Doctor Who Fan Fiction ❯ Dr Who – Martha and Ten The Inbetweens and Backstories ❯ Chapter Twelve ( Chapter 12 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

`Do you feel that?' said the Doctor. `Do you feel what's happening?' And Martha could see what he meant; the rate of descent of the hydrogen balloon had slowed. `It wants us to get rid of our food.'

`The only force here is gravity,' Pierre Bruyère said with scorn.

`Not that force. The force that's keeping us aloft. We should have crashed on the ice already.'

The bottom of the basket hit a spike of ice, chipping snow over them all. The force knocked them off their feet, the balloon bounced upwards off the impact. `Next time we'll tip over,' said the Doctor. `We've no choice.' And they took the remaining hampers, all three of them, and heaved them away.

In that instant the balloon stopped struggling. As if they'd just flicked a switch and turned the crisis off. Oh, the balloon seemed to say, you want me to go up? Nothing to it! And with a nonchalance that almost made Martha laugh, calmly, lazily, it began to rise once more into the air.

They gained height quickly - Martha watched all the provisions dwindle to the size of ants against the snow, then disappear completely.

`We're alive,' she said. It was obvious. But it needed to be said.

`Whatever this thing is,' said the Doctor, `it wants us entirely at its mercy.' He stared at the polar wastes ahead of them.

One day Pierre looked up from his sextant, cleared his throat formally, and announced that he thought they must nearly be there. `Below us, gentlemen, is the North Pole.'

Martha couldn't help herself, she looked over the side of the basket. It was a pointless thing to do, and she knew it was pointless. Nothing but white below them, white above them, nothing but white all around. Nothing but white for weeks.

`What do you think, Doctor?' asked Pierre. But the Doctor hadn't spoken for a long time. At first the Doctor had been characteristically exuberant.

`We have to stay alive,' he told them, `that's what matters. Gather everything which we can throw overboard, just in case we need ballast again.' Martha even thought he was enjoying himself as he arranged the heaviest items around the perimeter for easy access. Sledges, scientific instruments. `We've got to be prepared to junk the lot,' said the Doctor.

He took hold of Pierre's journal, but the explorer snatched it back. `Not that,' said Pierre, and for a moment it looked as if the Doctor would argue, but then he nodded, let go. `No,' he agreed. `All right. Not that.'

They made sure they kept warm, and took regular turns to sleep and keep watch. Not that there was anything to watch. After a few hours Martha found the stark blankness all around her almost blinding. There was no food, of course, and the Doctor told them they'd have to cope as best they could.

That day Martha hadn't felt hungry anyway, she supposed she was too scared. And after a couple more days she stopped questioning it, and by the end of that first week she'd even forgotten she should be hungry.

Once in a while her thoughts would drift, and she'd wonder about it - wasn't there something she should be doing with food, she'd think dreamily, shouldn't she be eating it, something like that - then with a jolt she'd realise she should be starving. No, really, literally starving. And then she'd feel dozy again, and the voice in her head would tell her not to worry about it.

OK, she'd tell the voice, and give in to sleep - I'm sure if anything were wrong, the Doctor would take care of it. Sometimes Martha's dreams would be peaceful. She wouldn't remember what they'd been when she woke up, but they'd been all hers and nobody else's. But more often than not they'd get interrupted by that woman examiner.

`Never mind that holiday in Bermuda,' she'd say, `never mind that Christmas when you were seven, never mind that date with Leonardo DiCaprio. Tell me about the bones, Martha. It's so very cold, I must feast. Tell me all about the bones, and why you love them so much.'

When they'd run out of songs, the crew began to share dreams. Martha told the Doctor and Pierre how she had always wanted to study medicine. And Pierre told them his dreams of white.

The Doctor hadn't paid much attention to anything in weeks, Martha had been getting very worried - but at this he showed a sudden interest. `Nothing but white, really?'

`But out here,' said Pierre, `amongst the white . . . sometimes I now dream of other things.'

`What other things?'

`Just other things,' Pierre would shrug. `Just not white. As if I've been set free. It's a relief.'

Pierre wouldn't say much any more either, he liked to sleep as long as possible. He'd do so with a grin across his face, and look so at peace that Martha would feel envious. And when he was awake he'd be scribbling in his journal.

Martha couldn't see why. Nothing was happening for him to write about. But he'd write anyway, one arm hiding it from view, as if he didn't want anyone to copy his homework.

`What do you dream of, Doctor?' asked Martha.

`I don't dream,' he said shortly.

But one time, when Pierre was asleep, he told Martha. `On old maps you'll find the words “Here Be Dragons”. It doesn't mean there really were dragons, of course. Only that there were places no one had ever been. They didn't know what they'd find, there could be anything. Explorers like Pierre, they don't think that's good enough. They keep pushing against the limits of what they know, they refuse ever to sit back and say, that's enough. They won't give in to the dragons. But,' he said, `what if, when you get out there, into the unknown . . . you find there are dragons waiting after all?'

One day Pierre looked up from his sextant, and said that they must nearly be there. `Below us, gentlemen, is the North Pole. What do you think, Doctor?' But the Doctor just looked at him grimly.

`How can you tell?' asked Martha. `We can't even see land.'

`We've been travelling at a steady rate of twenty knots these past two months. Always on the same course, the winds have been constant.'

`Wait a moment,' said Martha. `These past months? How long do you think we've been travelling for?'

Pierre frowned. `Four, maybe five months. What's your estimate?'

Martha felt like laughing. `That's ridiculous. It can't be more than a fortnight.'

`What do you think, Doctor?' asked Pierre again.

Martha looked at her old friend. `Yes, Doctor, how long have we been doing this?'

The Doctor licked his lips. Spoke quietly. `It's been years. Years and years, I lost count. So many . . . I've tried to shield you from the worst of it, took so much concentration. I'm sorry.' His companions looked dumbly at him. `Entire lifetimes, crouching here in a basket. And yet,' he said, and took out his sonic screwdriver.

Martha had never been so pleased to see something so safe, so familiar. The Doctor pointed it over the side of the balloon, aimed downwards. A blue light pierced through the white, it lost none of its intensity as it burned ever downwards, illuminating the way. And hundreds of feet below them . . . shapes to make out . . . yes! Martha could see the snow. And the ice. And the hampers of food they had jettisoned.

`And yet,' continued the Doctor, `it's been no time at all.'

`They're not even frozen over,' said Pierre, hushed. `They'd have frozen over in minutes.' He looked up at the

Doctor, and his face was suddenly livid, and Martha thought he might actually hit him. `It's impossible! That's the North Pole below us! It has to be. And I shall write as much in my journal!'

`Your journal is nothing but lies.' But Pierre stomped over to the book anyway, sat down, and picked up his pen.

`What is it, Doctor?' asked Martha.

`It distorts time,' said the Doctor. `Running the same seconds back over and over. We're literally frozen in them. The perfect larder. Where the meat stays fresh and never runs out.'

Pierre couldn't speak. He tried, but the words just didn't come out, his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. So he had to pass his journal to the Doctor dumbly. The Doctor looked inside. All the pages were filled. They'd been filled many times over, one diary entry over another over another, until all the words were illegible, a mess of black ink.

`I don't think this is your first expedition to the North Pole,' said the Doctor. He handed the journal back to Pierre, who dropped it listlessly to the floor. `Let's find out.' He raised the sonic screwdriver high and, as he pushed down just once, there was the smallest of beeps - and the giant gas balloon above them popped open.

There was a whoosh of hydrogen into the arctic sky, so dense that Martha could actually see it, and then the silk covers that had kept them afloat fell away and were lost in the white. Martha steeled herself for the fall, the inevitable crash upon the ice below - but, ridiculously, they just hung there in mid-air. She looked down, but the ground just sat there, out of reach, stubbornly refusing to obey the laws of physics. And then she looked up.

She'd not been able to look upwards for so long. The balloon had been her sky, it had blocked out everything else above them. And now she could do nothing but gawp. The Doctor and Pierre were already doing the same. They were not alone.

Balloons.

At first Martha thought there was a dozen of them, and that was impossible enough - but then she saw there was a layer above that, and the layers kept going on and on - there were hundreds of balloons, maybe thousands, a whole flotilla of them blotting out the sky. And that wasn't the strangest thing of all.

`They're my balloon,' said Pierre. `The same insignia, the same design . . .' And there he stopped, because he didn't dare carry on, he knew if he said it aloud his mind might crack - but the same Pierre too, standing at the edge of each basket, flanked always by two different crewmembers.

`What did I do?' he heard himself ask.

`What's been done to you,' corrected the Doctor. `It's caught you in a loop. Each time you set out with companions, and each time it sends you back to the beginning for new ones. The same polar expedition over and over, always doomed to failure.'

`But why?' asked Martha. `What possible reason could it have to do that?'

`All it can do is eat,' said the Doctor. `That's all. And so it's everything humanity isn't. Because you all have aspirations, desires, the urge to reach out and be something greater than you are. And that's what it feeds on. Human ambition. The very thing that makes you think or feel. It's obscene.' He turned to Pierre. `It's reached into your very dreams, made you want to be an explorer, made you hunger to come here again and again.'

Pierre's face was an agony. `Are you saying that all that desire I had to explore . . . to add to the sum of human knowledge . . . it wasn't even mine in the first place?'

The Doctor said nothing, because he had no answer to give. Pierre wobbled on his feet, he looked as if he might faint, he grabbed hold of the edge of the basket to steady himself. And then he gripped it harder, his knuckles flared, and he shouted out into the frozen wastes. `I wanted to be somebody special . . .'

The ice bit at his face and made his eyes water. `Come to me,' he said. `Come to me right now, and tell me I'm not to my face.'

The Pierre Bruyère in the balloon above tilted its head in what looked like consideration. Then it shrugged. It sat itself upon the edge of the basket, and swinging its legs over the side, lowered itself down.

Soon it was hanging there only by his fingernails, some nine metres above the real Pierre Bruyère's head. It looked downwards, seemed to tut in irritation to see how far it still had to go. And then the fingernails grew, they stretched out like elastic, only it wasn't elastic, it was ice, they'd become ten long icicles and Pierre was dropping gently into the basket beside them.

`How much of me is really me?' one Pierre asked the other bravely. `Could I ever have been a great man at all?'

His counterpart was speckled with frost like icing sugar, his hair frozen to his head, his teeth chattering, his eyes hard flint. `I'm so cold,' this Pierre said, almost apologetically, and with something like tenderness brought his hands up to the other's cheeks, and drained the life out of him.

`My turn, I think,' said the Doctor. And the Pierre Bruyère monster turned away from the frozen corpse he had created. `I've felt you buzzing away around my dreams. You want to know what's inside, don't you? You want to know my hopes and desires, where I've explored.' He stepped closer; the ice cold of Pierre's face didn't even change expression.

`I've navigated the North West Passage, stepped on the moon, been to Mars, Venus, planets you'll need three tongues to pronounce. I've sipped tea on the rim of burning constellations that were lost millennia ago. And I'm not done yet. I'm not done yet. So, if you want to feast, you'd better be hungry.'

And he didn't wait, he grabbed hold of Pierre's hands, drove them into his cheeks, and held tight. The white darkened. Turned red. Turned purple like a bruise. `Can you feel it?' gasped the Doctor. `All those dreams you'll never know. That you'll never understand.' And he cried out. `Martha, I made a mistake. I thought I could weaken it, could fill it to bursting. But it's so cold, and it's so hungry.'

And Martha didn't hesitate, she put her own hands upon the Doctor's cheeks too. She felt how cold they were, and she was so warm against them, and she pushed harder until she could feel she'd reached the Doctor's warmth too, she knew it must be deep inside somewhere.

`And I've been to the moon too,' she spat in Pierre's face. `I've not sipped tea at half so many constellations, but I've sipped at a good few. But that was never my dream. I'm not an explorer. I just wanted to put people back together again.'

There they stood, the Doctor and Martha, clasped together, embracing the monster. And with a dull crump, the sound of a footfall in heavy snow, time unfroze, flung backwards, and the wounded sky burst like a berry.

And one day Martha did visit the North Pole. `We never did get there, did we?' asked the Doctor. `What with everything else going on. Well, soon fix that!'

He set the controls, gave the pump a particularly vigorous workout, and a minute later he opened the doors. `Bit parky out there,' he said. `Won't stay for long.'

Martha stepped out into the snow. She hugged herself against the cold. She looked at the white, stretching out in all directions.

`It's just a place,' she said at last.

`Just a place,' the Doctor agreed. `Sometimes the destination isn't half as interesting as the ambition to get there.' He pointed at where she'd left footprints. `Look at that. It's 1890, give or take a year or two. You're the first person to have stood at the North Pole. Martha Jones, pioneer!'

She laughed.

`Come on,' he said. And before they left, he smeared away their prints carefully. `Don't want to spoil it for anyone else. Let's go and get something to warm us up.'

He took the TARDIS to exactly the same place, a mere two hundred years later. The North Pole Experience was an interactive museum, with exhibits that the children could play with, and a gift shop filled with `I've Been to the North Pole' T-shirts and clockwork penguins.

`Still don't have penguins in the Arctic,' said the Doctor.

He bought them both overpriced coffees in the café, found them a nice table in the observation lounge, and they looked out the plastic windows at what had been the most isolated place in the world.

And he told her what he dreamed. How, on his planet, the maps never said `Here Be Dragons'. Because his people had explored the universe, they'd been everywhere and everywhen. At one moment there they'd been, charting the stars, and the next, it was all over. That was time travel for you.

When he'd been a child, the Doctor had wanted to be an explorer. But there was nowhere left to discover. They told him he shouldn't leave home, what was the point? But he'd found a point. He'd found a point. And whenever he forgot it, he'd close his eyes, he'd dream again, and there it would be.