PEARL

“The Doctor is the cleverest person I have ever known.”

Nyssa agreed, “I’ve never met anyone like him. Only my father was as intelligent, and I admit it was a completely different kind of intelligence.”

“He has a good heart,” Tegan continued.

“Two, actually.”

“You know what I mean. Anyway, he is obviously extremely compassionate, caring….”

“He cares about us. He protects us.”

“Are you kidding? He saves worlds! Planets! How many times has he saved the Earth alone?” Tegan sighed. Nyssa closed the roundel whose contents she had been studying and looked at her friend. Tegan looked down, gently kicking the TARDIS wall.

“But…?”

“Well, has he ever given you a hug when you were low?”

“Why would he?” Nyssa was genuinely baffled.

“No reason. He’s not even human. It’s probably normal for a Time Lord. I don’t know what I’m wingeing about. Don’t mind me.”

I silently backed away, then turned and moved swiftly from corridor to corridor, without a care where I was going. I hadn’t meant to eavesdrop but once I’d realized I was the subject of my two companions’ conversation I couldn’t help myself. Now I was sorry I hadn’t interrupted them or walked away sooner. Their brief conversation disturbed me at a time I couldn’t afford to be disturbed. The TARDIS had been picking up weird murmuring signals for six days and we had been chasing those signals, only to have them move. They moved from planet to planet, from galaxy to galaxy, sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger, always just as we were about to close in. I needed to focus. Someone, somewhere, needed help, or perhaps it was a trap, but to what purpose?

No, I couldn’t afford to be distracted. Surely my friends had meant no harm. Somehow, though, I couldn’t set it aside.

That must be why I missed the most important signal of all.

The very first time we got the signal, not even a clear distress call, just a kind of odd blip, we did materialize and step outside to check things out. We suited up: no Goldilocks, this. We looked around but there was nothing, just rock and a thin veneer of what looked like gold but almost certainly wasn’t. My sonic screwdriver would have come in handy. Oh, well. Unless a flea existed under the radar, so to speak, there was no life on that planet, for which we hadn’t even got a name. When we returned to the TARDIS, the signal was even weaker and indicated a planet that did have a name: Pfilt. There was definitely life there.

“I feel like Gulliver!” Tegan declared, eliciting a confused look from Nyssa. A tree trunk the size of the Louvre was almost flush against the TARDIS door. We squeezed ourselves out and laboriously along it, not at all sure it would ever open out into the air, and indeed when it did open out it was into a whale-sized clearing surrounded by more bark.

“We’ll never find our way back if we proceed,” I decided.

Nyssa said, thoughtfully, “We don’t even know if these tree things have tree-tops. Maybe there are dwellings or other populated structures or spaces up there.”

“Right!” Tegan got it. “Maybe we are going in the wrong direction!”

“Along the wrong plane,” I agreed, and we all looked up. The canopy was too big and too distant to make out.

“These tree things are organic,” continued Nyssa. “They’re breathing.” Tegan and I agreed that we had felt that as we inched along. “If they have language, the TARDIS will translate, right?” I assured her that this was so. “I mean if they use language. They could be quiet for any number of reasons: they’re sleeping, they’re afraid of us, they have nothing to say, they are planning to attack us….”

“Attack!” Tegan shuddered.

“That isn’t likely,” I reassured her. “Anyway, Nyssa is right. No one is trying to communicate with us at the moment. That doesn’t mean they can’t, or that they won’t, if and when they’re ready. Meanwhile, we are clueless.”

Nyssa, always intuitive, placed both hands on the exposed surface of the “tree thing,” as she put it, and felt it with her palms and fingers. It breathed harder. I could see it inhale and exhale. Nyssa slowly stroked it, and it opened, what, a mouth? A pocket? “A lift!” I decided and stepped in. My friends gasped. “It’s safe, see? No teeth! I’ve not been swallowed or chewed! And it smells like…” I struggled briefly to figure out exactly what the scent was. “Licorice!”

Tegan took a sniff and a tentative step into the gap. Standing beside me, she looked out at Nyssa and shrugged. Nyssa shrugged back and stepped in too. With a slight lurch, whatever it was we were standing on rose… and rose, and rose. Holding hands, as no protecting screen or door had closed in front of us, we were lifted for a full three minutes and then, with an even slighter lurch, we came to a halt. Nyssa looked a bit greenish; as it turned out, she disliked the smell of licorice.

No one came to greet us. I peered out and saw big, fluffy orange clouds. Letting go of my friends’ hands, I rummaged through my pockets for something to sacrifice to the cause; I was not about to endanger my cricket ball, newly acquired to replace one I’d recently used as a weapon. Finally I dug up a jelly baby, long overlooked and certainly stale by now, and tossed it out onto a cloud. It bobbed there, but only slightly. If weight were not an issue, we could walk as if on a soft mattress. But was weight an issue? I stuck out a foot. Nyssa and Tegan both gasped. I pushed down with my toe, then my heel. Each time, I sank in about half an inch. I closed my eyes and stepped all the way out and, as the gasps turned to screams, I sank two inches and stopped. I opened my eyes, turned, smiled at my frightened companions… and immediately wobbled, lost my balance and found myself lying flat on my back, four inches into that fluffy orange cloud, which hadn’t enough resistance for me to roll over. I was as helpless as a turtle on its back. Worse, Nyssa and Tegan were laughing hysterically.

“Don’t mind me.” They each took one of my feet and unceremoniously dragged me back into the lift, where I was able to sit up. They were still chuckling softly and my pride, I admit, was smarting. Then suddenly I saw it from their point of view and laughed my ass off too. That set them off all over again. We sat in the hollow center of a humongous tree, a mile up among gelatinous orange clouds, not even yet considering how we would get back down, much less how best to proceed with the tracking of dim, variable distress signals, and let tears of laughter roll down our cheeks until we were limp and silly.

“Now what,” Tegan finally said.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Let me think.”

Nyssa said what I should have been thinking: “When we were all in here, that’s when it started up. We’re all in here now and it’s not starting down. So how do we get down?”

“We could all go out and come back in,” I offered.

“Oh right,” Tegan sputtered, “Look, I used to like bouncy houses. Turbulence never bothered me. This is different. If we all go out and fall down, who is going to drag us back? What do we do then, spend the rest of our lives lying on a cloud?”

“What if,” I started, slowly, “I went back out, but crawling? I could try to turn around. If I can’t, you can pull me back in. If I can, you lot can come crawling out too, and then we crawl back in. What do you say?”

“I’ll go first,” said Nyssa. I opened my mouth to protest but was preempted. “I am the lightest, the easiest to pull back. Tegan should follow me. You’re the strongest, Doctor. You can most easily pull us back. You come out only if we can move around on our own.” I couldn’t argue with that.

Nyssa knelt down and put her hands onto the nearest bit of cloud, exclaiming wordlessly as they sank in. Once she had determined that the sinking was minimal, she crawled out, then slowly turned around and faced us. She moved to the side so Tegan could crawl out. Tegan turned too, and moved to make room for me. I hesitated. As humorous as my plight may have looked, it had felt pretty awful. I didn’t fancy an instant replay.

“All right,” I breathed. “Here goes.” I crawled out onto the cloud, leaving the lift empty. I found that I could move, if I didn’t hurry. It felt odd and downright disconcerting to have nothing to grip, like crawling on foam-covered ice, but not cold. “Now the big question is, should we explore or go back into the lift and see if it takes us down, after which we still have no idea why we came here at all.”

I could hear Tegan turn slowly to face the endless, featureless expanse of orange clouds. “Explore what, Doctor? We might have to crawl for miles, and then we would not be able to orient ourselves and come back to the lift, much less to the TARDIS. We could be lost forever.” She sounded genuinely frightened, and when I looked over at her I saw that her face reflected that fear, which was not, after all, unreasonable. I thought then that maybe we should indeed turn back. Perhaps the TARDIS was even now receiving a nice, strong signal from the edge of the Whirlpool Galaxy, or barely a blip from a stranded life capsule near the edge of the Sombrero. Then I pulled my knees under me and sat up.

I hadn’t meant to sit up; I suppose I had been distracted by my efforts to justify turning my back on a recognizable cry for help. However it happened, I did sit up, and fall seven feet to the next stratum. As dazed as I was, I noticed that these clouds were purple, offered much more resistance than their upstairs neighbors, and, well, weren’t all that cloud-like. I would’ve been more conscious, too, of the figures bending over me, and the sensation of being carried a long distance, but I was rather deeply immersed in the process of passing out.