Doctor Who_ Earthworld - Jacqueline Rayner [96]
EarthWorld
TARDIS before: he could have had some fun. But maybe it hadn’t been there, back then.
Anji was frowning. ‘I hope you’ve got some crash helmets for that thing,’ she said.
The Doctor kept grinning. ‘Oh, I’m sure I have. I’m very safety-conscious.’
Fitz stifled a snort of laughter. The Doctor closed his eyes and spun round in a circle with his arm outstretched. When he stopped, he strode over to the roundel his finger was pointing at, and to Fitz’s surprise, clicked it open to reveal a storage space.
Inside were two crash helmets. One was grass-green, with a white-and-yellow daisy painted on it. The Doctor took that one out and handed it to Hoover. The other was shiny black with a mirrored visor. He gave that to Elizabethan, and then helped Hoover to lift her into the sidecar. ‘There only seem to be two,’ he called across to Xernic. ‘Sorry.’
‘That’s all right,’ said the boy, not sounding all right at all. ‘I’ll walk.’
Fitz, trying to help, flipped the switch to open the main doors. For some reason, he half expected them to be in another world already, even though the TARDIS hadn’t moved, but the same barren prehistoric plain was outside. They wheeled out the bike, everyone trying to help a bit, the Doctor helping Hoover to carry Elizabethan while giving him instructions on what bit of the bike did what, and how to stay upright. Fitz wondered how much of it the President was actually taking in, because he seemed unable to take his eyes off his wife. But after she had been laid in the sidecar, he climbed on to the saddle as the Doctor indicated, and an instant later the bike was roaring into life. Fitz thought he made out a ‘thank you!’ over the noise of the engine, and Elizabethan seemed to be trying to raise her arm in farewell – and then the President and his wife were zooming across the rocky ground, and soon they were just a faint dark blob on the horizon.
‘Well, that’s everything sorted,’ said the Doctor. ‘Come on Fitz, Anji, time we were off.’
Sorted? Well, perhaps. The President’s right-hand man was dead, along with a young girl (albeit a homicidal one), and a lot of other people as well. The planet’s main social and economic hope (as Fitz understood it) was now useless, and the woman who had been running it was among the dead, anyway (although she’d been homicidal, too. Perhaps it was something in the water. . . ).
Oh, and Anji had probably broken someone’s heart without realising it. All of this they’d ‘sorted’.
But he decided not to mention it to the Doctor. He just gave Xernic, the poor Dear TARDIS...
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kid, a ‘so long’ wave, and went back into the TARDIS. Behind him, he heard the Doctor say goodbye, and then he followed Fitz inside. On the scanner, they saw Anji give the boy a hug and a peck on the cheek. Xernic seemed to be about to say something – but then he didn’t. Anji came back inside too, and the Doctor switched off the scanner. The picture shrank down to a white dot, just as it did on the TVs of Fitz’s time that the scanner resembled. Then even the dot disappeared.
A green-sleeved arm stuck out of the door and waved for a moment, before vanishing back inside. A few seconds later the whole police box disappeared.
Xernic stood watching the empty space for a few moments. He unzipped the top of his jumpsuit, and folded it back. He unpinned the small badge reading ANJI, and zipped up his top again. He looked at the badge for a while, then fastened it to the front of his jumpsuit. Then he sat down in the middle of the grey featureless plain, hugging his knees to him, staring sightlessly ahead.
After a while, he got up and began walking back to the city.
Almost the instant she was back inside the TARDIS, Anji had rushed off. To her adopted room, Fitz reckoned. Probably best to leave her alone for a bit.
Now it was just Fitz