Doctor Who_ Earthworld - Jacqueline Rayner [94]
While he’d been talking, the Doctor had finished lashing up the machine to the console. He tried to run a lead across to Elizabethan but it wouldn’t quite reach, so Anji and Xernic had to drag the sofa a bit closer in order for the Doctor to be able to attach connections to the android-woman’s head. Then he knelt down next to the nightmare contraption and plugged himself into the controller’s section – where Asia had died. He flashed a smile at Fitz and Anji.
‘Here goes!’ he called. And that was it, with no ceremony he’d flicked a switch and a look of fierce concentration took hold of his face.
Fitz couldn’t drag his eyes from the Doctor. What if this was the last time he saw the Doctor he knew? His mind had been almost destroyed once by what he’d done. What would happen this time? And he couldn’t tell the Doctor that it was a really bad idea to have his memories restored, because he’d have to Dear TARDIS...
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explain why and that would be just as bad. No, if the Doctor was going to remember, he had to do it naturally. In his own time. So it wasn’t another sudden, Doctor-destroying shock.
Everyone was busy, fussing about what was going on. No one noticed Fitz slip through the big wooden doors on the far side of the room.
He wandered down the corridors, not quite sure where to go. The console room was the obvious place, the heart of the TARDIS, but that was no good at the moment, being full of people as it was. In the end, he decided on the library. It seemed a very Doctorish sort of place.
With Compassion he’d just sort of talked and she’d heard him. He’d never tried to speak to this TARDIS before. But the Doctor referred to it – her – as a person. It was worth a go. He still felt a bit silly, though.
He stood in the middle of the library, clutching a copy of The Tale of Peter Rabbit for emotional support. He spoke quietly. ‘Um. . . I don’t know if you can hear me. But if you can, I expect you probably. . . well, care about him, like I do. And you mustn’t let him use that machine. Please. Um, that’s all. Thank you.’ Then he went back to the console room.
He took a deep breath in the calm of the corridor before stepping back into the chaos.
It seemed he’d missed most of the action. The Doctor and Elizabethan were still hooked up to the Memory Machine – and the TARDIS console. But the Doctor’s eyes were flickering open, and he was sitting up. Fitz spared a glance for the President’s wife, and saw that her lips were opening soundlessly. Words were forming, but he couldn’t tell what she was trying to say. Her husband was kneeling by her side, mumbling incomprehensible sounds of encouragement.
He was holding her hand so tightly that her fingertips had turned bright red.
Back to the Doctor, whose eyes were open now. ‘It worked, didn’t it?’ he said, smiling. ‘I could feel it working. Well done, old girl.’ He reached an arm up over his shoulder to pat the central console.
The console spat sparks at him. The Doctor yelped and leapt up, clearly astonished.
‘Something’s going wrong!’ cried Anji – and something certainly was: an electric-blue current streaked down the wires towards the Doctor and Elizabethan. The Doctor yanked the connectors from his head, and dived towards the unconscious woman, but Anji had got there first and grabbed a handful of 172
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wires. With a scream she was thrown backwards, hitting her head and lying still. Xernic was by her side in a second.
Fitz was rooted to the spot. ‘I didn’t mean you to hurt anyone,’ he whispered.
‘I wanted to stop people being hurt.’
The Doctor was with Elizabethan now, detaching wires from the spasming body. The last one gone, she lay still. And the Memory Machine exploded.
Fitz managed to move this time, throwing himself towards the Doctor, trying to get between the Doctor and the explosion. . . which wasn’t happening.
There was an un explosion, just as Fitz landed on top of the Doctor.
The Doctor beamed at him. ‘The TARDIS! She’s contained it! The clever old thing.’ Then he glanced ruefully