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Ray rode along the empty road, the beam of the Vincent's headlight the only illumination of the path ahead. The moon was new, and dark oppressive clouds, heavy with a rain that was yet to come, blocked the starlight.
The bike still ran well, nearly three decades later; Ray had maintained it carefully ever since Billy had bequeath it to her. As time had worn on, his memory had turned from a bittersweet pang about what had never been to an occasional positive thought sent out in the general direction of the whole of the rest of the cosmos. Months, even years, could go by now without Ray thinking much about the events at the Shangri-La holiday camp all that time ago; there were much more pressing Earthbound matters to be dealing with. And when she did think of those times, it was that strange traveller, the Doctor, and his mysterious craft which tended to preoccupy her thoughts, rather than the man -- though they'd both barely been more than children, really -- she had once been so desperately in love with.
She passed the familiar sign, briefly flashing in military red-on-white onto her awareness -- Greenham Common 2 miles -- and fought back her instinctive revulsion.
She was running late for her return to the camp; it had been well past 11 o'clock when she'd left the village. But on her run for supplies she'd run into old Professor Watson, and she was always willing to give him the time of day, even though she'd never quite been able to work out how sympathetic he was to their cause. One thing had led to another, and now here she was, heading back insanely. Some of the others would still be up; it wouldn't just be the guards and the policemen. Gladys especially would be glad to read the copy of the latest Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Watson had passed on to her.
Ray had already flicked through it. The cover story was titled "Distorted Realities", illustrating the story with a nightmarish cartoon of negotiators facing off against each other, their heads dwarfed by the horrifying masks they wore over them, forced onto them by one another's perceptions. Supposedly the latest talks were making progress, but there was still no change to the doomsday clock: still stuck at three minutes to midnight, as it had been for well over two years now. The last time it had been that close, Ray had still been at school.
Ray slowed down to take a tight bend. As she came out of it, the headlight flashed just for a moment on something large and blue at the side of the road.
It couldn't be, could it? It must be her imagination, turned too vivid by the late hour and the fact that she'd just been thinking about the Doctor. But she was certain that there hadn't been a police box there when she passed that spot this morning. You didn't see many of them at all these days, in fact. She slowed, did a U-turn, and headed back, parking the Vincent on the verge next to the police box.
As soon as she took off her helmet, she was sure. It was nearly thirty years since she'd felt that strange tingling sensation, but it was unmistakable.
"Doctor?" she said, quietly at first, but then when no answer came she started repeating herself, increasing in volume each time.
What would she say to him, if he was here? "You never did take us for that spin, you know." Or maybe, "My life was never the same after I met you." Or perhaps, "Where the bloody hell have you been while all this has been going on?"
Back then, humans were only just learning how to send things into space, that spiky little sphere the height of American technology. Now they and the Soviets had thousands upon thousands of warheads trained on each other, their distorted realities convincing them that that was the only path to peace. The exact same technology, put to a very different end. Even away from the camp, everyone was talking these days about what they would do when the Four Minute Warning came. She'd never let on what her own answer was: look for the Doctor.
So if the Doctor was here now, was the Four Minute Warning far behind?
But there was still no answer, no silly little man just around the corner who came from Scotland by way of outer space, doffing his hat to her and offering her his elbow all at the same time.
Ray took a deep breath and stepped up to the TARDIS door. She shouted "Doctor?" even louder than before and raised her fist to knock.
But before her knuckles made even the slightest contact with the wood that wasn't really wood at all, the door swung open.
Gingerly, Ray stepped inside.
The inside of the TARDIS was nothing like what the Doctor had shown her and Mr Burton back then. Gone was the shiny grey-white science lab feel, replaced by something like the interior of a Gothic cathedral. And it was huge -- Ray could have ridden the Vincent right inside, turned round and come out again without difficulty.
Her attention, though, was immediately drawn to the figure slumped on the floor, halfway between the console -- still hexagonal -- and an armchair next to a record player that was hissing away, having reached the end of the disc it had been playing. It was indisputably the Doctor, lying prone, his hair even more messy-looking than usual.
But how long had he been lying there, if the record had finished? How could he have opened the door for her just now?
Somewhere in the distance was the sound of a huge bell tolling. A church, somewhere?
As Ray walked carefully over to the Doctor -- there was a chance he'd been electrocuted or something, and she didn't want the same thing to happen to her -- the TARDIS door swung shut behind her.
The bell tolled again, just as loud as before.
She reached the Doctor. There was no obvious hazard, so she rolled him over. It was harder than she expected, but she managed to get him on to his back.
Ray's hand flew to her mouth in horror as she saw his face. It was ... twisting, misshapen somehow, as though something was writhing underneath his skin. Occasionally, a purplish, scaly blotch would appear before disappearing back under the rolling flesh.
"Doctor?" she said. On a disquieting hunch, she picked up his hand and pushed back his sleeve; the same squamous marks were appearing and disappearing there. It seemed to be happening all over his body. "Doctor!" she said again, shouting over the bell as it repeated itself once more.
His eyelids rippled back into the shape she remembered just before his eyes opened. "The Doctor is in," he said weakly through a mouth that no longer sprouted little tusks on the lips. "The Doctor is in the TARDIS and the TARDIS is in--" Suddenly he sat up, and whatever had been happening to his body stopped completely. "Where am I? When am I? And who are you?"
"It's me, Doctor, Ray! You remember, Shangri-La holiday camp and those awful Bannermen and ... well, I know it was a long time ago but you must remember."
"Of course, of course, Ray." He reached out, grabbed her by both shoulders. "It's very good to see you again, cariad. So, I've landed in Wales, have I?"
"Not quite, Doctor," she said. "Greenham Common, or near enough."
"Ahh," the Doctor said darkly. "Yes. I take it you're--"
"You're looking at one of the founder members of Women For Life On Earth, thank you very much, Doctor," Ray said. "I've been here since the very start."
The Doctor smiled, though the effort of doing so drained him visibly. "Of course you have. I should have known."
"Well, you know, Doctor, once you know there's life in outer space, you can't help but have a wider perspective." She looked at him. "Don't worry, though, I've never told anyone about ... well, you know. You and Mel and Billy and Delta and what have you."
The Doctor nodded absently. "So it must be, what, the 1980s?" he said.
"Aye; it's nigh on thirty years since I last saw you," Ray said, gently extricating herself from his grip.
"Of course," the Doctor said. He started to slip back towards the floor; Ray cursed herself for not realising that he hadn't just been holding on to her as a friendly gesture but that he'd needed her support. She rushed round to catch him before he hit the back of his head. "I think I may be having a spot of difficulty," he said.
"You look a damn sight better than you did when I came in," Ray said. "You were-- Well, forgive me for being blunt, Doctor, but you looked to me like you were turning into a monster."
The Doctor struggled back to a sitting position, and Ray helped him, ending sat beside him with her arm around his back. He smiled a thank you and said, "Yes, the nasty little sting in the tail of the Rani's trap."
Ray let the sound of the bell finish reverberating around the huge chamber before asking, "Am I supposed to know who the Rani is?"
"She's a Time Lord, like me." He paused, then said ruefully, "Very like me, in some ways. Sad to say we were friends, after a fashion, long ago. But she has long since chosen to devote her life to the pursuit of her scientific endeavours without the slightest consideration of ethics, morality or common decency. Biochemistry, that's her particular field of interest."
Answering the question seemed to have perked him up, so Ray decided to keep the conversation going. "Ah, biological weapons. We're usually more worried about the nuclear ones, I admit, but--"
A faraway look entered the Doctor's eyes. "Ashes, nothing but ashes ..."
"Doctor?" Ray said. "Is that what happened, this Rani used a biological weapon on you?"
"Ah, no, not quite. It might be more accurate to say that she tried to turn me into a biological weapon. The, ah, monster you said I was becoming."
"Oh, it was horrible, Doctor, all purple scales and little tusks and ... knobbly bits."
"Sounds about right; that's the state I found her other poor victims in."
"And did they change in the same way?"
"Ah, no. We Time Lords have a unique -- or perhaps I should say near-unique -- regenerative ability. We can renew our entire bodies when necessary. I was able to use that same ability in a more subtle way to prevent the changes." The dark expression crossed his face again, brow furrowed and lips pursed. "Or so I thought."
He looked worn out, as though thinking about how he had got into this mess made it much harder. Ray was tempted to ask him about something, anything else, but if he faded before she found out how to help him, it would be curtains. For both of them, since from the sounds of things she'd be trapped in here with the monster he would have become. "What do you mean, Doctor? What happened?"
The Doctor leaned against her more heavily. "It was all a trap. All those other poor victims weren't important, except as bait for me."
The bell, which had punctuated the whole conversation, rang again. "Listen, Doctor, what is that?"
"The Cloister Bell," he said, seeming once more to recover at getting to explain something neutral. "It's a ... a sort of warning system the TARDIS has." He looked up at the console, and a small television set suspended from the ceiling. "Funny, I don't remember setting these coordinates. Perhaps the radiation from the missiles pulled the old girl off course."
"Doctor, I don't like to press you," Ray said, "but I think we need to do something. Can't you just do your ... what did you say, rejuvenating thing?"
The Doctor looked impossibly sad. "That's exactly what I mustn't do. You see, what the Rani wanted to prove was that she could hijack the regenerative process, force it to produce such grotesque outcomes."
"Why would she want to do that?"
"It could just be simple curiosity. There aren't that many Time Lords easy to get hold of; most of them stay home all their lives, and while there's no love lost between her and the Master either, even the Rani would think twice before trying to spring him for Skaro just to use him as an experimental subject. Or perhaps she wanted to make a point to me specifically. That I could be made to be just as monstrous as her."
While he'd been talking -- speechifying, if she was honest, though once again it seemed to be doing him some good -- Ray had been thinking over what she'd already learned. "So let me see if I've got this straight. When you thought you were stopping it, you were actually ... what, letting it program what you'd change into next time?"
"Precisely so," the Doctor said, like a professor pleased with a quick student. "And so, after escaping in a fiendishly clever manner -- though I now rather suspect that was something the Rani deliberately allowed me to do -- she followed me in her TARDIS and attacked, hoping to trigger my regeneration." He looked into the distance. "Perhaps she does have some sense of poetry after all."
"So, what do we do?"
"Ah, well, it should be relatively straightforward, now that I've got you here to help. I'll need to get the TARDIS to interface with the Matrix on Gallifrey, then I can use an excitonic interface to connect to the biodata extract contained there, which should -- unscrupulous castellans notwithstanding -- be unsullied, and ... reset myself."
"I am going to be honest with you, Doctor, I only understood about one word in ten of that. But if it's really going to work, I say we give it a try."
"It is cheating, slightly," the Doctor said with the ghost of a twinkle in his eye. "Help me to the console." He rose unsteadily to his feet and leaned on Ray.
They hobbled to the console like contestants in a three-legged race until, once they were close enough, the Doctor lunged forward and grabbed onto the side. He began flicking switches and adjusting dials; the column in the centre sprang to life, spinning bizarrely. The little television high above started to show a rapidly changing set of arcane symbols, which finally resolved themselves into a steady stream of numbers. The Doctor tried to look up to read them, but nearly fell back to the floor again in the process.
Ray grabbed him just in time and helped him right himself. "Do you need me to read them to you, Doctor?" she said.
"That would be very helpful, yes," he said. "Though perhaps you'll need them a little slower?" He flicked a couple of other switches, and the display changed so that it was only giving a few digits at a time.
Ray read out the numbers as they flashed up in a seemingly interminable sequence, the Doctor inputting them by means of what looked like a telephone keypad. Eventually, though, it stopped and a great humming sound filled the room. The television went dead for a moment, before a message appeared. "Here, Doctor, it says Matrix Link Established. That's good, isn't it?"
"Very," the Doctor said. He was about to say more, but his body began to change again. "Ray!" he gasped out during a brief moment when his mouth was under his control.
"Stay with me, Doctor, stay with me," she said, grabbing hold of his torso. She could feel it rippling and contorting beneath his clothes. "What do we do now?"
Agonising seconds later, the attack passed. But when the Doctor spoke, his voice was weary and subdued. "Excitonic interface." He tried to raise a hand to point, but in the end settled for nodding in the right direction.
Ray looked, and saw that on the other side of the console a device somewhere between a helmet and a crown had descended from the ceiling on a contraption similar to the TV. "Let's get you over there, then," she said.
"Wait, wait," the Doctor said. "Let me show you ..." He twisted in her grasp to point at the controls in front of him. "Red switch."
"Get you in that thing, come back here, press the red switch," Ray said. "Got it."
The first of those steps turned out to be the hardest. The Doctor held on to the console with one hand and Ray with the other, shuffling slowly. Two thirds of the way round, there was another attack, and this time the monstrous features were much larger and remained visible far longer before being subsumed again. All Ray could do was keep talking, hoping that the Doctor would come back to her. She told him anything she could think of: gossip from the camp, how she'd noticed that they kept rotating the policemen elsewhere just as they started to get to thinking that maybe the protestors had a point, how her mechanical knowhow had come in handy so many times. Then she went further back, all the way to that whole business in Llanfairfach in the '70s that had been her first taste of organised activism.
That one seemed to do the trick; the Doctor seemed to settle down, and even managed a weak laugh. "You were at the Nuthutch?" he asked. "Well, I never."
She smiled back at him. "Come on, Doctor, it's not far now."
Finally, they reached the interface. The Doctor grabbed the edge of the console for dear life while Ray lowered it as gently as she could into his head. As it made contact, there was a strange electrical hissing, but the Doctor nodded minutely, as though to say it was all right.
Ray retreated, just a half step back at first in case the Doctor suddenly collapsed again, then much more quickly so that she could flip the switch before it was too late.
"Physician, heal thyself," muttered the Doctor.
But that was the last coherent thing he said; the interface crackled with blue electricity, most intense at the temples, and the Doctor began to scream, a bloodcurdling noise that echoed around the room, drowning out even the Cloister Bell. His whole body was twisting and distorting, bands of lightning-white energy shifting across it. To begin with, it seemed as though it wasn't working -- one entire hand became a purple, scale-covered claw before shifting back again; a moment later, the right hand side of the Doctor's face changed into a monstrous visage, hair replaced by quills. But gradually, the process seemed to be settling down, the Doctor regaining control. For one brief, terrifying moment the Doctor transformed completely into the bestial form she had seen glimpses of so far, and his screams became roars, but then he just as quickly returned to normal, as though that had been some sort of final purging of the Rani's insidious infection from his system.
The Doctor let go of the console, standing up straight and carefully removing the interface from his head. "Well done, Ray. My most hearts-felt thanks for your assistance."
"You didn't half give me a fright, you know," she said, walking round to him, looking as subtly as she could all around him to check that he really had returned to normal. "But I am glad to have seen you again."
"Not half as glad as I am to have seen you, given the circumstances. Indeed, you may well have woken me just in time." He glanced at the screen, which had gone back to displaying the TARDIS's current coordinates: "Earth, 1987 AD, Humanian Era". He patted the console. "I have a feeling I didn't land here by mere chance, did I, old girl?"
"I'll tell you what it is, Doctor. You've got something that that 'Rani' hasn't," Ray said. "Friends. All over the universe, I bet."
"I suppose I have," the Doctor said. "It's easy to forget that, sometimes, when you have as many enemies as I do."
"And what about that Mel?" Ray asked.
"Oh, she left a long time ago, just after I met Ace ... And then there was-- But no matter."
"So, there's no one travelling with you at the moment, then?"
"No," the Doctor said. "Lately I've been flying solo, as they say." He looked at her intensely, piercing eyes gazing right into her. "I don't suppose ...?"
"I've got responsibilities here on Earth, Doctor. You know that."
The Doctor looked crestfallen, disappointed both at her refusal and at himself for having asked when he knew exactly what those responsibilities were. "Naturally," he said. "Forget I said anything. A passing fancy, gone as quickly as a dandelion seed blowing in the wind. Besides, I have responsibilities too, ones that I've been putting off for some time. And where I have to go it wouldn't be fair to take anyone else with me."
Ray started to head towards the door; the Doctor pressed a switch and it opened for her. She turned back at the incongruous border between time machine and countryside, the Vincent still exactly where she'd left it. "Remember this, Doctor, wherever you go, you'll find friends, new or old."
"Thank you," the Doctor said. The shadow of the closing door fell across his face as he added, half to himself, "And yes, I'm sure I will. The oldest of all."