Killer Bees Episode Eleven;Always the Third Doctor!;Welcome to Jeri's Dr. Who fiction Page!;Doctor Who;UNIT;TARDIS;Third Doctor;Katy Manning;Jo Grant;The Master;Roger Delgado

Killer Bees
	Episode 11 - Epilogue

The Doctor met them at the door of the lab, but the Clerk rushed past him with Jo in his arms. "Get the syringes and don't ask questions!" he exclaimed, and the Doctor scooped up all the syringes and followed him to the worn sofa.

"That's the one; give it to me!" The Clerk snatched up a syringe and ran the point under the skin of her arm.

"Are you mad? That's not for a human!" the Doctor exclaimed.

"It's close enough. It has to be. There's nothing else," the Clerk snapped. He shot a glance at the Doctor as his practiced hand gradually depressed the plunger, feeding the stimulant into her at a measured pace. "Why are you sitting there? Talk to her, you fool. Make her feel your presence. And make her comfortable. Where are the materials I asked for? "

"In the medical kit, right there by your feet."

As the Clerk withdrew the syringe of stimulant, the Doctor took her face in his hands, made a quick survey, and then used his thumbs on the meridians around her nose and eyes, pressing and pushing. "Jo, I'm here, " he said quietly. "Do you hear me. We've won." He pressed against the meridians that governed her breathing, working his hands down to her throat and sternum, as though he were pushing life force into her. The Clerk glanced at him with concern as he pulled out an IV bag of water and hung it up, but at the moment the Doctor was as strong and sure as he had ever been. The Clerk pulled the tubing from its protective wrapper and in seconds had it attached to the bag. He took up the tape and quickly ran the syringe for the precious water supply into Jo's wrist and taped it into place. Eyes still closed, Jo swallowed. The Doctor pulled the respirator away.

Without taking his eyes off of her, the Clerk said quietly, "I think they're still active. We need a magnet, a huge magnet. Sweep it over her so that the magnetic field incapacitates them. At least temporarily."

"I'm on it," the Doctor exclaimed, getting up. "I've got an electro-magnet in the storage closet."

"And then you've got to develop those counter measures!" the Clerk called after him.

"All we need are the crystallizing ovens," the Doctor called back. "I've finished the design."

* * * *

Jo was not clear on what was happening around her from the time the Clark carried her out of the Master's labs until she woke up, much cooler and more comfortable, on one of the thin mattressed cots at UNIT. It was the sound of men's voices singing that brought her around. Singing, as she remembered from grade school, but the words were new:

Oh I love a girl from an alien race!
She chews with her bottom and sits on her face!
We trundle about in time and in space!
Just me and my girl from an alien race!

Oh I have a girl from Mars red above
She blows off her nose to say she's in love
We sneeze and we snort as we trundle in space--

She opened her eyes in time to see the Doctor and the Clark. They were seated one on either side of her bed, singing. She jumped awake and took in her breath, then just as abruptly let herself drop back. She could breathe. The asthmatic tightness in her throat was gone, and she could swallow again.

Both of them dropped the song immediately and reached to help her if she wished to rise. She shrank from the Clark without thinking, and the Doctor glanced at him and shook his head slightly, then helped her sit up on the pillows. She found to her surprise that her weakness and light headedness lessened considerably as she sat up.

"I'll get the tea," the Clark muttered, turning away.

Jo looked at the Doctor. "He tried to betray us!" she whispered urgently.

"No, Jo," the Doctor assured her. "He saved you. He's saved us all--from here to Gallifrey."

"No, you saved me."

He looked at her kindly and with both hands accepted a cup from the Clark, who turned back to the tea tray. The Doctor offered the tea to her while he held the saucer in his two hands. "No," he said. "The Clark did it. I couldn't get within a mile of you or the Master would have activated those little blighters inside you." He set the saucer down as though it were heavy, brushed her hair back with his hand, and glanced at the tea. "Drink your tea, my dear."

"But it was you," she protested.

"Your fever was high and it altered your perceptions; it was the Clark who went to collect you, and Clark who fooled the Master so successfully. He's much better at deception than I am." And he winked.

Jo looked over at Clark 42. "The Master followed your lead like a puppy," the Clark said, not looking at her. "Can't figure out why a timelord would look to a human for cues, but there you have it. Once you were convinced I was a traitor, so was he."

He put his back to Jo as he stirred his tea, and she turned away from him and looked at the Doctor. He nodded. After a moment, the Clark joined them. He sat down with his tea.

"I am uncommonly good at being cruel," the Clark admitted. "As you once observed, Miss Grant. I knew I had only one chance to get you back from the Master and save your life. So I did it in the only way I knew how: by being myself." He glanced at her, almost furtively, and added, "But I am not, perhaps, quite so cruel as I seem." He looked down.

The Doctor gently stroked her cheek. "I once fooled you into thinking I was cruel and heartless, Jo," he said gravely. "Do you remember?"

"No," the Clerk said sharply. "No. She must not think of unhappy memories. Let it rest, Doctor. She shall know me better by and by if she likes." He took a sip of his tea and glanced at her. "Drink your tea, my dear. Is there enough sugar in it?"

She didn't quite know what to say, so she obeyed him. The tea was very sweet, as sweet as it was when the Doctor made it for her. "Yes, it's fine," she said.

The Doctor spoke again. "You've been here a week, you know," he told her. "And the Clark has tended you with great care. He has hardly left your side." The Doctor's face, she realized, was now much more haggard--even ravaged--by the passing days. He was happy at the moment, ready to be jovial in the glow of her rescue and recovery, but she could see that he was much more wasted in flesh than he had been even when she had found him in the dark cell.

She did not comment on his condition. She looked back at the Clark. "You're taking care of me? But all you feel for humans is contempt."

"Not entirely," he said shortly. "There are some humans I have grown quite attached to. But a person with many enemies must sometimes keep his friendships secret. Even from his friends."

"The Clark is as true a friend as I have been, Jo. He's just out of practice," the Doctor told her.

"Enough of this. Tell us how you feel," the Clark ordered.

"Almost entirely well," she admitted. "Hardly seems possible."

"Well, you have been here a week," he reminded her. "We nearly lost you before we got those sub-microbes of our own finished and injected into you, but once they went to work attacking the Master's devices, you improved rapidly. But they created a problem with high fever--I must brush up on human immune response--"

He was interrupted by Mike Yates entering the infirmary room.

"Jo!" Mike exclaimed. "Why didn't you call me?" he demanded of the timelords.

"She's only just now come around," the Clark told him. "And last I saw you, you were looking more dead than alive from lack of sleep. As though sitting by the girl's bedside would have changed anything. I was looking after her well enough." He threw a glance at his watch. "Come Doctor. Time for a treatment."

The Doctor took her hand, but gently, as though the pressure of a firm grasp would have hurt him. "Think you can manage without us, Jo?" he asked her.

"It won't frighten me if you get the injections right here," she said.

"The treatments are a little more extensive, now" the Clark told her.

Mike actually had to help the Doctor up from the chair, and she saw that the Doctor was a good deal worse off than when she had last seen him. But he took hold of the railing of her hospital bed and bent over her. He moved steadily, but she could see that he was in pain. He kissed her forehead but did not immediately straighten up. She looked at his eyes. They communicated everything to her.

"You're getting sentimental," the Clark observed to him as he and she looked at each other. "She's all right now. She's fine. They'll both do very well."

"Help me out, now," the Doctor said. Painfully, slowly, he straightened up, his eyes still on her eyes, and with one last gesture he softly swept the hair back from Jo's forehead. The Clark helped him out.

Mike sat down in the chair that the Doctor had vacated. He glanced at Jo. Suddenly a human familiar face was more welcome to her than anything else: a face delightfully apparent with human limitations and human understanding.

She put her hand over his and closed her eyes as she nearly sobbed out loud. Then she controlled herself.

"What is it?" he asked, alarmed.

"They're leaving, Mike."

"What?" He nearly stood up, but she did not release his hand, and after a moment he sat back down again.

She made herself open her eyes and not cry, and she looked at him. "The Doctor and I never really say goodbye to each other," she said. "We've been pulled apart so many times that after a while it gets silly." She tightened her hold on his hand, for she felt it in her mind as the Doctor slipped away from her time and place on earth. She felt the absence of him all over again. It was a sudden sharp pang of loss and loneliness. But Mike put both his hands around her hand. To her surprise, that was almost enough.

They were both silent for a very long time, as she negotiated losing him a second time. But finally she spoke.

"I want to get up," she said. "I'm better now."

"Well, finish your tea, anyway," he told her. "And let me just sit and look at you. You gave us all quite a scare. I don't mind telling you that the Clark pulled you back from the brink of death." He took her tea, which was now cold, and warmed it up from the pot. He brought it back to her and looked at her carefully, but at the moment she was all right.

"What about the Master?" she asked. "What did Clark do? It's all such a muddle. I do remember that he made the Master vanish somehow. Next thing I knew, I was in a cab with the Doctor--"

"No, you were delirious," Mike told her. "It was the Clark, and I was there, too." He sat back in the wooden chair. "From what I understand, he tricked the Master into putting on that time bracelet of his. The Clark controls the time bracelet with his mind. So once the Master had it on, the Clark sent him out into the time vortex. I went in with the UNIT detail and destroyed the Master's base of operations. We feel pretty sure that we got all of the microscopic devices that he manufactured."

They fell silent again. "Look," he said softly. "I know this isn't a time to celebrate, but the lads have invited me to join them at darts some night. I don't know that all of them will be glad to see me, but some will. I'd like to ask you to join me."

"All right," she said.

* * * *

It was actually another week before the darts night was made official. The UNIT soldiers made use of an out of the way pub run by a German man and his wife. Though it was not frequented by the officers at UNIT, Mike was now exempt from any such class distinctions.

While he and an impromptu group of darts players chose up sides, another small group of men stood at a piano in one corner, trying to pick out a song.

Jo felt she ought to go join one or the other group, but her moments of grief for the Doctor came and went, and at the moment she was trying to fight one off. She had learned during the past week that Mike was happy to listen to her, to help her think out and say out her many conflicting emotions about her history with the Doctor. It was hard for her to weigh out the past happiness and optimism with the present sorrow and the huge weight of realizing how temporary even her most profound friendships had been. Yet Mike insisted, even in the face of his own fall and the tragedies of the last few years, that it had all been worth it. It was better to know, he insisted, even if most of the knowledge was a knowledge of weakness and limitation. It was still better to know. "We ran with giants, Jo," he told her at one point. "And we couldn't keep up with them. But at least we ran. For a little while." His human perspective was so familiar and comforting, and yet in some ways so profound that she found herself fascinated to be with him, often charmed out of her grief by listening to him. And there were moments when they did not talk about the Doctor or the past, when he enticed her into new ideas, showed her his sketch book in which he had captured remarkably good drawings of the local flora and fauna, asked her about some of the interesting and happier aspects of South America, introduced her to the Book of Common Prayer. In her presence, he seemed ready and able to move on; and she was beginning to be ready to do the same, as long as he was with her.

But there were moments, too, when she wanted to be alone. When she was simply sad. And this was one of those moments. It was then that she heard the singing, clear and steady, through the pub's one open window:

Oh I love a girl from an alien race! She chews with her bottom and sits on her face! We trundle about in time and in space! Just me and my girl from an alien race!

She hurried outside.

"My singing always brings the girls," Clark 42 told her. "Though usually they throw things at me when they come."

"You came back!" she exclaimed.

"I did!" he said. "I think I owe you and Yates an apology for being a bore one time too often. And perhaps an explanation."

"Is your mission accomplished?" she asked.

"It is. K'Anpo was waiting. Everything has taken place. He's alive; though what you would call a changed man."

She looked down.

"He will not always forget you, Jo," he told her.

"Please--" she began, but he stepped closer, insistent.

"The Doctor was right," he said. "I have gone too far into the remote heart of Gallifrey. I have lost much. But I want to tell you what you ought to know."

She looked up at him.

"He will regenerate, and regenerate again, and again, and so on. And after a few regenerations it will be easier for him to recall you. But as his timeline continues, he will be drawn away from Earth and from the politics of planets. For he will finally discover what has been the coda for the timelords for so long: interference does not alter the balance of the universe. The evil is never defeated by mere mortals. And timelords," he added, with a severe glance at her. "Are, in the end, mere mortals."

"You make it sound as though his life were wasted," she told him.

"He will come to feel that way," he said briefly. "Right or wrong, he will return to Gallifrey towards the end of his life span. He will immerse himself in the doings of the Council. He will lay aside almost all of his previous knowledges--except for language studies and medicine. But he will dismiss the electronics, the physics, the rest. He will rise in the Council, but he will be an isolated creature." He looked at her, his eyes shadowed.

"He deserves better than that," she told him.

"Great tragedies lie ahead for him," he added. "His friends shall pay a heavy price for loving him. So he shall remove himself from them, isolate himself, change his name, change everything. For the surest way to destroy the Doctor is to destroy those whom he loves," he added. "As you well know. He shall have to fly to the cold heart of Gallifrey and the Council for refuge, because one day that will be the only place left."

"Does he know this?" she asked.

"I told him of it on Metabilius, but he has now forgotten what I told him, " the Clerk told her. "And it is well, for he must make his own way. In spite of all, he shall save many lives. I would not wish to prevent that, Jo."

She looked down. "So he's to become a--a hermit. A powerful, isolated, politician."

One day," he replied. "He shall hear--over the corridors of time and space--a cry for him. It is a cry from the past, a cry from the heart and the very being of one of the truest friends he ever had. And he shall find himself unfit to save her because of everything he has laid aside. But he shall come anyway. And in the course of his journey, he shall hit upon a plan to ally himself with himself--to return to her the Doctor she knew and loved, and so hide from her the creature he has become." He stopped.

Understanding dawned on her at last. "You!" she gasped. "You're--you're the Doctor!"

"Yes," he said. "But you must never repeat that again. I couldn't bear that you would think I had forgotten you forever once I regenerated. I wanted to come back to tell you the truth."

"I should have known," she whispered. "There were so many moments when your expression seemed so familiar. When you laughed at the exact same things that he laughed at. And that singing. . . " She let her voice trail off, but then she addressed him. "I just want to know--really--why you came back to Earth," she said. "To save me? to save Earth, or to save Gallifrey?"

"To save you was the first reason," he said. "Because I heard your call first. But it fit into the larger picture of defeating the Master. Had I not interfered, he would have eventually destroyed the Council of the Timelords."

She thought hard for a moment. "So you, because you come from far ahead in history and after the whole situation is completed--you could come back and possibly change Gallifrey's history."

"And Earth's history, Jo," he told her quietly. "For the Master did kill you, and Mike, and destroyed most of UNIT. That was the story that I was told, and that I brought to my earlier self--the Doctor--when I found him outside the caves of Metabilius. I knew that he could avoid a Blinovitch loop for the simple reason that, being dead, he had no place in this time stream. I could also act freely." He surveyed her with an expression that seemed familiar to her. "But when I realized that the Master had captured you, I thought we were going into a Blinovitch loop. I was ready, if things went against me in the Master's TARDIS, to annhiliate both myself and the Master in an explosion--a last ditch attempt to break out of the Blinovitch loop and change history. My time bracelet would have survived, and the Doctor would have found you--in time, I hoped."

The complexities of changing history were a book that Jo had long ago decided to leave closed. So instead of asking more along that line, she asked him, "What now?"

"The Master will not stay in the Vortex forever," he told her. "Once he escapes the ring, it shall come back to me, so I will at least know when he's running about again. But I can return to Gallifrey at any time. I have his TARDIS to use. Outdated as it is."

She looked up at him, and he glanced away. But after a moment he met her eyes, his own eyes gentle. "Do you see the remnants of the friend you loved so nobly and well?" he asked her. "Or am I a stranger to you?"

Her eyes filled with tears. "Are you really sentenced to such a horrible life?" she asked.

"It's not so bad," he told her gently. "For there is still much good to be done, even in Council. I am lonely, as you know I would be."

She took his hands in hers. "I'll go back with you-"

"No. You would hate Gallifrey, and they would be rude to you, my child. They would not understand you."

"Doctor-"

"Jo," And he took her face in his hands. "Another friend has a stronger claim on you. And I cannot take you where you would be miserable and misunderstood. Please, understand."

She looked down, and after a moment she nodded. He released her.

"I must go," he said, his voice suddenly brisk. "But I will come back when I may. It was such a shame to put away all that knowledge of human history and human philosophy. Still, the business of the Council is ever ready to be done. You'd better stand back. I've jury rigged a second ring to act in conjunction with the Master's TARDIS, but it's behaving badly."

"But why not come in first for a while?" she asked. She gestured toward the lighted doorway.

He hesitated "Guiness does seem a wonderful way to be reacquainted with human culture," he said cautiously.

"Come on, then," she coaxed. "While the Master's in the Vortex, you may as well enjoy yourself."

"Well, all right. And I promise, I'll be nice." And he laughed. They walked across the parking lot together, and as they came up to the doorway, he burst into another bit of song:

Oh I have a girl from Mars red above
She blows off her nose to say she's in love
We sneeze and we snort as we trundle in space,
Just me and my girl from an alien race!

Click here to go to back to Jeri's Dr. Who Fiction page

Click here to Sign My Guestbook
NOTE: If you sign the guest book, the guest book service provider will take you to their site. So be prepared to hit the Back button about four times to return here, or bookmark this page. I look forward to feedback and hope you will sign my book!
View My Guestbook

Killer Bees

Episode 11 - Epilogue