Chapter Text
A bang.
A blast of light.
An explosion.
Particles of rock and light.
Nyssa began to weep.
“Adric?” whispered Tegan. “Doctor?” And then she began to weep too.
The Doctor said nothing. He did not weep. He stared at the screen. Adric. The boy he trusted. The boy he cared about; and had never stated to do so to anyone, even him. His companion. His friend. He was gone. Forever. Gone.
*
Adric raised his head. It ached and he winced as he put a hand up to it. His fingers came away bloody. For a second, he remembered nothing, not even his own name; and then slowly, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, it all came back to him.
The Cybermen. They had begun it. When that dying one had blasted the controls before he could complete his calculations and steer the freighter away from Earth, the thing had collided with the planet. But was this right? Adric pushed himself up onto his knees. His head was throbbing. So, he was still alive then? But how? The blast had wiped out the powerful dinosaurs; why, there was one lying not far away from him, dead as a doornail, as the Doctor would put it. So, how was he still alive?
The Doctor. The Tardis. Adric staggered to his feet. It was a long shot, but maybe the Doctor had landed the Tardis somewhere close by.
“Doctor?” Coughing in the smoke from the wreckage around him, he looked around. “Doctor?”
No use. No Doctor to answer. No Nyssa calling his name. No Tegan joyfully shouting. No one. Well, he had said it was a long shot. He studied the layout of the landscape. The trees were burning from the explosion. Here and there, more of those creature the Doctor and Tegan called “dinosaurs” lay dead or dying. The land was undeveloped, primitive.
Somehow, he realised, he had been flung from the wreckage the second it collided into the Earth but fallen with it to the ground. He touched his head again, tentatively. That seemed to have been the only injury he had sustained.
“Why call out for the Doctor? He’s not going to help us now, is he?”
Adric jumped and looked around. Sitting in the branches of a burning tree was...himself? He blinked. What was this? Some kind of hallucination?
“He let us die,” the Adric in the tree reminded him.
“What?” Adric took a second to realise that his double was naked. “How did...what?”
“Use your brains, my friend. All that Cyber technology they left in the freighter exploded when it did. There was a cloning machine in there too. How do you think they managed to reproduce so quickly?”
Adric looked around, fearfully, in case there were more clones of himself around. To his relief, he saw none. “What do you mean?” he stammered. “The Doctor won’t help us? He would if he were here.”
“He let us die.” The Adric clone sneered, bitterly. “He could have saved us in the Tardis but he didn’t, did he?”
“Maybe he couldn’t.” Adric felt the wound on his forehead again. “The Cyber Leader was with them. He might have...damaged the controls or something.”
“Come on; the Doctor made it clear that he didn’t want us hanging around anymore.”
“That’s a lie!”
“Is it, Adric? He didn’t show us the same respect as Nyssa and Tegan, did he? He teased us, didn’t he? Criticised us, didn’t he?”
Adric shook his head. The Doctor had his faults, true, but he couldn’t believe that he could cease to care for any of his friends. “I refuse to believe this is real,” he decided. “You’re just a figment of my imagination; that part of me that liked to argue with the Doctor.”
“Call me what you like,” replied the clone. “You know I’m right.”
“No.” Adric shook his head. “The Doctor wouldn’t just abandon us...unless he had a good reason for it...” Even as he said it, he wasn’t sure he believed it.
The Adric clone leapt down from the tree. “And what are we to do now, Adric? Rot with those beasts?” He waved a hand in the direction of the dinosaurs. “Or,” he added, seeing several large creatures with pincers scuttling off into the jungle. Adric knew what they were; he had heard the Doctor and Tegan call them scorpions. “Or, we survive with them,” the Adric clone mused.
“You do what you like,” Adric told him. “I’m going to get out of here.”
“Have it your own way.” When Adric next looked up, his other self had gone.
*
Commander Javon, the commander of the Starship Persephone, turned to his lieutenant. “Well?”
“Earth has been hit by the meteor, Commander,” Zavvi replied. “It is on course for the beginning of the evolution of the human race.”
The crew of the Starship Persephone had an unusual task; they were what had become known in the twenty second century as “a clean-up crew” or as the Commander liked to think of them “Time Monitors.” Using their basic time travel technology (stolen from Daleks of the twenty sixth century) their job was to monitor planets in the universe as they developed and make sure that nothing tampered with their development. Being time travellers, they knew their history of the planets; when they were to develop and what happened to make them develop. Their latest project was Earth. The meteor, which they had been taught the freighter was, had hit, and so it was right on track.
“Good, good,” said the Commander, turning his attention, as usual, to the youngest member of the crew. “Tana!”
Tana jumped and looked up. As usual, she had been daydreaming. “Commander?”
“Get back to work!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Commander?” Tarkin, a cadet like Tana, looked up from his monitor. “The monitors are picking up a reading of something down there.”
“Probably the scorpions,” stated Zavvi, remembering her history lessons. “They survived the explosion, for some reason.”
“No, Zavvi. It’s human.”
“Human?”
“Already?” The Commander came over to his screen. “That’s impossible. They’re not due to evolve just yet.”
“Well, something’s down there,” Tarkin stated and it was true. The reading was quite clear for them all to see.
“It’s not a Time Agent, is it?” asked Tana, leaving her seat to look over Tarkin’s shoulder. “They have been known to-”
“Tana, get back to work,” said the Commander.
She sighed and did as she was told.
“Commander, oughtn’t we check it out?” asked Zavvi. “If they meddle with something down there, it could affect the whole course of human history.”
The Commander had to agree with her. “Very well. Tarkin, hone in on that reading. Zavvi, fetch the equipment; and then take Ibson and Penton down there.”
“Yes, Commander,” said Zavvi, already on her way.
“Can’t I come?” asked Tana.
“No,” said the Commander shortly.
Tana sighed. “But I never get to do anything. How can I learn if you won’t let me?”
Tarkin looked at the Commander. “She has a point, sir.”
The Commander sighed. “Very well, Tana, you may go; but do not touch anything unless Zavvi permits it so. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All is ready, Commander,” Zavvi stated, as she returned.
“Very well. I have decided that Tana will be joining you.”
“Is that wise, sir? I mean, considering-?”
“It’s an order, Zavvi.”
“Very well, sir.” Zavvi looked at Tana. “Come along.”
*
Adric stumbled along through the forest. Everything seemed hazy now; and he wasn’t entirely sure whether it was all due to the effect of the explosion. He wasn’t even sure where he was going or what he would find.
He tripped, suddenly, over the tail of one of the larger dead dinosaurs. Slamming into the ground with a cry of “Oof!” he lay still for a minute. It was hard to think properly, what with the constant throbbing in his head and the sounds of fire crackling and the sound of a spaceship nearby...
Spaceship? Adric raised his head. He couldn’t see anything but he could hear it. Or maybe he was hallucinating again? Maybe he was just hoping that someone was here? At any rate, it was all too much for him and he passed out...
*
Tana couldn’t help feeling excited as she looked around this new and evolving planet. She had never been to Earth before. Zavvi had told her stick close by for her own protection, she claimed, but Tana knew the truth. None of the crew trusted her with anything like this because she was so clumsy they were always afraid she’d do something daft and cause a fatal accident or something. That was why the Commander was always barking at her to get on with her work.
She longed to explore the place, but Zavvi’s orders were for her to stay beside her and Penton, so she explored with her eyes instead, studying the landscape. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered.
“Yes,” Penton agreed. “I wonder if Invertire looked like this thousands of years ago. It must have, surely?”
The party moved over in the direction of the area where Tarkin had seen the blip of human life on the monitor. “Zavvi to Commander,” said Zavvi into her radio, “no sign of anything yet. Ought we to split up?”
There was a crackle as the Commander hesitated. “Very well, but make sure Tana keeps her hands to herself.”
“Yes, Commander.”
“I’m not a child,” scowled Tana.
Penton grinned. “Just don’t wander too far from my sight, Tana.”
“And don’t touch anything unless I give you leave,” Zavvi commanded her.
Tana nodded and moved away from them. To her left, the land dipped downwards in a valley and she made her way over there. She had only ever seen a dinosaur in pictures and she was hoping to spot one now, even if it were dead, it wouldn’t be any less real, would it? Glancing down the valley, she saw one; a Diplodocus, if remembered rightly. But what was that there beside it?
She gasped and looked around. Her companions were nowhere in sight. She fumbled for her radio. “Tana to Zavvi, do you read me?”
“This is Zavvi; what is it, Tana?”
“I see him! The humanoid Tarkin picked up!”
There was a crackle and then Zavvi asked “Are you sure?”
“Yes! Look, come here and see if you don’t believe me!” Tana reeled off her co-ordinates and then, taking a chance, slid down the hill to land beside the dinosaur and the boy. She touched the scaly skin. The dinosaur was very definitely dead and she dashed a tear of pity away from her eyes as she leaned over the boy.
“Tana, don’t touch him!” Zavvi commanded, hurrying down the hill with Penton in her wake. “Let Penton; he’s a doctor after all.”
Penton gently eased Adric onto his back. “Nasty gash there,” he muttered, looking over the young mathematician. “Doesn’t seem to be in a bad state otherwise.”
“What’s that over there?” Tana pointed to a few bits of debris from the crashed freighter.
Zavvi reached for her radio. “Zavvi to Commander; the meteor was a space freighter; repeat, the meteor was a space freighter.”
“Is there much left of it?”
“Besides the boy? No, there doesn’t seem to be.”
“You know what to do, Zavvi.”
Zavvi nodded and got to her feet. “Penton, take the boy back to the ship. Tana, go with him. I’ve got some cleaning up to do.”
By “cleaning up” she meant destroying the bits of the freighter in order for them not to be preserved and later discovered by human archaeologists. Such a thing could alter the course of human history dramatically.
She readied her disintegrating gun. Tana got to her feet and went to help Penton help Adric to his feet. “No, no,” Penton said, hurriedly. “You lead the way. I’ll be alright.”
Adric blinked at them, groggily. Now what was happening? Two humans – were they humans? Or at least, they were humanoids were standing before him, one supporting him, the other waiting patiently in case she could do anything more to help. Another hallucination?
Before he could make sense of it all, he passed out again...