InsidersEpisode 1 |
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My thanks to Steven A. Henry, MD, for his technical advice on this story.
"Her pulse is at thirty five and slowing." The masked nurse turned quick, concerned eyes to the young surgeon. He was forcing a tube into the comatose woman's mouth. Behind him, a male technician, also gowned and masked, looked up from where he knelt at an EKG machine and said, "It's no good. This machine's not working at all."
"All right. There's no time to fool with it. You there---" And the surgeon flicked his head from the technician to the patient who lay before him. "Get at her chest and listen for the heartbeat. You can do that much?"
"Yes." The technician immediately stood, took the stethoscope offered by the second nurse, and applied the sensor to the unconscious woman's chest. It took him a moment to find the heart, in part because the heartbeat was slowing even further.
The surgeon got the tube down the patient's throat, and for a moment, the forced air lifted the young woman's chest.
"All right," and his voice was terse and yet desperate. "The edema indicates a calcium channel blocker of some sort. We'll have to take the best strategy that we know until somebody can tell us what she took---"
The senior nurse was already hanging up a new bag. "Ten milliliters of calcium chloride, doctor?"
"Make it twenty. We've got to prevent atrioventricular shock if we----"
"Her heart's stopped," the technician said.
"Give me atropine!" The surgeon snapped, and the second nurse, fully prepared for this, passed him a syringe. He depressed into into the unconscious woman's neck. The second nurse quickly stepped around the others as they made room for her and began chest compressions. She attempted five, and then the technician applied the stethoscope. He shook his head. She tried five more. He checked again.
"How's that drip?" the surgeon snapped.
"We've got some inside her. Her heart is still in shock, Doctor," the senior nurse said.
The young technician stepped back as the second nurse again tried compressions. "Come on, Miss," he whispered. "We want you to live long enough to realize how stupid you've been."
"All right, this or nothing," the surgeon said, and he applied another few cc's of the atropine into the injection site. As there was no response, he pushed the technician aside and took the stethoscope from him. He listened for a moment and then shook his head at the nurse. He applied ten compressions, almost viciously, as though he would have taken a savage delight in not letting the young woman die. Indeed, for a moment, his eyes were frustrated and angry as he pumped his locked hands against her sternum
"Good grief, there's a spider on her!" And the technician swept his hand at a tiny insect that scuttled among the folds of sheeting under the woman.
"Step back!" the surgeon shouted. He took up the syringe and plunged in another cc, but he was at a level of dosage now that would have complicated her condition even if her heart could have come back. He stopped. There was no response whatsoever in the patient, and her face remained a pale white that was tinged with blue.
He applied the stethoscope and then shook his head. "Useless. She's gone."
The technician was too new to emergency work to restrain his opinion. "What a waste! She did it to herself." Suddenly, from trying to save her life, he was furiously angry with her. "What a stupid cow!"
"She wasn't stupid. All right." And the surgeon's voice held a note of finality. They all stepped back from the body. The senior nurse unhooked the IV and the ventilator. The surgeon's voice was slightly puzzled. "She knew exactly what she was doing." Very few people had enough knowledge of biochemistry to take a timed release calcium channel blocker in massive overdose. But all he said was, "Let's go. I'll have her sent down to the morgue."
They walked out, dispirited after having lost this round of furious activity to the patient's obstinate tenacity in succeeding at her own death.
As they stripped off gloves and pulled off their masks, the young technician seemed dazed. He was caught between his anger and his pity. The surgeon, though fairly young himself, was more detached now that the heat of battle was over. With an attitude of resigned acceptance, he tossed his spent gloves into the lined disposal sack that was hung in one corner. "Who was she, anyway?"
"Student in pharmacology," the senior nurse told him. "Been in and out of here with bouts of depression. We never quite reached her, I suppose."
"Not before the pharmacology training did. Well, she learned her courses very well. Don't forget to note the time, will you?" And he walked out to the surgeon's dressing room.
In the small theatre where they had worked so furiously, the tiny, multi-legged insect slipped along the limp arm of the young woman. She suddenly expelled a gasp of air and then was still once again. Had the EKG been connected, it would have shown a faint electrical activity in the heart, not discernible to a stethoscope sensor. The insect, flat as a sheet of paper, slipped under her. After another few seconds passed, the young woman let out a strangled sound of pain and was then still again. But the blue tinge receded further from her skin. Upon being admitted to the emergency surgery, she had looked like a person on the threshold of death, but now she appeared to be simply sleeping, though there was a faint furrow of pain in the lines of her forehead.
* * * *
It started when Liz Shaw was on board. There had been the usual overload of work, punctuated by the road trips that Liz so detested. The Doctor, of course, loved to toss an overnight case into Bessy and roar off into parts unknown to explore new phenomena. And he always managed to stall and dawdle about getting back to UNIT and the Brigadier. Liz, on the other hand, disliked traveling. Her relationship with the Doctor, always somewhat thorny at best, worsened when they traveled together. For he was a loud, overly confident, not quite mannerly guest at pubs and inns. And when he worked, he worked tirelessly, and he expected Liz to do the same. So in a sense, it was almost a relief when the Brigadier ordered the Emergency White Glove. All operations at UNIT HQ ground to a halt as every able bodied man (and woman) meticulously cleaned, filed, sorted, discarded, shredded, and burned materials, as appropriate.
Emergency White Glove Inspection, of course, was just another term for getting things under wraps in time for an invasion of outsiders from the British government. The Brigadier, after months of fruitless arguing with Whitehall, had decided to allow the inspections into UNIT's top secret buildings, but he simply arranged things so that nobody ever saw anything crucially important. And so visitors were treated to endless "confidential" reports of phenomena that had been declared obsolete months ago, and those inquisitors of a more scientific bent had their heads spun by the Doctor's glib lectures on black hole formation and the possibility of light waves having mass. Liz was always able to throw in a lecture on calculating asteroid dispersal rates based on mass and velocity vectors and proximity to either pole.
None of it really meant anything, and as consolation there was the promise of lobster and aged beef at the formal dinners, as well as cream cakes for tea. But preparation was a nuisance and a chore.
Even UNIT's two scientific advisors had to pitch in and help with the grubby work. The Doctor had cleared out a small broom closet in the great, untidy lab, and with Jimmy Munro's help he had built in a false back to the narrow enclosure. Then he and Liz had boxed up their really important research and samples and hidden everything away back there, behind the false back wall. The Doctor replaced two long panels that could be fitted in and removed, and after these had been snugly fitted into place, he had returned the small array of cleaning supplies to the front of the closet, and the illusion was complete.
"They'd need dogs to sniff that out," he told Liz with some satisfaction as he came out from the closet and surveyed his work.
"We've still got to do the cleaning," she said. She passed him one of the plastic aprons, and he ruefully pulled it over his head and tied it on behind his back.
"And what about this?" she asked, waving a few papers at him.
He groaned and then glared at her. "Liz, if that should have been packed away---" He caught himself. "I refuse to pull that closet apart, again! If that's an important bit of information, just keep it in your pocket when the ministers inspect!"
"Just look at it and see if you remember." She passed the sheaf of papers to him. He glanced at it. His face changed from annoyance to thoughtfulness. "Oh yes. Forgot about that." He rubbed his chin with a long finger. "Should have looked into it more."
Just then the Brigadier walked in, crisp and alert, with his uniform neatly pressed. He gazed around the lab, his eyes full of disapproval. "This place is a tip. Haven't you two done anything?"
At sight of their faces, he backtracked hastily before they could say anything. "Sorry. But the inspectors will be here tomorrow."
"We've got the important stuff stowed safely," the Doctor told him. He waved the papers at Lethbridge Stewart. "Liz just reminded me of this. That poor dead girl."
"What poor dead girl?" And the Brigadier cocked an eyebrow.
"In the morgue, in the morgue!" the Doctor exclaimed. "Can't you remember anything, man?"
"The suicide you mean? The mental patient?" Lethbridge Stewart twitched the papers from the Doctor's hands and glanced at them. "Yes, I remember. Body disappeared from the hospital morgue. You expressed an interest in it, and I dug up the information for you. Thought you'd decided it was nothing."
"Whoever took the body surely has had their way with it by now," Liz said. "I mean, it happened months ago, just after I started at UNIT."
"Did you hope to recover the remains?" The Brigadier passed the sheaf of papers back to Liz, but he looked at the Doctor. "Thought you wanted to leave things like that to the police."
"It's really remarkable that they never found the body," the Doctor said.
"She killed herself, Doctor," Liz reminded him. "Perhaps it wasn't a high priority to find her body."
"Or they didn't know where to look," the Doctor said.
"Oh?" and the Brigadier was intrigued. "Where should they have looked for this dead body?"
"In the least likely place, of course," the Doctor said. "The best place to hide a dead body is among the living." He glanced over at the TARDIS, which was safely at rest in the corner of the lab, next to the tightly spiraled stairway that led to the roof. "And the next best thing is to send it to the stars. I'm going to keep that TARDIS safely locked, I think."
"You're not expecting an attack of the living dead, are you?" Liz's voice was amused.
"Not at all. The living dead are rather easy to deal with from what I understand. A pure heart and a garlic wreath. But with all these strangers poking about, I'll keep the TARDIS locked."
"Well what about this?" she asked. She realized that the question, like the brief report, had come full circle back to her again.
"File it in the missing dead body file," the Doctor told her.
"Oh, they'll never look in *there* for a report on a missing dead body." The Brigadier's voice was courteous.
Liz was surprised. "Do we have missing dead body file?"
"Of course."
This peaked the Brigadier's interest again. "Doctor, you've actually been tracking dead bodies that have gone missing?"
The timelord noticed speckles of dust on the sleeve of his black velvet jacket, and he hastilly scrubbed them off with his hand. As he did, he said, "I was interested for a brief while, Brigadier. One of those things that one wants to monitor for a bit. Just to make sure that it's not happening on a grand scale."
Liz normally didn't like to be told to go file papers, but she took the report to the file cabinet near the double doors and pulled open the top drawer.
"So it wasn't happening on a grand scale," the Brigadier said. "Body snatching, I mean."
"No." The Doctor glanced at his other shoulder and sleeve to make sure they were tidy. Liz pulled out the file folder in question. She opened it and glanced through it. "Not much to see," she reported. "Looks like two instances in which the missing body was dumped off somewhere by criminals. And this one was found immolated. Died from smoking in bed and going to sleep." She was puzzled. "You wanted to verify that there were remains in the ashes of the house?"
He shrugged. "What if I did?" Then he became defensive. "See here, it's all very well knowing in hindsight that there was no need for alarm. But that's what investigation is all about. I do wish you would stop grilling me."
"But what were you expecting?" Liz asked.
"A visit from a dead body, of course," he snapped. "But it won't be a rush, anyway."
When he got like this, there was no use in talking to him. Liz dropped the sheaf of papers into the file folder and set the folder onto the workbench in the lab. At her own leisure, she would read through it. Perhaps she could decipher what had gotten the timelord's attention.
* * * *
The Brigadier bribed the Doctor with a guarantee of a spree in the electronics stores as a reward for courteous behavior to the inspectors. But Liz had known it wouldn't work, not when the Doctor actually came face to face with people who would lord it over him. He just couldn't bear to have anybody treat him as an inferior (although he was good at treating others that way).
The small band of four government men in dark suits and one very pale young woman in a dark skirt and blazer gazed around at the lab in some disfavor when they arrived. It did not look like the most technologically advanced lab in Britain. It looked like a high school chemistry lab. A very messy high school chemistry lab. "You have a lab like a zoo," one of the ministers said to the Doctor.
"You have a face like a pie," the Doctor said gravely. "At least I can clean up the lab."
Liz immediately rang up the Brigadier from the intercom phone on the workbench. She had tried before to act as intermediary for the Doctor, but it was no good if he was bent on being quarrelsome.
While she hastily asked Cpl. Bell to send the Brig down to the lab to field some security questions, the Doctor's quick fire conversation with the government ministers escalated. More words were passing, which Liz did not catch. She cradled the receiver and picked up the thread of insults.
"I don't have to stand here and be insulted!" the minister shouted.
"Would you like to sit down?" the Doctor asked.
The four men, followed by the woman, would have left in a group, but the Doctor suddenly stepped forward. "Not you!" he barked, and his voice was filled with such an authority that even Liz's heart skipped a beat.
The pale young woman froze. Her companions looked back at her, but then they walked out, expecting her to follow or do as she liked. "I want to talk to you," the Doctor said. His voice was commanding but not angry. The young woman seemed inclined to turn and walk out, but her feet only twitched. It was as though she were fighting to stay in place.
"Close the lab doors, Liz," the Doctor said.
Liz obeyed him, though she was not sure why. But in the past, she had sensed that he could act for very good reason, even if he did not have the time to explain himself first.
"Yes, I think you'd better lock them," he said. He had his eyes fixed on the eyes of the young woman, but then he frowned. "This isn't what I expected. What have you done?"
But he wasn't talking to Liz. He fished his pocket watch from his waistcoat. He held it up by its chain in front of the young woman. "Look at this. What is this?"
She didn't answer.
"Then look at me. I'll get to the bottom of you." He would have lifted the young woman's face by the chin, not roughly, but she jerked her head away. "No, time lord!" she exclaimed.
"Oh yes!" he said. "It's bad enough when they're dead. Look at me."
Liz gasped as he seized the girl in his arms. He very nearly tackled her, and he kept her arms pinned to her sides. But his voice stilled Liz, and it seemed to command something in the girl herself. "Look at me. If you can hear me, look at me. I'll set you free."
The girl instantly turned her eyes up to his, and two tears suddenly trickled down her face.
"He's hurting me," she said. "He's trying to kill me. He won't leave."
The Doctor grasped her hair in the back so that she couldn't look away, but he was not being rough, only firm and very strong. He kept his eyes locked onto hers.
"Tell him to come into me," he said. "I'll take him. I'll find him a place to stay." He put his face close to hers, and it looked as though he would have kissed her. But he said, "Come into me. Leave her alone."
This offer evoked more tears from her. "He says no. He doesn't want a timelord to rule him. He says it isn't fair because I would have died in another minute or two."
"You did try to kill yourself?"
"Yes."
He straightened up, and though he did not release her, his great, powerful eyes became more quiet and calm. Liz thought that she saw the young woman's face become less pale. "Close your eyes," the Doctor said softly. "I've got you for now. I'll free you. Liz."
The young woman closed her eyes, but the Doctor didn't move.
"Yes," Liz said.
"Bring me a sedative. Get it from the infirmary if you don't have your bag. A good benzodiazepine. It will relax the muscles, and it has a low toxicity."
"You're going to sedate her?" Liz was shocked. She had no idea what was going on. The young woman's eyes were closed, but her spine remained fixed, almost rigid. The Doctor looked up.
"Do you have no memory at all Liz?" he asked. "Didn't you read the article about the missing body? And see the photograph? Who do you think this is, anyway?"
He was still holding the young woman, and now she was clinging to him, eyes closed, half hypnotized. And then Liz recognized her. It certainly was the young woman whose body had disappeared.
"But she died. She was declared dead," Liz said.
"Yes, and even I supposed she had died, and that was bad enough. This is worse. She didn't die, and now she's been inhabited by an invader that her body could not fend off. They're struggling for ownership of her. Now get me a sedative for her. It will knock him out, too. We've got to think of something to help her!"
With that, he stooped and slipped one arm behind the girl's knees. He picked her up and marched to his TARDIS. "We've got to keep this a secret. I don't want the Brigadier making decisions about her life. He may just try to pack her off to a hospital. I have a better place for her."
* * * *
Sarah Jane Smith, of course, knew none of this. In her short career with the Doctor, she had traveled with him---uninvited---to the fourteenth century to track down a string of missing scientists, and she had helped him clear up that dreadful time scoop affair. That unhappy episode had ended in the breakdown of the young Captain Yates.
She knew enough to know that there were a great many secrets and stories behind this enigmatic man who had befriended her. And she sensed a certain easygoing tolerance in him for her many questions. He seemed to like having her around, even though she was of no use to him whatsoever, except as company. And it had not occurred to him that, as a journalist, she might be tempted to do a little unauthorised snooping to get a good story.
So she hardly felt a qualm of conscience about coming onto the UNIT main site on a Tuesday evening when she knew perfectly well that the Doctor was going to the National Theatre for a night of opera. She told the guard at the main gate that he was expecting her, and the soldier raised the barricade and passed her through. At the next gate, the soldier was more reluctant, but she had him call Sgt. Benton, and the good sergeant okayed a pass for her. She was given a visitor's pass and was allowed into the main building.
There actually was a waiting area for visitors to be officially received, but by that time it was after normal hours, and nobody was assigned to maintain a watch on the reception area. Sarah Jane had little trouble in slipping away from the unmonitored room.
She made her way down to the lab: the Doctor's domain. Not that she would steal any information from him. But she was certain that if she could only find something on which to quiz him, he would likely give in and tell her more about his adventures.
She slipped into the lab. To her surprise, the lights were on. One of the UNIT soldiers, Cpl. Atkins, was hunched over the top file drawer of the Doctor's file cabinet, rifling papers. Sarah Jane stopped, mouth open. The Corporal looked up and stared at her, caught in the act.
"Here now," he exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm waiting for the Doctor. What are you doing here? Oh, don't tell me, I can see very well what you're doing here!" She did not add that she would have been doing the exact same thing if he had not gotten there first. But she did not fool him.
Atkins closed the file drawer with a bang and glared at her. "Come off it! You know the geezer's off at the opera. You come down here with a mind to do the same thing. What's the matter? Have you started to see through this Doctor feller, too?"
"See through him? What do you mean, see through him?" She stayed where she was and kept her voice indignant, but Atkins' words sent a new sense of uncertainty through her. She actually knew very little about the Doctor.
"Him and his young women. There's more come in then goes out of this place, for one thing!"
"What are you talking about?" She made her voice defiant, always a sign of nervousness in Sarah Jane Smith.
"Listen you, he gets women under his power. That doctor from Cambridge, she washed her hands of him quick enough. But the little one. Went into that machine again and never been seen again. He tells the story that she's off down the Amazon with some chap nobody's ever heard of. And Yates then. He goes off his rocker. Why? What did he know that he couldn't face, eh?"
"If you're talking about the Doctor's friend, Jo Grant, then she is down the Amazon," Sarah told him. "Even the Brigadier said so."
"Well he would, wouldn't he? We all know this place couldn't manage without that chap's science gadgetry. He does what he likes, and he gets what he likes. So what difference does a little bird now and again make?"
Her eyes flashed. "That's monstrous!"
"Is it?" He withdrew a folded up piece of paper from his shirt pocket and offered it to her. "What about this, then?"
She felt uncertain but she took it from him. It was a newspaper clipping, annotated by the Doctor's scrawl. The news arricle was about a young woman's body that had disappeared from a hospital morgue. The Doctor's written annotation was brief: "Search halted."
"What does this mean?" Sarah Jane asked, and then she answered herself. "It could mean anything."
"Except that supposedly dead young lady was here, because I saw her," Atkins said. "There's her picture there. She came here with a group. Went down into the lab, and never come up again. The Doctor says she stayed to answer a few questions about her credentials and then left. But I never saw her leave. Never checked her out through the main gate. Never collected her pass from her."
"She could have done any one of a dozen things!" Sarah Jane exclaimed. "This place is incredibly lax! Why just tonight---"
She caught herself. It would not do to give herself away to one of the soldiers. But he answered for her. "You got in here, down to his lab, without anybody to stop you," he said for her. "It was so easy, wasn't it? Except you're not a scientist, and you're not a special agent. You're just a young girl, which is just what he's always looking for. One more to add to his collection."
"You make him sound like a monster. He's saved the entire planet, you know."
"Oh yes. He may as well. He's been forced to live here." And then Atkins dropped his voice. "You'll not believe this, but he's not even a human being. Not a real one."
"I know that. He told me so himself."
"Like rot. He told you being a human is how you define it."
She gave a slight nod. "Well, all right."
"More of his double talk. Half a truth is better than an outright lie." He squinted at her. "Why earth, then? If he had to stop and land for a bit. Why earth? What do we give him that he needs to survive?"
He said this in a very pointed way. "It's not as though you're a scientist yourself---oh no, when he had a woman that knew something and that could figure him out, he sent her packing in no time. He likes them young. Young and alone. Like you. You've got no parents, have you? Who would really miss you?"
"That's none of your business!" she snapped.
He pointed to the silent TARDIS. "It's all in there, isn't it?" he asked her.
She made her voice defiant again. "I've been in there. And I came out again."
"So far. So did that other little girl. The Grant girl. Came in and out. Until the day she didn't. They said she'd gone down the Amazon. She was the second. This one was the first." And he nodded at the paper he had given her. "I don't know what the Brig will do when you come up missing. Cover for him again, I reckon."
"Look, that's a lot of rot!" Sarah Jane felt a sudden tingling of anger, and mostly with herself for feeling any influence at all at his words. "If you think the TARDIS is a place for storing captives or---or stowing away dead bodies, just take a look inside her!"
"Not on your life! I'm not goin' in there! You go, if you're not afraid of him!"
She gathered her wits together. "Of course I'm not afraid of him. He's always been very kind to me. And I will just go inside!"
She set the paper onto the work bench and strode across the room, with his eyes fastened onto her. She was reasonably sure that the TARDIS was locked, anyway. But when she pushed on it, the door unexpectedly opened a crack. She glanced back at Atkins. He had not moved, and he still had his eyes fixed on her. With a slight toss of her head, she went inside. As the door closed behind her, Atkins heard the noise of soldiers passing outside. He quickly flipped off the light switch and waited until the voices had passed. Then he swiftly exited the lab. He closed the doors behind him.
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