Doctor Who and the Crusaders (2 page)

As swiftly and as silently as a shadow, Doctor Who’s Space and Time ship,
Tardis
, appeared on a succession of planets each as different as the pebbles on a beach, stayed awhile and then vanished, as mysteriously as it had come. And whatever alien world it was that received him and his fellow travellers, and however well or badly they were treated, the Doctor always set things to rights, put down injustice, encouraged dignity, fair treatment and respect.

But there had been changes inside the ship. Susan had gone, left behind in an England all but destroyed in the twenty-first century when the Daleks had attempted the conquest of Earth, an invasion only just foiled by the Doctor. No decision was more difficult for Susan or easier for her grandfather, who knew in his heart that she must share her future with David Cameron, a young man she had met and fallen in love with during that terrible struggle between the Doctor and his arch-enemies.

Only Ian and Barbara, kidnapped by the Doctor from their lives in the England of the 1960s and now his close friends, knew the real aching sadness the loss of Susan meant to the old man, and it was they who persuaded him to take on as a passenger a young girl named Vicki whom they rescued from the planet Dido. And, as the Doctor grew more interested in the little, fair-haired orphan and devoted himself to her care and well-being (which Vicki repaid with a totally single-minded love and respect) his friends were secretly overjoyed to see a new and vigorous spring in the Doctor’s step, a
happy gleam in his eye and a fresh interest in the unknown adventures that lay ahead.

Ian and Barbara had changed too. Ian was now a deeply tanned bronze, his body trained to the last minute, no single trace remaining of the ordinary Londoner he had once been. But the alteration wasn’t confined to muscle and sinew alone. Ian had encountered situations beyond the concept of any young man of his age. He had faced dangers and been forced to make decisions a countless number of times, where not only his own life, but the lives of others, stood in peril. Experience had proved to him that strength and fitness alone weren’t enough in the sort of emergencies he had to handle, and so he had turned his new life to advantage, learned from it and improved by it, until his brain was sharp and active, tuned to deal with whatever problems might present themselves.

The change in Barbara was entirely different; harder, perhaps, to find; a much more subtle thing. For unlike Ian, she could have been put back in London in the old life she had known, among friends and acquaintances and not one of them would have found any major alterations to puzzle or bewilder them. The golden tan on her skin might have come from a long holiday in the West Indies. Her superb physical condition could be explained away by regular visits to a gymnasium. For what was totally new in Barbara grew and fostered inside the girl. She had always had that sense of mystery about her, even on Earth in her own time; she had always been very beautiful, her mind had always reached ahead for answers and conclusions while others struggled to grasp the situation. Now, life inside the
Tardis
had given full reign to her air of mystery, and the adventures outside it had deepened her love for life in all its various forms, maturing her sense of values, giving her the ability to taste the joys and sorrows of existence to the absolute last drop. Where her face
and form had conjured up beauty in the eye of any beholder, now beauty radiated from within and trebled her physical attractions, making her the admiration and desire of all who met her. But always her eyes turned to Ian and their hands were ready to reach out and touch, for, whatever world of the future enmeshed them, they knew their destinies were bound up in each other – the one sure thing, fixed and unalterable, in the ever-changing life with the Doctor.

The question of change itself became the subject of a conversation one evening in the
Tardis
, between Ian and the Doctor. Barbara and Vicki were playing a game of Martian chess – a complicated affair with seventy-two pieces – while the two men rested on a Victorian chaise-longue facing the centre-control column of the ship, for the Doctor’s eyes were never far away from his precious dials and instruments. Behind them lay the adventure of the talking stones of the tiny planet of Tyron, in the seventeenth galaxy. Around them, the ship shivered faintly as it hurled itself through Space and Time. A dozen minute tape-recorder spools whirled frantically on one side, while hundreds of little bulbs on the central control column glowed intermittently, in a never-ending sequence. The stately Ormulu clock ticked its needless way through a time pattern which had no meaning, kept in the ship purely for decoration. On the other side of it, some twenty feet away on a tall marble column, stood the magnificent bust of Napoleon Bonaparte. The pale gold of the interior lighting of the
Tardis
shone down on the travellers like warm afternoon sunshine.

The Doctor shifted his feet impatiently and then leaned towards the Martian chess-board, darting out a rigid finger.

‘You’re forgetting the one important rule, Vicki, my dear,’ he said testily. ‘To marry your Princess to an opposing Lord, you must bring up your Priest.’ He smiled apologetically at
Barbara, as Vicki nodded excitedly, moved up one of her pieces and captured an enemy Lord.

‘I’m sorry, Barbara, but you did leave yourself open.’ Barbara looked at him indignantly.

‘I was planning to marry my Captain to her Duchess. Now you’ve made me lose a dowry.’

The two girls started to bargain over the forfeit as the Doctor sat back.

‘I’d better keep myself to myself,’ he muttered to Ian. He wriggled himself into a more comfortable position, crossing one leg over the other and folding his arms. The polish on his elastic-sided boots gleamed beneath the immaculate spats. The perfectly tied cravat sat comfortably beneath the stiff, white wing-collar, enhanced by a pearl stick-pin. No speck of dust or tiny crease were anywhere in evidence on his tapered black jacket, with its edges bound in black silk, or on the narrow trousers, patterned in black-and-white check. The long, silver hair hung down from the proudly held head, obscuring the back of his coat collar. Gold pince-nez, attached around the neck by a thin, black satin tape, completed the picture Ian and Barbara had always known. For the Doctor’s favourite costume was that of the Edwardian, English gentleman of the early nineteen hundreds. Ian had always thought the Doctor might have stepped straight out of the drawings of the famous magazines of the period,
The Strand
or
Vanity Fair
. And as Ian marvelled (for about the thousandth time!) at the Doctor’s obsession with that one, short period of life on Earth, when he had all space from which to choose, it brought a question to his lips he had often wished to have answered.

‘It’s often puzzled me how it is, Doctor, that we can visit all these different worlds and affect the course of life. You must confess we have interfered, often in quite a major kind of way.’

‘Always for the best intentions, and generally we’ve succeeded,’ murmured the old man. Ian nodded.

‘That really isn’t my point, though. Why is it that when we land on Earth, with all the pre-knowledge of history at our disposal, we can’t right one single wrong, make good the bad or change one tiny evil? Why are we able to do these things on other planets and not on Earth?’

Barbara and Vicki forgot their game and stared at the Doctor, who pressed the fingers of his hands together and thought for a moment before replying.

‘You see, Chesterton,’ he said eventually, ‘the fascination your planet has for me is that its Time pattern, that is, past, present and future, is all one – like a long, winding mountain path. When the four of us land at any given point on that path, we are still only climbers. Time is our guide. As climbers we may observe the scenery. We may know a little of what is around a coming corner. But we cannot stop the landslides, for we are roped completely to Time and must be led by it. All we can do is observe.’

‘What would happen if we cut those ropes and tried to change something?’ asked Vicki.

‘Warn Napoleon he would lose at Waterloo?’ smiled the Doctor. ‘It wouldn’t have any effect. Bonaparte would still believe he could win and ignore the warning.’

‘Suppose one were to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1930, then?’ suggested Barbara. The Doctor shook his head.

‘But Hitler wasn’t assassinated in 1930, was he? No, Barbara, it would be impossible. Once we are on Earth, we become a part of the history that is being created and we are as subject to its laws as the people who are living in that period.’

‘Then we can never die on Earth,’ said Ian.

The Doctor said, ‘We do not have everlasting lives, my
friend. Of course we can die on Earth or anywhere else, just as we can catch colds or suffer burns. Try and understand.’

The Doctor leaned forward and, as he did so, a part of his face slipped into a shadow.

‘Often our escape clause on Earth has been that we have pre-knowledge that some awful catastrophe is going to happen. We would know when to leave Pompeii. We would not go fishing on the Somme river in the summer of 1916. We would not disguise ourselves as Phoenicians and live in Carthage in
A.D
. 648 and let ourselves be destroyed with the city by the Arabs. Or go for a sea-voyage in the
Titanic
.’

‘Then we can do nothing for suffering,’ murmured Barbara sadly. ‘We can never help anyone on Earth or avert horrible wars.’

She looked up at the Doctor and was surprised to see a slight smile on his lips.

‘There is a story about Clive of India,’ the old man remarked casually, ‘which tells how he attempted to commit suicide as a young man by putting a pistol to his head. Three times he pulled the trigger and each time the gun failed to explode. Yet whenever he turned it away, the pistol fired perfectly. As you know, Robert Clive did eventually take his own life in 1774. The point is that Time, that great regulator, refused to let the man die before things were done that had to be done.’

The Doctor held up a hand as all three of his friends started to speak.

‘I know exactly what you’re all about to say. Why do men like Lincoln and Kennedy, those two outstanding American Presidents, have their lives cut off short when everything lay before them, and they had shown themselves capable of doing good for their fellow men? How can I, or any person, answer that? It is too easy to say that the sharp, shocking manner of their deaths underlined heavily the contributions they
made. Life, death, the pattern of Time, are eternal mysteries to us. Here you find one man squandering his talents on wholesale slaughter, evil and terrible acts of indignity. There, another makes every effort for peace, goodwill and happiness. Inventors of medicines and advantages for others are laughed into insane asylums. Discoverers of murder weapons die in old age as millionaires. True love is set aside, hatred seems to flower.’

‘But that’s appalling!’ said Ian vehemently. ‘That’s the gloomiest view I’ve ever heard in my life.’

‘My friend,’ said the Doctor softly, ‘it is only one small part of what I am saying. Time is constant. Look at history. You’ll find the brave have their share of successes. You’ll see that honesty, unselfishness and good works overflow in every generation. All I am saying is that what is going to happen on Earth must happen. If Rasputin is to die, no will to survive by that extraordinary man, no black arts, no personal power, can save him. Remember that they drugged Rasputin, shot him and then drowned him. No, don’t try to understand why a fine man is cut off in his prime and an evil one prospers. Try to understand what benefit there is in observing history as it actually happens.’

‘I don’t see that there’s any benefit in it at all,’ muttered Ian, ‘except for the fascination.’ His eyes turned to the Doctor’s. ‘And, frankly,’ he went on, with a more definite note in his voice, ‘that isn’t enough. We ought to be… to be doing things. Not just watching them happen.’

The Doctor stood up and walked over to the central control column. He stared down at the dials and switches for a few seconds and then turned to face them.

‘We
are
doing something. We are learning. Why do people kill each other, steal from each other; rob, slander, hurt and destroy? Why do thousands upon thousands of young men
hurl themselves at one another on a field of battle, each side sure in the justness of its cause? Until we know, until we can control greed, destructive ambition, hatred and the dozen and one other flaws that plague us, we are not worthy to breathe.’

The Doctor looked up at the ceiling of the Ship, his eyes strangely alight.

‘The next time we visit Earth,’ he said, ‘I hope we encounter a situation where two men are opposed to each other, each for the best reasons.’

He suddenly looked down, turning his eyes from one to the other, with a directness that riveted their attentions.

‘That is the only way to understand the folly, the stupidity and the horror of war. When both sides, in their own way, are totally right.’

He turned back to his controls, adjusting some, switching off others, until the
Tardis
began to shiver quite noticeably, responding now to a hundred thousand impulses of power, and a dozen different orders. The little Time and Space machine began to wheel in its path through the limitless pattern of the cosmos, describing a huge arc. Suns, satellites, stars and planets appeared and faded, all ignored, as the ship headed towards its objective – Earth!

The hawk turned in the sky above the forest, almost as if it were standing on its wing for a split second, and then darted down on its prey, its bold eyes of orange yellow glinting darkly in the bright sunlight; talons rigid and ready to catch and hold, the beak sharply poised to put down any struggle. It flashed lower, swooping to the right slightly, a compact weapon of destruction; slate grey above, a white touch on the nape, darkly streaked on its wings and tail. Beneath, the russet colour was broken by strips of brown. Whether the little bird, its prey, took fright because it recognized the danger of the colouring, whether it saw death in the broad, rounded wings and long, barred tail, or whether it simply sensed, as victims often do, a fast approaching end to its life, is something far beyond the knowledge of human beings. Sufficient to say, the little bird took fright and tried to elude its pursuer, with an urgent thrust of its tiny wing-span.