‘If I reversed the trajectory...’

‘The Doctor will not give up so easily,’ said Mawdryn to his comrades, as the TARDIS dematerialised a second time. The confident smile disappeared from his face as a middle-aged Earthman in a blue blazer rushed into the empty space left by the police box.

It had never occured to the younger Lethbridge-Stewart, when he left to reconnoitre the ship, that the time-machine could leave without him, and it had been a considerable shock as he turned the corner by the staircase, to see the light on the police box already flashing. He sprinted forward... but too late.

The presence of the alien from the TARDIS, together with seven more of similar ilk was a further surprise to the Brigadier. But it was nothing to the confusion and dismay of the eight vigilants at his own arrival.

‘Brigadier!’ exclaimed Mawdryn, who had just seen the same military gentleman leave with the Doctor.

‘This man is also in the TARDIS,’ warned a fellow Mutant.

‘He is a deviant!’ cried another.

‘There has been temporal duplication!’

There was consternation amongst the mutants.

‘The TARDIS will soon return. The imbalance could be cataclysmic,’ declared Mawdryn. ‘For your own safety you must return to Earth at once.’ He grabbed the Brigadier by the arm and hurried him in the direction of the control centre.

‘So far so good.’ The older version of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart was anxiously watching Tegan and Nyssa as they time-travelled away from the ship. The Doctor stood beside the console, hand poised over the controls.

‘It’s no good!’ wailed Nyssa in a plaintive voice.

‘But nothing’s happening,’ protested the Brigadier.

‘Oh yes it is,’ said the Doctor in despair.

Lethbridge-Stewart looked more closely at the two girls.

There was a look of bland innocence on Nyssa’s face, a softening of the aggressive line of Tegan’s jaw. They were both suddenly thinner, shorter...

‘We’re travelling in the opposite direction,’ explained the Doctor. ‘It’s having the reverse effect.’

‘Stop! Stop!’ piped the voices of two tiny children.

As Tegan and Nyssa regressed towards infancy, the Doctor reversed the direction of the TARDIS.

Mawdryn returned from the control centre in time to see the police box rematerialise at the foot of the stairs.

Everything was happening as he had predicted. All things proceeded towards the ending.

Leaving the Brigadier to comfort his two companions, the Doctor returned to the console where an intermittent buzzing had begun to sound in the communications section. Someone must be trying to operate the transmat capsule. ‘Obviously Turlough taking your other half to the centre of the TARDIS.’ He explained his plan for avoiding the Blinovitch Limitation Effect to the older Brigadier.

‘Can the capsule do that?’

‘Only when the TARDIS is clear of the ship. Until that happens the transmat can’t take place. The capsule will return to its terminal.’

The junior Brigadier opened the door of the silver sphere into which he had been so unceremoniously bundled. He was still on board the alien’s ship. Lethbridge-Stewart was not surprised; he had never really believed the creature when he pretended to be the Doctor, and he certainly wasn’t going to be persuaded that this bauble would transmit him to Earth.

There was a sudden bleeping, quite different from the whirring and buzzing when he operated the so-called transmat control. He caught sight of a rather familiar round object wired into the control panel. He could swear that was the Doctor’s homing device. But how... As the Brigadier’s hand went to his blazer pocket, it froze as if paralysed by an electric shock – that deuced static again.