Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [3]
He understood the truth and he knew how to find it. He was probably still mad, though.
‘I want you to stay here,’ he said wrapping the scarf round his neck several times and clamping the hat on his head. ‘In the TARDIS.’
‘Why? Where are you going?’ Leela looked at the doors, which were so large in here and so small out there. She knew there was a trick to that which involved not believing what your eyes were seeing, and eventually she would work it out.
In the meantime, what she could see on the scanner screen was limited and as always the Doctor was ready simply to trust the TARDIS to tell him that it was safe outside. He appeared to think that the doors would not open unless it was. She peered hard at the picture of where the travelling hut had stopped. The ground looked flat, there were trees which looked like standard forest vegetation, and there was nothing obvious lurking in the immediate vicinity. All was silent stillness, not even a breeze moved in the trees.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ the Doctor said.
‘What for?’
‘I need to stretch my legs. Walking helps me think.’
Leela turned back to watching the screen for signs of movement. ‘The larger predators will wait to see what we are and how we move. It would be wise for us to do the same.’
The Doctor began to show renewed signs of exaggerated patience. ‘There are no large predators,’ he said as if addressing a troublesome child. ‘The conditions are unsuitable for their development.’
‘How do you know that?’ Leela was not to be cowed by his tone. ‘You do not even know where we are. Why will you not admit that you cannot control this – this –’ She gestured round the console room.
‘Travelling hut?’ the Doctor offered.
‘TARDIS.’ Leela managed to sound appropriately dismissive of the slur on her understanding of the travelling hut.
‘Which means?’ The Doctor said, adjusting the door control sequence.
She struggled to remember what the acronym stood for, finally managing, ‘Time And Relative Dimension In Space.’
‘Which means?’ He was rather shamefaced about that one. It was not a fair question. There were one or two Time Lords around who had trouble giving concise and coherent summaries of the theory.
‘It means, I think,’ Leela snapped, ‘that we are lost.’
Without warning the Doctor strode towards the doors, which opened as he approached. ‘I shan’t be long,’ he said, walking through.
Leela moved to follow him. ‘I will come with you,’ she said, but he had already gone. The doors closed behind him and did not open again when she reached them. She pushed at them. She took out her knife and tried to insert the point in the crack where the two halves met.
‘The doors won’t open,’ the Doctor’s voice said from the screen. ‘It’s for your own good.’
Leela turned to look at the scanner. He seemed to be looking directly at her, though she knew he was not. ‘Any sounds you hear in the TARDIS are normal, so try not to attack anything while I’m gone,’ the picture said. ‘You are perfectly safe. Nothing can get to you in there.’
‘And what happens when you do not come back?’ she shouted at the Doctor, but in the picture he had turned away and was strolling off through the trees. ‘I am not going to die in here,’ she said more quietly to herself, ‘like an animal in a trap because you think nothing can get to you out there.’ She stood perfectly still for a moment and took a couple of deep breaths. She must reason this out carefully, as the Doctor did. As the Doctor did on most other occasions. A door was a door: a way of blocking up an entrance hole in a wall. There were only so many things you could do to make a door open and close and none of them was magic. Something is done and something happens as a result. What did the Doctor call it? Cause and effect? So what did the Doctor do to cause the door to open? Leela crossed to the control console, parts of which were still glowing and flickering in a sleepy sort of way, and stood