Doctor Who_ Wooden Heart - Martin Day [2]
The great engines at the heart of the TARDIS began to wheeze and shudder.
. Are we going to take a look?’ asked Martha, wondering if the Doctor could pick up the uncertainty in her voice. Exploring a rusting old space station stuffed with dead bodies – or worse – didn’t exactly sound like a barrel of laughs. ‘What am I saying?’ she realised, seeing the Doctor’s expression. ‘Of course we’re going to take a look.’
‘So, why the Castor?’ asked Martha some moments later as they stepped through the TARDIS doors and into darkness.
‘Good question,’ said the Doctor. He busied himself at a small panel on the wall, illuminated only by the piercing blue glow of his sonic screwdriver, then stepped backed triumphantly as the lights flickered on.
‘Fiat lux!’ he said triumphantly. ‘From the Latin for My small Italian car is on fire…’
‘They’re not very bright,’ said Martha. The lights that had come on were glowing dully, leaving pockets of shadow at regular intervals.
‘Night cycle,’ said the Doctor. He looked down the long, gently arcing corridor they found themselves in. ‘I imagine whoever named this craft had a love of the classics.’
‘Castor, as in Castor and Pollux – the sons of Led a,’ said Martha, trying to elevate the conversation somewhat – and, if truth be told, wondering if she could impress the Doctor with her learning.
‘That’s right,’ said the Doctor, peering at another panel recessed into the wall. ‘Probably why on the colony world of Aractus they still say Never turn your back on a swan.’
Martha sighed. That was the problem with the Doctor – you had no way of working out if he was telling the truth, or deliberately escalating the conversation into the realms of the absurd. ‘I’ll remember that next time I’m on Aractus,’ she said.
‘Castor was said to be a skilled horse tamer,’ said the Doctor, ‘whereas Pollux was a pugnacious pugilist. I wonder if that has a bearing on this ship. People rarely just a pluck a name from the air – it always means something. Take Martha, for example…’
‘Martha means “mistress of the house”. I remember looking it up in the library when I was a kid.’ Martha smiled. ‘Mum just said she liked the sound of it.’
‘There could be other reasons, I suppose,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s a place near Peterborough called Castor. Just off the A47…’
‘So you’re wondering if the owner of this spaceship was born near Peterborough…? Nothing against Peterborough, but I prefer your first suggestion.’
‘You do?’ said the Doctor absentmindedly as he pulled the mesh covering the panel clean off the wall. ‘You should have heard my third idea…’
‘Which was?’
‘Whoever owned this ship was a fan of the Popeye cartoons.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Poor Popeye – hopelessly addicted to spinach and skinny women… Anyway, Olive Oyl’s brother was called Castor.’
‘You’re a fount of useless information,’ said Martha.
‘Don’t you mean “useful”?’
‘I mean what I said.’ She tried to see what the Doctor was doing. ‘How come the lights are working?’ she asked.
‘Solar power,’ said the Doctor, as if that explained everything.
‘I’ve seen pictures of the space station,’ said Martha. ‘The one the Americans and the Soviets are building. They’ve got huge solar panels, but I didn’t see anything like that on this ship.’
‘It’s integrated into the very fabric of the craft,’ said the Doctor. ‘Almost every external component and hull panel plays its part.’
‘But you were just telling me how empty bits of space are. This thing might not have been anywhere near a sun for ages.’
The Doctor slipped on his glasses while peering at the panel’s small read-out screen. ‘It’s obviously had just enough sunlight to keep it ticking over. To be fair, it hasn’t had to expend much energy recently – a smidge on life support, a soupcon on a few other essential systems… The engines haven’t been used in years, so it’s just kind