Doctor Who: Time Flight (3 page)

'Golf Alpha Charlie. Descend to three seven zero.'

The relief of the crew at the voice on the radio was considerable. But it was nothing to the surprise of the Doctor.

Captain Stapley turned and smiled. 'Would you like to put your seatbelt on, Doctor. By my calculations we're twenty minutes from touch-down.'

The familiar smell of kerosene greeted them as they walked down the aircraft steps.

'I ought to feel at home, getting in and out of airplanes,' thought Tegan, as she looked round the airport scene. 'But everything seems so unreal after the TARDIS.'

'There's something very unreal about all of this.' Nyssa felt an intuitive sense of unease.

The Doctor felt acutely embarrassed. They had no right to be back at Heathrow. But how could he explain that to Captain Stapley?

Prompted by Nyssa's observation, he started to recite to himself: That's why this tree

Doth continue to be,

Since observed by yours faithfully, God.'

'What's that. Doctor?' the Captain asked in a friendly voice. He was now quite sorry for the Doctor. After all, the poor man had come back with a lot of egg on his face.

"To be is to be perceived",' the Doctor quoted back. 'A naive eighteenth-century philosophy.'

At this point, something very strange happened to Nyssa. For a moment she saw the airport around her as a reflection in a window. Against her conscious will, the focus of her eyes was drawn through the glass to a frightening vortex beyond. There were bodies, cadaverous shapes -

putrid, rotting, utterly horrible. She screamed.

As the others rushed round to comfort her, the spectre was gone. She tried to explain what she had seen.

There's nothing there,' said Andrew Bilton reassuringly.

It all started to make sense to the Doctor. He should have realised. They were under the influence of more than a time contour. 'Perceptual induction,' he muttered to himself.

'What are you talking about, Doctor?' Andrew had heard enough nonsense for one day.

'I want you to concentrate very hard,' the Doctor replied with renewed urgency in his voice.

Roger Scobie was not impressed. 'You don't give up, do you, Doctor!'

'Concentrate! Look at everything! Observe it in every detail!' There was something about the Doctor now that commanded their attention.

'Concentrate! All together! It must be a concerted effort!'

Captain Stapely shivered. Pure imagination, of course, but ever since that bit of bother during the deceleration he had sensed a certain atmosphere. Perhaps the Doctor wasn't such a fool as he appeared.

They all felt the temperature drop. From nowhere a moaning wind blew up.

Tegan was staring at a Pan Am jumbo jet. It rippled and twisted like a mirage in the desert. That plane! I can't focus properly!'

It was true for all of them. The whole world was reducing to an image from a half-forgotten dream.

'What are you doing to us!' shouted Captain Stapley.

'Perceptual induction. And I'm undoing it,' insisted the Doctor. 'Keep concentrating. It's the only way to fight it and find out where we really are!'

The Doctor was in deadly earnest. They were battling with a powerful unseen force.

'But we're at Heathrow!' interjected Stapley, desperately trying to reason away the invading unknown.

But the Doctor was giving no quarter. 'You think you're at Heathrow. So did I - well almost - up to a moment ago. But now I know this isn't Heathrow at all. And you're beginning to have your doubts!'

They were cold now and desperately afraid. But the Doctor continued, ruthlessly, to exploit their will power.

'Can't you see the coherence breaking up!'

All around them, layer upon layer of what they had taken to be Heathrow was peeling away to reveal an infinite void. The wind rose to a hurricane. The whole air screamed. The airport ripped apart, as if it had been nothing but a painted cloth.

Then there was darkness.

The Coming of the Plasmatons

It was a wilderness. A cold, primordial tract of land, that rolled away, flat and empty to the horizon.

The Doctor came to his senses first. Then the others, one by one, struggled to their feet, dazed and confused.

'Where are we?' stammered Captain Stapley.

'I think you were right first time, Captain.'

'Heathrow?' He was numb with shock.

'Some one hundred and forty million years ago.'

It was all too much for Roger Scobie. 'I think I'm dreaming,' was all he could say.

'Quite the reverse, Mr Scobie,' the Doctor corrected him. 'You've just woken up.'

'I don't believe it!' Andrew Bilton gazed round the solitary place.

The Doctor had no such credibility problems. Definitely Jurassic,' he decided, looking at the forbidding terrain. 'There's a nip in the air though, so we can't be far off the Pleistocene era.'

'The ice age?'

The Doctor nodded. 'You know, it's at times like this I wish I still had my scarf. Better watch out for the odd brontosaurus,' he added casually -

an observation that did nothing to restore the shattered morale of Captain Stapley and his crew.

'Were they the creatures I saw?' asked Nyssa, still fearful of her horrifying clairvoyance.

'I doubt it,' replied the Doctor. 'Though I suspect what you saw was from this time zone.'

Captain Stapley was struggling to make sense of what had happened.

He had to concede that the Doctor's hypothesis fitted the facts. 'Do you really mean we've gone backwards down this time contour?'

'Have you any other explanation?'

Captain Stapley had not.

But Andrew Bilton was still clutching at straws. 'We were on Concorde,'

he protested, hoping that everything else was just a bad dream.

At the mention of Concorde, another thought struck the Captain. 'How did we land on this?'

They could see Golf Alpha Charlie parked at the end of a fortuitously long stretch of level ground, possibly a dried out mudflat, toughened by the encroaching cold.

The crew took one look at the long ribbon of tyre tracks and broke out in a cold sweat. Without knowing it, they had just crash-landed a hundred tons of supersonic aircraft.

The Doctor agreed they were lucky to be alive.

'The touch-down was perfect!' Andrew's memory of the landing just didn't square with what must have been an impact such as he had only previously experienced on the simulator.

'Like having a tooth out under hypnosis,' explained the Doctor. 'You don't feel a thing.'

Captain Stapley shared his copilot's perfect recall of a normal approach and landing. 'The descent into Heathrow was utterly real,' he protested.

'So was the Indian rope trick,' remarked the Doctor.

It occurred to Stapley that the same thing must have happened to Captain Urquhart as he brought in Flight 192 the previous day, no doubt believing they were making a normal let-down into London. The passengers and crew could be anywhere in this wasteland, and, without the Doctor's help, totally at the mercy of an unbelievably potent hallucinogenic force.

'We shall find them,' the Doctor reassured him. 'Let's hope no one finds us first,' he added, a little less optimistically. 'Behind most illusions there's a conjuror. And in this case you can be sure he's not gone to all this trouble for our entertainment.'

They all noticed the anxiety in his voice.

'Doctor!' Tegan pointed. From where she was standing she had caught sight of the other Concorde, previously hidden behind an outcrop of rock. Perched further along the mudflat, Victor Foxtrot looked like some prehistoric animal, entirely at home in this pristine landscape.

Tegan was already away to have a closer look.

'Tegan! Wait!' But she seemed not to hear the Doctor calling.

Tegan suddenly stopped running. 'Look!'

As he caught up with her the Doctor followed her eyeline to the horizon.

'A building!' she exclaimed. 'Or are we hallucinating?'

'I don't think so. The illusion is always one of normality.'

'Well, that's not exactly Terminal Three.'

Dominating the skyline was a large pyramid of dark stone.

'But who could have built it!'

No accident of nature had produced this megalithic fortress. Neither, in this prehistoric desolation, could it be the work of any man.

As they cautiously moved forward, something caught the Doctor's eye, in a shallow crater to one side. It was an enormous skeleton, though not of any living thing.

'I think the answer might be over there.'

'A spacecraft?' asked Tegan.

The Doctor walked into the crater to get a better view of the wreckage.

Looters or salvagers had long since stripped it bare. The wind and freezing rain had eroded the gaunt superstructure. But it was undoubtedly the hulk of a vast ship.

Nyssa felt a sudden jab of fear. Something was gnawing at the threshold of her mind. Surprised at her own spontaneity, she cried out.

'Danger! We must follow the Doctor!'

She moved instinctively towards the second Concorde. Andrew, Roger and the Captain had no choice but to follow her. Yet when they came to the brow of the hill the Doctor and Tegan could not be seen.

A band of mist obscured the horizon. As they peered into the haze it seemed to evaporate. Out of the barren tundra a four-lane motorway, surging with traffic, stretched ahead, as far as the eye could see.

'It's the M4,' cried Roger.

'It's an illusion,' warned Nyssa.

it might lead us out of this time warp,' replied Andrew, stepping forward with Roger towards the beguiling vista of civilisation.

'Bilton! Scobie! Stay where you are! And that's an order.' Captain Stapley had learned from the Doctor. Like Nyssa, he wasn't to be taken in by this phantom reality. 'Remember the Indian rope trick.'

The two officers remembered Heathrow that was not Heathrow. With renewed scepticism they outstared the vision. The view of tarmac and traffic faded. They were alone in the wilderness. Once again they had been the victims of some form of group hypnosis, like the spectators of the Indian mesmerist. They must be on their guard against another attack.

'What was the Indian rope trick?' asked Nyssa who knew nothing of that curious tale of the Raj. How, in front of all the sahibs and memsahibs, the fakir threw his rope up into the air, climbed up, and vanished. And how only a photograph had shown the truth-no magic, no gateway to heaven ...

'Just the rope lying on the ground, and this Indian juju man and his oppo behind the bushes, laughing like a couple of skunks.' Roger finished the story.

'Get down!' Captain Stapley had seen something.

A group of men and women came into view, trundling a large heavy object. Nyssa was appalled. Somehow these people had got hold of the TARDIS.

Roger and Andrew were more interested in the task force itself.

'There's Dave Culshaw and Angela Clifford!'

'They were on Victor Foxtrot!'

They had found some of Captain Urquhart's passengers and crew. Copilot and engineer were already half-way to joining their colleagues.

Captain Stapley could do nothing to hold them back.

Andrew was the first to reach the young stewardess. 'Angela!'

The girl recognised him at once, obviously delighted. 'Andrew! You didn't tell me you had a New York Stopover.'

'What are you talking about?'

'See you in the bar in half an hour.'

He realised that this little band, in their Savile Row suits and airline uniforms, were blind to the alien landscape, and knew nothing of the strange labour they were required to perform. They day-dreamed normality.

'Look, old chap. This is all a bit of a snare and a delusion ...' Roger was having the same trouble with Captain Urquhart's copilot.

'Do you fancy that new Indonesian restaurant?' Angela was looking forward to an evening out in Manhattan with the man who was frantically trying to drag her back to reality. But the spell could not be broken.

'We'll have to grab them!'

The struggle was viewed from a distance by Captain Stapley and Nyssa.

The Captain was on the point of going to help his two crew members when Nyssa saw the cloud.

Stapley had experienced a tornado once in Arizona, and he was reminded of it as the great tongue of white fire came whirling in and hovered over Bilton and Scobie. It grew in size, seeming to draw its substance from the air.

The white mass divided into seven hideously bland seething conglomerates which transmogrified into creatures; faceless dead things dragged to life.

Andrew and Roger had seen the invaders. They turned to defend themselves. Encircling them, the seven grey transmutes linked their spavined limbs to contain the two men. As their unnatural flesh touched, it merged again, oozing and bleeding, until the seven members were reabsorbed into each other.