If there is one phrase in any language in the known universes that I can’t resist, it is “help me.”
Nyssa and Tegan weren’t up yet, or at least hadn’t come out to the console room. It had been a grueling day and night for us all, ridding the TARDIS of microparasites – a story for another time – and repairing the damage they’d done. Poor Tegan had scrubbed down every inch Nyssa cleared, only to have those inches reinfested as the little devils fled Nyssa’s chemical, ultrasound and biological ministrations, more than one of which made all three of us ill as well. We deserved a rest but I was what Tegan, with her years of minding her young cousins, would call “overexhausted.” I couldn’t sit still. One repair led to another, and another, and yet another. I was about to tackle the chameleon circuit when I realized not only how long I’d been at it but that the TARDIS, which had been in hover mode, in the middle of nowhere, had materialized in a definite somewhere. A quick check told me it was late morning, September 16, 1920, or 1620 (for some reason the second digit had come out sideways) and we were in lower Manhattan. I unshaded the scanner. We’d landed in what appeared to be a small park, definitely 20th-century. A little girl, maybe five years old, was looking directly at the scanner, pleading, “Help me!”
The child’s hair was tangled, and her face and romper were both streaked with dirt. “Help me!” In an instant I was kneeling in the center of Hanover Square and the child was crying in my arms. Then she was pulling me across the triangle, babbling something about finding Mommy. I allowed myself to be dragged past rather pointedly uninterested people grabbing some lunch or strolling about in their own little bubbles, as New Yorkers do. What an enjoyable quest, sans monsters, TARDIS-munchers or the end of the universe! A little girl wanted her Mommy. I’d be back in time for brunch with an amusing tale for Nyssa and Tegan, and perhaps even find time for a short nap.
A seemingly endless series of explosions, a block and a half away, sent both of us flying. Crawling to where she lay, I found her stunned but unharmed, having landed on a pile of shirtwaist dresses from an overturned wagon. Others around us were less fortunate, and some people hitherto unhurt were injured by hysterical folks fleeing the scene. We were nearly trampled ourselves. The child sprang up and ran ahead. “No!” I yelled, limping after her; I realized later I’d fallen forward over a fire plug and slashed open my trousers at one knee, as well as the knee itself. I felt none of that; only the child mattered. A block hence she stopped so abruptly that I almost ran into her. I grabbed her and turned her face from the gruesome scene. Smoke, flames, broken glass, scattered bloody bits of humankind and a severed horse’s hoof, as well as hundreds of wounded, some running and some too severely hurt to move, were not anything a child should see; even now I wish I could unsee it.
A woman with a scraped cheek caught up with us and ripped the little girl away from me with a force that knocked me over. “Mommy!” Moments later Nyssa and Tegan were at my side, helping me up.
“What happened?” Tegan, rightly horrified, nonetheless clicked into “organizer” mode without waiting for a response and started directing the wild foot traffic.
“The whole TARDIS shook,” said Nyssa, ripping up a shirtwaist and binding my knee. She grabbed an armful more of the dresses and, turning to the wounded, applied tourniquets, bound wounds and dispensed comfort. She activated every fire plug she saw and let the water spray, soaking the cotton garments and ripping them as she went from patient to patient.
A block off, smoke spread like a stain high over Wall Street. I ran toward it and found fires blossoming everywhere, and people on fire too. I used my coat to beat flames from flesh, choking, as everyone was, on the thick smoke and the oppressive burnt-rubber odor of TNT.
At the far end of the block two teen-aged girls were rummaging among randomly strewn bodies. That’s where I headed, to dissuade these opportunists. Humans, I thought, choking on my own anger more than the smoke, barely skirting the fires still spontaneously popping up as I struggled to see my targets. By the time I reached them, they’d loaded a relatively undamaged Willys Whippet with six injured survivors and one was returning with yet another. They were conducting an ad hoc triage. They clearly needed help, so I helped.
“Doctor!” Nyssa had caught up with me and had Tegan in tow. The latter had repaired to the TARDIS and stuffed sacks full of medical supplies and clean rags. Both of my friends were soaked to the bone and, I realized with a start, so was I. Meanwhile, an impressive contingent of policemen had arrived. Some were administering first aid on the spot and others were turning every available intact vehicle, from drays to taxis and even a bus, into ambulances; real ambulances arrived shortly. Everyone who could pitched in. We helped as best we were able.
“Humans,” I whispered, not without a touch of pride.
“Captain Booboo?” I wouldn’t even have turned except that the voice was right in my ear. I did turn and saw the woman identified by the grimy little girl as “Mommy.” I hadn’t realized she was just as tall as I and had indeed spoken directly into my ear. “You are Captain Booboo.” It was a statement this time, not a question.
“I…” I began, not knowing whether Captain Booboo was a good thing to be. “You are the mother. How is your daughter? Is she all right?” I looked around. “Where is she?”
“She says you are Captain Booboo. You do not look like Captain Booboo.” She was instantly inside my conscious, then unconscious mind, and plucked out an image of one of my former incarnations. “This is you?” Nyssa grabbed my hand. I cannot even begin to imagine what my face looked like as I struggled to put my mind back in order, although the invasion had been extremely brief and arguably benevolent.
“That… was me,” I agreed, when I could speak again. I withdrew my hand from Nyssa’s and stood quite straight. “I mean… I am still me. You are not from around here, am I right?”
“We are from nowhere. We have been refugees for so many generations no one can remember whence we came. All we remember is that when our planet was being taken from us, Captain Booboo helped us to escape.”
“He… I did?” I tried to remember.
“We need Captain Booboo again. Are you he?”
Tegan interjected, not at all helpfully, “Doctor, have you ever been a children’s show presenter?” I ignored her.
“I guess I am Captain Booboo,” I looked around again. The police had the situation under control. “Would you and your daughter like to come back to my… ship, and explain what you need?”
“It Is not safe to gather.”
“You can come, at least,” Nyssa suggested. “You’d be safe there. What’s your name?”
“Mommy.”
Nyssa and Tegan exchanged amused looks which I pretended not to see, but it was difficult for me to keep a straight face. “Mommy,” I said, somewhat grandly, “please accept our hospitality. I promise you will be safe on my ship.” Tegan smiled encouragingly. Nyssa took Mommy’s hand in both of hers.
“We promise,” she said.
The four of us settled in the Tea Room, where we found jammy dodgers for all, with sweet tea for the ladies and a twist of lemon garnishing mine. The TARDIS can be quite intuitive but I was still feeling a bit tender about having had a mind-visitor and wondered whether Mommy’s brief invasion had been mere expedience or a deliberate power play. I didn’t wonder for long. “This is safe,” decided Mommy, emptying her cup in three huge gulps. She closed her eyes and her little girl appeared in the Tea Room… along with four men, a boy and three women, all as humanoid as Mommy and undoubtedly not human at all. Each bowed slightly upon being introduced: “Baby you have met. Here are Moe, Shemp, Curly, Larry, Alfalfa, Darla, Lucy and Ethel.” Tegan burst out laughing and could not be subdued.
“False names,” I said evenly. “False bodies too? Stolen bodies?” That brought Tegan’s mirth to a crashing halt.
“No!” Mommy was emphatic. “We have modified our own bodies to blend in. We are not thieves. We are not murderers. We are being pursued from planet to planet, from era to era, by thieves and murderers.”
“You travel in time?” Nyssa was as astonished as I; Tegan had not yet understood. “How do you do that?”
“Yes,” I said, shaking hands with the newcomers, but addressing Mommy, “how exactly do you do that?”
“They can’t follow us here. Your ship is our only hope.”
Before I could protest, the TARDIS wobbled, halted, wobbled again and stalled… and Mommy was back in my mind, this time not for my edification but to use me as a TARDIS operating manual. Her probe took nearly a full minute and when she withdrew I collapsed, knocking the basket of jammy dodgers off the table. As they went flying, it was their loss, rather than the painful incursion, that brought tears to my eyes. I heard Tegan shout “Leave him alone!” Nyssa sat me down. The pain subsided. The TARDIS was in flight and I could not guess, or control, when or where we were headed.
Once we had all piled back into the console room, “when” proved to be no surprise at all: 1620. “Where” was a bit confusing: Philippolis or Thrace, in the Ottoman Empire, about to be Roman – again - later to be Bulgarian, definitely in turmoil.
“This is what you consider ‘safe’?” I asked, staring at the scanner. “Are you sure this is when and where you want to be?” Mommy opened the TARDIS door, led her people out into the middle of a street fair and vanished in the crowd. “Great,” I grumbled.
“Now what do we do?” demanded Tegan.
“We get dressed,” said Nyssa, so we all hastened to the TARDIS’ vast closet.
“How hard would it be to organize this by century?” Tegan was unhappily sorting through miniskirts, togas and djellabas all mixed together.
“On my list,” said Nyssa.
For myself I found a short white cotton tunic; when I emerged from the dressing room I thought I caught Tegan glancing admiringly at my legs, and drew my ripped trousers back on. She hadn’t yet chosen anything. Nyssa came out in a Roman palla, fastened with a tiger eye brooch, and handed a similar one to Tegan along with a brooch of agate. “We can be Roman. There were Romans, Greeks, Persians… no one from Traken or Gallifrey!”
“Whoever we are, we have lost Our Gang et al by now, and we don’t even know if we would recognize them if we found them. They probably don’t even need us anymore. They will not be readmitted to the TARDIS, at any rate,” I added, emphatically, wrapping a knee-length paenula around my tunic. Nyssa fastened it for me with a glass bead pin that looked like a blue eye (to match my own, she explained). “We only have to look approximately right. There are soldiers out there. Let’s not call too much attention to ourselves.”
Once we left the TARDIS we were bombarded, not unpleasantly, with smells and colors and various musical essays competing for the attention we were trying to avoid. I’d been about to suggest that we leave our hijackers to their own devices and find a nice planet on which to chill, but the bombardment was so intoxicating that I changed my mind and looked around with great interest, without another thought wasted on Mommy and her confederates. I could see that my friends were similarly distracted. The TARDIS itself intermittently drew a smattering of curious fairgoers who apparently thought it was a planned attraction; they wandered off when it failed to entertain them. The three of us were jostled into a larger group heading for a legitimate attraction that delighted us as soon as we saw it: a merry-go-round, in 17th-century Turkey! “What is it?” cried Nyssa, clearly enchanted by the elaborately decorated wooden horses.
“It’s a carousel!” Tegan declared, trotting toward the machine as it slowed down. Nyssa hesitated for only a second before doing likewise. I decided that 849 was not too old to enjoy a spin, and joined them.
Around we whirled, feeling the pull of centrifugal force, thanks to the human operators using ropes to guide our otherwise stationary mounts, on their wooden platforms, affixed to the great simple wheel. Tegan shrieked with laughter and to my surprise and gratification so did Nyssa, whom I often had suspected was only truly happy surrounded by bubbling test tubes and squealing electronics. I believe I may have laughed aloud, myself, but my hearts were in my mouth in an instant: out of the corner of my eye I had seen an anomaly and when I craned my neck, spinning past it, to see it better, I realized that the anomaly was a rather tall woman, in local habiliments, staring intently at me. “Mommy,” I muttered, vastly displeased. Displeasure turned to alarm as, on the next pass, I saw a man and a boy – not, I thought, one of her gang – approaching her rather rapidly from a few yards behind. I dismounted and was thrown into a neighboring horse, which I clutched to right myself as I tried to estimate the best launching point and the exact moment to leap. I blew it and landed painfully on hard-packed dirt, half a circuit past Mommy and her pursuers.
Momentarily forgetting I had replaced my slightly scorched coat with the paenula, I patted around for pockets and despaired until I remembered that I had transferred my cricket ball into my trousers in order not to concuss the burning folks on Wall Street. Running toward where Mommy was now being manhandled away through the throng, I realized that if my pitch weren’t perfect I could injure an innocent fairgoer. I bowled and closed my eyes. When I opened them, Mommy was running to me and the boy was at her heels. The man was down. Part of the crowd was converging upon him; the rest were converging upon me!
Mommy grabbed my hand without stopping and dragged me away from there. She evidently knew where we were going so I let her, until I saw the TARDIS straight ahead. “No!” I cried and pulled back. There was no way she was ever going to see the inside of my TARDIS again. She was strong but I was stronger. She gave up and pulled me to the left; we circled halfway around and kept running. We had lost the boy and the crowd was dispersing. I hoped Nyssa and Tegan would return safely to the TARDIS as soon as they realized I was gone; if they decided to look for me, who knew what would happen?
We headed for the hills, of which there were seven. We clambered up the nearest one, a rocky affair, hard going, especially after our strenuous endeavor – not yet proven completely successful – to escape her pursuers. Whoever they turned out to be, they were now my pursuers as well. Irrationally, I kept wishing my cricket ball had been a boomerang, so that it would not now be lost, and that made me think of Tegan, and how her natural impatience might lead her and Nyssa into danger from which I was helpless to extricate them. Indeed, I was following a woman who had already proven she could, without warning and apparently without much effort, shatter my personal autonomy. I shuddered to think what she could turn me into if she put her heart into it. She was no longer dragging me along; we both needed our hands to proceed, among the shedding pines. Yes, I still followed her up the hill. There was no question of trying to overpower her or to flee. For all I knew, she could scramble my brain from the other end of a cricket oval.
Just when I thought that either my legs would give out or my imagination would render me useless, we reached a small wooden hut wherein, it turned out, Moe, Larry and Ethel stood waiting. They didn’t seem surprised to see me. Upon my inquiring glance, Mommy said, “We are all who remain.” I felt a pang of grief for Baby, who may or may not have been a juvenile of whatever species she was but had at least presented as a child. She had doubtless been used as bait but had done me no personal harm. There were no chairs. I sat down on the floor.
“They will find us soon,” said Mommy, matter-of-factly. “We must prepare ourselves.”
“Have you any weapons?” I asked. Mommy shook her head. “Is there anything we can use to make weapons?”
“You must save us, Captain Booboo,” pleaded Ethel. She reached down and touched the brooch that fastened my paenula.
“Captain Booboo hasn’t got a magic wand,” I sputtered, frustrated. “You think you can hijack my TARDIS, hijack my mind, not give me the slightest hint what is going on, who you are, who is chasing you or what the stakes are, separate me from my friends, who are stranded and vulnerable, and just demand that I help you?” As tired as I was, I jumped to my feet. “Well, I have demands too. I want information and I want it now.”
My tirade was met with silence. They all just stared at me.
“All right. I’ll make this easy for you. One thing at a time. Why am I Captain Booboo? When was I Captain Booboo? I don’t remember being Captain Booboo.” I closed my eyes. I could still see the image of myself that Mommy had identified as Captain Booboo. “I believe you but I don’t understand.”
“Captain Booboo saved us,” they all chanted at once. “Captain Booboo turned the magic on. Captain Booboo taught us how to fly through time.”
“What is that… a nursery rhyme?”
“You are legend,” said Mommy. “Everything we know, you taught us.”
“When was this? And where?”
“I have told you. Generations ago. We remember only what has been passed down.”
“My image was passed down too?”
“You taught us how to do that.”
“I don’t know how to do that! How could I teach you what I don’t even know?” As silence was once more my only response, I added, “And who are these people who are after you? Can you at least tell me that?”
Mommy sighed. I was startled by this mild break in her impassivity. I was more startled by her eventual response: “They are us.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“They are us. We are Arim. They are Arim.”
“There was a civil war?”
“I am not stupid, Captain Booboo. I know that magic is not magic. I know that flying through time is not flying. I know Captain Booboo is a myth and you are real, but the myth is you. Some of us know that and some do not, but regardless, there are those who are respectful of what we were taught and those who see only the means to power.”
I was silent on the subject of power. If so-called magic, for example was to some a means to power, then to what was power a means? In Mommy’s case, I decided, it was a means to survival. There was, however, no time to ponder this. I’d had an idea. “We need to gather pine needles and pine cones, as many as we can, as fast as we can. Do we have anything in which to carry them?”
The hut had a back room with cots lined against the walls. We pulled the bedclothes off of them and set them out in front of the hut. Moe and Alfalfa got to work tying the corners. Mommy and Ethel dragged off the first two and began to gather pine needles and cones.
“Now, what kind of containers have we got?” I was talking to myself, as I often do, especially as an antidote to stress. (Most of the time it is highly ineffective but it’s what I do, and there is a level on which I do find the sound of my own voice comforting.) On one side of the hut I came upon a cracked rain barrel that could still be used to store the materials we gathered. In the back I found a wooden box of firewood, and perhaps better yet, an ax lodged in a stump. I freed the ax, looked around and found a few birch saplings, which I promptly felled and set atop the firewood. Now I really missed my coat. I knew that, along with a plethora of items both useful and less obviously so, I had a book of matches. Without that, or some other incendiary device, all of the gang’s efforts, and my own, would be in vain. I have to admit I rather missed my celery, too.
Ethel came back with the first load and, upon my instruction, emptied it into the rain barrel and hurried off to gather another blanketful. Mommy returned next and I asked her if she had any matches. She had none but produced a Zippo lighter almost out of thin air and held it out to me. “I don’t suppose you have a fire extinguisher handy as well?” She rolled her eyes. Then she stiffened. I had reached for the lighter but froze when she did.
“They’re here.”
Moe, Alfalfa and Ethel returned, breathless, terrified and empty-handed. We hadn’t a scintilla of a chance. There was no place to hide and despite our efforts we were unprepared for battle. “Go inside,” I ordered them. It was no safer inside than outside but I couldn’t think with their pleading eyes upon me. “You too, Mommy.”
“No.”
I counted 16 men advancing up the hill. We should have gathered rocks, I thought, to roll down onto them. No, we never could have moved enough of them, fast enough, and at any rate the men could just move out of the way.
The squad stopped several yards from us. They seemed to be unarmed, or at least displayed no weapons. I held my hand out and smiled as winningly as I could. “Hello,” I said, stepping forward. “I’m the Doctor.”
Three seconds later I could not have told you who I was to save my life.
I hope I didn’t actually say my name out loud. It wouldn’t have mattered; they had complete access and I would not even have had to think it for them to possess it, but I couldn’t shut up. My throat was sore and dry and still I chattered, and what came out of my mouth made no sense to me. Some of it was just screaming… at least I think that was me. Yes, it had to have been me. Farther away, people were laughing, and their laughter echoed painfully in my chest, after which my entire being seemed to be on fire, but that was only my deep, unconquerable shame, not for screaming but for caring about the laughter. I do think that because I could not remember my name they never did find it. Maybe I just need to think that.
For a while - an eternity, truth be told - I was drowning. “I can’t properly regenerate if I drown because my regeneration will drown too, and his regeneration, and so on, until we run out of lives. That’s not fair.” This too appeared to tickle someone whose glee was less distant, whose hilarity was breathed onto my skin - onto my neck and then my cheek - and then became a chortling face inside my head. I could still feel it breathing on me and I could see and hear it laughing, in my sinal cavity, onto my scalp but from the inside out, against my ear drums, playing like a video loop against my conjunctiva. I could see and hear nothing else. I could not tell whether I was standing or sitting or lying down, or whether I had a body at all. I could not think. My mind was not just being plundered. It was being reconstructed.
Suddenly the face that had been chortling was screaming, so I screamed too, frightening myself so badly that I screamed again, and the screaming face melted into a quite different visage: Captain Booboo. This Captain Booboo was not the clear image of myself, albeit in a former incarnation, that Mommy had pulled from my psyche. He was, rather, the glorious mythical Captain Booboo, ancestral memory of a dying species, not me and yet altogether me, so I clung to him with all my might. He was fierce but he was fierce on my behalf, not against me. He was bringing me back.
When I was able to have a coherent thought, it was that Mommy was fighting back. She had put Captain Booboo in my head. Captain Booboo would save me.
Then I was boiling hot, being sat up and relieved of my smoldering paenula; a spark had ignited it. My eyes were still closed; I could still see images on my eyelids. I saw the Arim destroying each other, and their planet, in a brutal war. I saw weeping parents, dying with their planet, entrusting their traumatized children to Captain Booboo and his magical blue box, I saw the power-hungry Arim escaping through means I did not fully understand involving time-bending psychic energy, and tracking down the survivors over countless generations and countless less-than-welcoming planets, whittling them down to virtual extinction. I saw that last little band adapting to the ways of Earth, escaping backwards through the centuries, always pursued and increasingly outnumbered. The pursuers adapted too, and were able to use means at hand – such as a horse pulling a cart full of TNT and hundreds of pounds of heavy window sashes, just to blow up any Arim in lower Manhattan.
What had they wanted from me? Nothing at all. My mind was just easier to catch unawares and invade than the Arim minds long conditioned to fight fire with fire - and apparently, burning holes in my psyche was their idea of fun. I opened my eyes and saw fire everywhere, pine needles on fire, pine cones popping out their shrapnel-like seeds, birch sap exploding. My blue-eyed brooch was melting near my ankles. Three of the attacking Arim and Mommy’s little party were trapped, locked in a mental stalemate. The rest of the squad had been lost to the flames. My plan had worked and it was horrible. I wanted to take it back. Through a gap in the flames I saw Nyssa speeding toward me. She helped Tegan, whose arm was supporting me, lift me to my feet. My legs worked even if my mind didn’t. As we stumbled downhill, we eventually could see townspeople digging a ditch where the hill gently sloped into the city. Others were pouring buckets and barrels of water into the ditch, which expanded more quickly than I would have thought possible. They were trying to create a fire line barrier, and it had little chance of success, as the fire was devouring everything in its path and rolling downhill toward the city. Nyssa left Tegan in charge of me and rushed toward the Tardis. Tegan had me well past the growing ditch when Nyssa returned lugging a gigantic fire hose. “Wait!” cried Tegan, letting go of me and racing to help Nyssa with the impossible burden.
“Turn it on!” Tegan ran to do that and as water gushed from the hose, more townspeople took it off Nyssa’s hands. “Doctor!” I was on the ground again, beginning to comprehend that we had abandoned all the Arim, even Mommy, who had saved my life, to their fiery fates. I had failed. I had saved no one. I may even have engineered the demise of the Arim I was trying to protect, by diverting their energies to saving me, convenient hostage that I was. It was a paralyzing thought. It was also my last thought for quite a while.
The first thing I did upon awakening fully, nearly a week later, was to check to see if I had regenerated. I hadn’t. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
Tegan and Nyssa were in the console room when I wandered in. They’d managed to put the TARDIS into hover mode but were at a loss what to do next, so Tegan was cleaning the roundels and Nyssa was contemplating some obscure switches.
“I made an awful mess of things,” I said, sitting on the edge of the console. Tegan shooed me off; Nyssa drew up a worn but comfy-looking overstuffed chair. “Where in the world did that come from?” I sank into it.
“You mean,” said Nyssa, “where in the TARDIS. Did you know there’s a whole room full of furniture, all stacked up? We could redecorate! Oh, that reminds me, don’t use the swimming pool. We emptied it to fight the fire.”
“Was anyone hurt? I mean besides….” I couldn’t go on.
“Not a soul,” Tegan assured me, placing a hand on my arm. “Doctor, you didn’t mess up. We saved a lot of people.”
“From the fire I planned!”
“No, in New York. You didn’t cause that fire, or that explosion. Lots of people are alive because of you.”
I pondered that.
“Doctor,” whispered Nyssa, from behind me, her hands on my shoulders. “I don’t know what they did to you, but it’s over now. Please, Doctor.”
“We’ll help you,” said Tegan.
“I’m fine,” I said, almost meaning it. “Captain Booboo is dead. Long live Captain Booboo.”
THE END
