Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [1]
‘What, is that it?’ Sarah grumped.
The Doctor didn’t reply. He looked up, at last, a frown of concern blooming among the wrinkles at the corners of his mouth. Still wearing his “grim” expression, Sarah noted. Actually, the Doctor’s face had a kind of built-in grimness about it. A nose that wasn’t so much hawk-like as vulture-ish, a forehead that someone had carved worry lines into with a Swiss Army knife... sometimes, his features almost looked as if they’d been sculpted out of marble, and that white hair of his – which never seemed to get ruffled, no matter how many ventilator shafts he crawled through – didn’t make him look any more human.
‘Oh,’ Sarah mumbled. ‘Sorry. Forgot. A funeral. Sombre atmosphere from now on. Promise.’
‘Thank you,’ said the Doctor, quite gently, and his hand performed a fifteen-second ballet across the console. The central column shifted an inch or so, the scanner flickering as the TARDIS moved closer to the smear. It was a metal tube, that much was clear now, evidently a relic from the days when sticking antennae all over spacecraft was considered to be a really smart idea and you could still use the word “rocket” without anyone sniggering.
Sarah tried to look interested. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘A tomb,’ said the Doctor. He couldn’t resist a touch of the theatrical, God bless him. ‘It’s been floating freely for some time now. That’s why it took the TARDIS so long to find it, you see? No fixed co-ordinates. Won’t be long before it gets pulled back into Earth’s gravity and... fsht.’ He demonstrated the concept of atmospheric burn-up by making an elaborate gesture with three of his fingers.
Sarah clacked her tongue. ‘All right. You said you wanted a funeral. Any explanations, or should I just go off in a sulk again?’
The Doctor smiled, but only weakly. ‘There’s a body inside that capsule, Sarah-Jane. The body of a traveller. A great traveller, you might say. This is something I’ve been meaning to do since the early days, but it’s only now I’ve put the new dematerialisation circuit in that the TARDIS can steer herself properly...’
Sarah had the horrible feeling she was about to be kidnapped and led blindfold into Technogubbins City. ‘So why would anyone want to put a corpse into orbit? Bit grizzly, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, the occupant was alive when the capsule was launched. Alive and kicking.’
‘What went wrong?’
‘Nothing went wrong. It was a one-way trip, that’s all.’
The column shifted again, and something began to materialise on the floor of the console room, a few feet from where Sarah was standing. The object was roughly the same shape as a shuttlecock, a couple of yards from tip to tail. No, not a shuttlecock; more like one of those ice-creams you used to get in the ’60s, the ones that came in plastic cones with balls of bubblegum at the bottom. The shape was smooth and metallic, with rust-coloured letters stencilled across its surface. The words weren’t in English, and the Rs were the wrong way round.
It was the silver thing, Sarah realised. Or at least, the capsule that had been attached to the end of the silver thing. The TARDIS had neatly materialised around it. Sarah had no idea where the rest of the tube might have gone, but she doubted it was worth asking.
The Doctor knelt down, with a small sigh of effort, then slipped his sonic whatsit out of a crushed velvet pocket and got to work on the capsule’s rivets. A minute later, the wide end of the object fell away. The scent of old leather and electrified air wafted out of the space inside, but there were none of the smells Sarah would have associated with death, no hint of decay or decomposition. Trying not to feel like a spectator at a traffic accident, she squatted down next to the Doctor and peered into the opening.
There was hardly any room in there, almost no space for supplies, barely enough even for the tangled mass of metal and rubber that was presumably the rudimentary life-support system. Just as Sarah was