Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [8]
'Sort of feels like it too,' Ian admitted as he stood, gripping the arms of the chair for support. `You ought to see the other fellah...'
`... but it hurts,' shouted Vicki from across the room.
Òf course it does,' replied the Doctor, in exasperation. 'It's supposed to.'
Barbara rolled her eyes. 'We'll have to get her toughened up a bit,' she said, glancing at their newest travelling companion. Ian followed her gaze at the girl who, with the bandage applied to her arm, was now discovering other bumps and bruises. And complaining, loudly, about them.
'She's got a chip on her shoulder the size of Big Ben,'
continued Barbara. 'I told her to act her age and she asked how she was supposed to "act fourteen". You'd never have heard impertinence like that from Susan.'
`You've got a short memory!' Ian noted with a wry smile.
'Susan could be a right scallywag when the mood took her.
Vicki's no different'
`Perhaps,' Barbara replied, 'but I can't see the Doctor putting up with too many lead-swinging performances like this, look-alike replacement or whatsoever...’
Ian was amused by this. 'If she'd gone to Coal Hill, you'd have sent her to Mrs McGregor, no doubt?'
Barbara winced at the thought of the eighteen-stone Scottish form mistress who not only terrified all of the pupils, but a fair percentage of the staff as well. 'I can't see Vicki at Coal Hill, somehow,' she noted.
`Come to that, I can't see you or I returning to a life of registers, dinner money and log tables,' said Ian flatly. That he had given a lot of thought to the possibility of returning home didn't surprise Barbara in the slightest. She, herself, spent a portion of every day pondering on when and if it would ever happen.
'Do you think we ever will get back?' she asked. 'To our own time, I mean?'
'In the lap of the Gods,' Ian noted with a fatalistic shrug of his shoulders. 'Or, should I say, in the hands of the Doctor?'
Ìs it always like this? asked Vicki as she flexed her bandaged arm.
'No,' replied Ian. 'Now and again we actually arrive somewhere and don't get thrown headfirst into peril, danger and mayhem, Isn't that right, Doctor?'
The Doctor raised his head from a complex piece of TARDIS equipment, clasped the lapels of his Edwardian waistcoat and strode purposefully towards Ian who was standing by the console.' What's that, eh? Had enough, have you, hmm? Care to get off? I'm sure that could be arranged.'
He peered at the schoolteacher across the rim of the half-moon spectacles that rested on the bridge of his nose, his blue-grey eyes resembling a raging sea in the middle of a force-ten gale.
Vicki stared, aghast. This was to be her new home? A surrogate family of squabbling, loud, authority figures.
'Stop fighting, you two,' said Barbara, clearly embarrassed that their new companion was being introduced to such a confrontational aspect of TARDIS life, `We're safe now... For the time being, anyway. Shouldn't we find out exactly where we've landed?'
The Doctor gave a muffled humph of bellicose indifference and moved to the console, edging Ian out of the way with a terse ‘excuse me'.
'A vexed question, clearly,' Ian observed as he followed.
'Earth,' the Doctor said, grandly, pushing a few random buttons until the TARDIS scanner spluttered into life. He noted the joyous expressions on Ian and Barbara's face with clear disdain. There was an entire universe to explore out there. Whilst he waited for the picture to clear, the Doctor read from the gauges in front of him. 'The Yearometer tells us that the date is, using a calendar that you would be familiar with, 14 March. In the year 64.’
'AD or BC?' asked Ian.
`The former,' replied the Doctor. 'We appear to be somewhere close to the peninsular between the Bosphorus straits and the Black Sea.'
`Turkey?'
`Thrace during this period,' corrected Barbara. `More of a Greek and Macedonian influence than Middle Eastern, though it's likely to be under Roman rule. It consisted of a series of free city-states until circa AD73. Before that they were all