132 - Doctor Who - The Edge of Destruction

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In a final bid to regain control of the Tardis’s faulty control

system the Doctor is driven to experiment with a

dangerous untried combination.

With a violent explosion the TARDIS blacks out and the

crew find themselves trapped inside.

A simple technical fault? Sabotage? Or something even

more sinister? Tension mounts as the Doctor and his

companions begin to suspect one another.

What has happened to the TARDIS? Slowly a terrifying

suspicion dawns. Has the TARDIS become the prisoner of

some powerful fifth intelligence which is even now

haunting the time-machine’s dark and gloomy corridors?

ISBN 0 426 20327 5

DOCTOR WHO

THE EDGE OF

DESTRUCTION

Based on the BBC television serial by David Whitaker by

arrangement with BBC Books, a division of BBC Enterprises

Ltd

NIGEL ROBINSON

Number 132 in the

Doctor Who Library

A TARGET BOOK

published by

The Paperback Division of

W. H. Allen & Co. Plc

A Target Book

Published in 1988

by the Paperback Division of

W. H. Allen & Co. Plc

44 Hill Street, London W1X 8LB

Corporation 1964, 1988

The BBC producers of The Edge of Destruction were Verity

Lambert and Mervyn Pinfold

The directors were Richard Martin and Frank Cox

The role of the Doctor was played by William Hartnell

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading

ISBN 0 426 20327 5

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by

way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or

otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in

any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is

published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Prologue

1 Aftershock

2 The Seeds of Suspicion

3 Inside the Machine

4 Trapped

5 ‘Like a Person Possessed’

6 The End of Time

7 The Haunting

8 Accusations

9 The Brink of Disaster

10 A Race Against Time

Epilogue

Conclusion

Introduction

It all started, they would say later, in a forgotten

London junkyard on a foggy November night in 1963. But in

truth, for Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright it had started

some five months earlier.

It had all begun with fifteen-year-old Susan Foreman

who had just joined the school. From the start Susan had

proved something of a mystery. Despite five months’ constant

nagging from Miss Johnson, the school secretary, she was still

unable to produce a birth certificate or indeed any other

documentation to prove her status; neither was her

grandfather, with whom she lived, on the electoral register of

Coal Hill or any other London district.

She had just returned from a long stay abroad, Susan

explained, and the necessary papers were still in transit. Miss

Johnson had thought of telephoning the girl’s grandfather

but he was not listed in the phone directory; the two letters

she wrote to him remained unanswered. Fortunately Miss

Johnson was a mild-mannered woman, not the normal stuff of

school secretaries, and as the months passed she began to

despair of ever completing her file on Susan Foreman.

Looking at Susan, Barbara Wright could believe that the

girl had spent most of her life abroad. Her speech was clear

and precise, as though English was not her mother tongue, or

at least she was unused to speaking it.

Occasionally she would use a word or phrase in her

conversation which, although not technically wrong, was

unsuitable, just as if she had learnt English from a text book.

When she spoke, however, it was with a peculiar lilt which was

not unattractive.

She often seemed nervous in the presence of her fellow

pupils, as if she was uncertain of their customs, and though

she was a pleasant enough girl she seemed to have few friends

at school; those pupils she did associate with appeared rather

in awe of her.

The one time Barbara had asked Susan about her

background the girl had just smiled sweetly and said, ‘We

travelled around quite a lot when I was a child.’ But Susan’s

large almond eyes, finely-boned cheeks and slightly Oriental

complexion suggested that she had some Asiatic blood in her.

As history teacher, Barbara Wright had a special interest

in Susan. Most of Barbara’s pupils regarded history as a dull

chore, especially when it was the last lesson on a Friday

afternoon. But Susan greeted each lesson with genuine

enthusiasm. She was passionately interested in every period of

history and at times displayed a knowledge of certain ages

which astounded even Barbara. Barbara recognised in Susan

a potential university candidate and offered to work with her

at home; but Susan had firmly refused, giving as an excuse

the fact that her grandfather did not welcome strangers,

Ian Chesterton, the handsome young science master,

had been having similar problems. Susan’s marks for her

written papers were consistently excellent—surprisingly so for

a girl of her age—but in class she seemed strangely detached,

as though Ian’s practical demonstrations of physics and

chemistry simply bored her. Even the spectacular

experiments Ian reserved for Monday morning, in a futile

attempt to gain his pupils’ jaded post-weekend enthusiasm,

failed to excite her spirits. At these times Susan seemed

different from the rest of the class, a girl apart.

But if Susan was extraordinarily good at science and

history, she was unbelievably bad at other subjects. Her

geography was laughable, and her knowledge of English

literature at best patchy: she could quote, for example, huge

chunks of Shakespearean verse but had never even heard of

Charles Dickens, let alone read any of his works. However,

her foreign languages—French, Latin and the optional

Ancient Greek—were surprisingly fluent for a schoolgirl, a

fact Barbara put down to her having lived abroad and

acquired an ear for languages.

In short, Susan Foreman was a problem child. And so it

was on a foggy Friday night in November that Ian and

Barbara resolved to visit the girl’s guardian and discuss her

erratic performance at school. Miss Johnson gave them her

address—76 Totters Lane—and they drove there in Ian’s

battered old Volkswagen. It was a journey that changed their

lives forever.

76 Totters Lane was far from what Ian and Barbara had

expected. They had imagined it to be a rather dilapidated

terraced house in a slightly run-down area of London; instead

it was nothing more than a junkyard. There, surrounded by

the clutter of unwanted pieces of furniture, and discarded

bicycles and knickknacks, was, of all things, a police telephone

box, similar to many which stood on London street corners at

that time. But like 76 Totters Lane this police telephone box

was not what it seemed.

Even years later in their old age Barbara and Ian would

never forget that first thrill of disbelief as they entered that

out-of-place police box. Instead of the cramped darkened

space they expected to find beyond the double doors, they

crossed the threshold into a spacious, brilliantly lit futuristic

control room whose dimensions totally contradicted its

outside appearance. Standing in the middle of the impossibly

huge control control chamber, astonished to see them, was

Susan Foreman.

And there Ian and Barbara finally met their problem

pupil’s grandfather, a tall imperious septuagenarian with a

flowing mane of white hair and a haughty demeanour which

suffered no fools gladly. Dressed in a crisp wing collar shirt

and cravat and the dark frock-coat of an Edwardian family

solicitor he seemed to the teachers to be not of their time, an

anachronism from another point in history all together.

As indeed he was. For Susan and the man they were to

come to know as the Doctor were aliens, beings from another

planet unimaginable light years and countless centuries away

from the Earth of 1963. The machine in which they were

standing was the TARDIS, a philosopher’s dream come true,

a craft capable of crossing the boundaries of all space and all

time, and of bending all the proven laws of physics.

Suspicious of the true intentions of the two teachers and

wary that if they were allowed to leave they would reveal his

and Susan’s presence on their planet, the Doctor had

activated his machine and taken all of them to prehistoric

Earth. There they were captured by a group of savage

cavemen and nearly sacrificed to their god. It was the courage

and resourcefulness of Ian and Barbara which saw them

through that crisis and returned them safely to the TARDIS.

Having won the Doctor’s grudging respect—if not yet

his friendship—the two teachers demanded that he take them

back to their own time. But mental giant though he

undoubtedly was, even the Doctor did not understand fully

the complexities of the TARDIS; and so it was that their next

journey took them not to Earth but to the desolate radiation-

soaked world of Skaro in the distant future. There they

encountered the deadly Daleks and once again the Doctor

displayed his distrust of all other creatures but his

granddaughter Susan, at one point even going so far as

callously to suggest abandoning Barbara in order to leave the

planet safely. Ian had vetoed that suggestion and the four

time-travellers finally survived their ordeals and returned to

the TARDIS.

But as Ian and Barbara left the planet Skaro they began

to realise that the chances of them ever seeing their home

world again were very slim. Their entire fates were in the

hands of an irascible old man whom they did not understand

and whom they still did not trust.

The vicissitudes of his character were a constant puzzle

to them; at one moment he could be generous and caring to a

fault, the next he was a selfish old man whose only concern

was the safety of himself and his granddaughter. And now

that they knew of her origins even Susan’s behaviour

appeared disconcerting and unpredictable.

Indeed, it seemed to them that the only thing remaining

constant and unchanging throughout their travels was the

TARDIS itself, running with the emotionless, unthinking

precision of a well-conditioned if slightly erratic machine.

But they were wrong, far more wrong than they could

ever have realised. For the TARDIS was more—much, much

more—than a mere machine...

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InafinalbidtoregaincontroloftheTardis’sfaultycontrolsystemtheDoctorisdriventoexperimentwithadangerousuntriedcombination.WithaviolentexplosiontheTARDISblacksoutandthecrewfindthemselvestrappedinside.Asimpletechnicalfault?Sabotage?Orsomethingevenmoresinister?TensionmountsastheDoctorandhiscompanionsbegi...

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