Doctor Who_ Wooden Heart - Martin Day [4]
The small area was no bigger than the box room at the front of the house where Martha had spent so much of her childhood. In the cell were a bed, a folding desk and a single cupboard high up in the corner of one of the walls. There was a screen at the far end of the room: whatever its original function, it resembled a dark, oversized tile as no power went to it now.
A few indeterminate items of clothing were scattered on the floor. A thick layer of dust had fallen on the desk and the pens and other items that cluttered its surface. ‘No air filtration in here,’ Martha observed in a whisper, remembering the pristine corridor they had landed in.
‘No,’ said the Doctor, his own voice a funereal whisper. ‘Not a high enough priority, I suppose.’
Martha reached out to run her finger across the desk, then remembered that household dust was largely composed of shed human skin. She shivered, staring intently at the object of the Doctor’s curiosity, for lying in the bunk, curled as if sleeping, was the long-dead body of a man, tatters of bleached-grey overall still clinging to his limbs.
‘How long has he been dead?’ she asked, appalled but unable to avert her gaze from the cracked, shrivelled skin.
The Doctor popped his glasses back on his nose, dropping his head to look more closely at the dead man than even Martha, with all her medical training to back her up, would have been comfortable with. ‘What with the somewhat garbled information I was able to glean from the central computer, and given the obvious age of his body…’ He paused. ‘Whatever happened on this craft, it all took place at least a hundred years ago.’
‘A hundred years?’
‘Yeah, give or take. The artificial atmosphere means the corpse has become… sort of mummified. The outer few layers of the epidermis have gone’ – Martha glanced at the dust again and a shiver went down her spine – ‘but the rest of the body has just… dried out.’
The Doctor turned to look at Martha, his body language reassuring despite his words and the environment they found themselves in.
‘So sad,’ he added, quietly.
‘Any idea what killed him?’ Martha asked, opening up the cupboard but finding only two small porcelain figures and a thick paperback book.
‘Dunno,’ said the Doctor, slipping his glasses into a pocket. ‘How do you fancy putting your training in pathology to the test?’
‘Not absolutely number one on my list of things to do in the next five minutes,’ said Martha.
‘So perhaps we’d better find another way. Less… invasive.’ He turned for the door. ‘What was the book in the cupboard, by the way?’
‘Freud’s Interpretations of Dreams,’ said Martha, pleased to be following him out of the room.
The Doctor nodded, then pointed to the control panel set into the doorway. ‘You can only open the cell doors from outside,’ he said. ‘This part of the ship… It’s definitely a prison.’
‘What would a prison be doing on a research vessel?’ asked Martha.
‘Depends what it’s researching.’ His voice became deadly serious. ‘But I think we just found our first guinea pig.’
They stood for a moment on the circular gantry, Martha marvelling at the sheer size of the place. On the TARDIS scanners it was hard to get a sense of scale just by looking at something against the backdrop of space. As a result she’d been expecting something grim and claustrophobic, like the Russian-American space station she had mentioned to the Doctor. The reality, however, was a vast expanse of endless alloy and open space.
Mind you, the cell had been grim and claustrophobic – the prisoners here, if that’s what they were, certainly hadn’t been living the life of Riley.
She turned to the Doctor, still thinking of the few items she’d found in the cupboard. ‘I’m surprised that people in the future still have books,’ she said. ‘The way technology advances, I thought you’d… Plug yourself into a computer and download stuff straight into your brain.’
‘Even when something new and flashy comes along,’ observed the Doctor, ‘the old forms persist.