Dirk's Chronicles, Chapter 2

The first adventure

I stepped out of the Tardis first and stood stunned. Everything was covered in snow. I had never seen this much snow. The short time we were inside, the rain had turned to snow and dumped an ungodly amount of snow on everything. The street was covered in it. The Doctor stepped past me and walked right off the porch and into the snow. He completely disappeared from view. I take the stairs down, testing each step before I put my weight on it.

At the bottom of the stairs, I turned to my left and found the Doctor lying face down in a pile of snow. Kelly followed me down and pushed through the snow to his other side.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

“Fine. Fine! Never better. Help me up,” I heard his muffled voice.

Together, we managed to get him upright and dusted off.

“There! All better! Now, which way to the beach?” he looked quizzically in all directions, even up.

“I don't think this is anywhere near a beach,” Kelly offered.

"Nonsense! We programmed for a beach, and we ... this isn't sand," he said as he knelt and took up a handful of snow and examined it carefully.

"This is snow. Without a doubt, it's snow. Why did you think it was sand?" he looked at me accusingly.

“I .. I didn't. I knew it was snow when we -,” I start to say.

“Hurumph, well,” he interrupted me, then stood up and watched a group of bundled-up people carefully walking by on the sidewalk in front of us. As I took in the bundled-up people and the houses on the street, I realized we were not in Holland anymore. In the distance, I saw a minaret that could only be in Russia. I stood gawping like a fish at the change. It was magic to me. I went into the building in Holland during a rainstorm, and I stepped out in Russia after a snowstorm.

“Well,” he repeated. "This is not a beach, but it is where we are supposed to be, as it is the starting point of the [unintelligible] storm. We must investigate here.”

He looked around a little more and then said, "Well, not exactly here, but around here. Maybe that way." He pointed up the street, then added, "But first, I think we need to change into more suitable attire."

He turned around and looked at the edge of the front step and asked, "Say, how did you get down here?" He looks back and forth between Kelly and me.

“We took the stairs like normal people,” Kelly replied, not hiding her sarcasm.

“Stairs. How clever,” he steps past me quickly and takes the stairs on that side up to the doorway.

Kelly stepped toward me, and I asked, "We are not in Holland anymore?"

A sympathetic look came over her lovely face, and she said, "Apparently not. The Tardis has … well … it's really hard to explain what it is. Let's go inside and maybe his majesty will deign to explain."

We followed him back inside.

Once inside, we followed him around the center platform, under the ramps, to the area behind it. There were a number of doors. Actually, there were a lot of doors along the curved wall, all looking exactly alike. He walked along, paused in front of one, then looked at us, shook his head, and moved on.

Kelly stepped towards that door but halted short of opening it when he called, “Here! This will do nicely.” He opened a normal-looking door and entered it. We caught up and followed him inside.

Inside was a spacious room with winter gear on shelves and hangers around the periphery and an open area in the center. I stood for a moment trying to fathom how a room of this size could fit between the doors on either side of this one. It didn't make any sense at all, but he waved us over to the shelves and we sorted through the items.

I found a pair of heavy, warm-looking boots and pulled them off the shelf. I accidentally dropped one; it landed with a thud and fell over. A large ... no, an enormous, hairy spider crawled out and waved its front legs around. Both Kelly and I froze and stared in horror. It turned, looked at me, and hissed.

The Doctor looked up, then at the spider, and said, "Oh. I wouldn't wear those; no telling what she was up to in there. Might as well put the other one down, it probably has her mate in it.”

I placed the other boot on the floor and gently tipped it over, then backed away. Another spider, slightly smaller than the first, came out and looked around. The first spider hissed as it turned and went back into the boot. The first spider then dragged the boot she had been in under the lowest shelf, then returned for the other one. She started dragging it, stopped, hissed at me, waving one front leg, then dragged under the shelf.

Both Kelly and I were very cautious about the rest of the gear from that point on. I found a very nice pair of heavy boots, sturdy gloves, a heavy wool coat, a nice fur hat, and a scarf, all without things living in them. Kelly picked out a similar set of gear, and the Doctor added a pair of driving gloves and a ridiculously long scarf to his. He still had on the same pale frock coat, long pants, and lace-up shoes.

We left the room with our new outerwear and stopped at a side table near the "front" door to put it on. I carefully shook out everything a second time before I put anything on. After I put on the coat, I checked the pockets. There were four inner pockets, two on each side. In one inner pocket, I found a long knife. The blade was as long as my hand from wrist to fingertip. It had a sheath, but I had no belt to put it on, so I just dropped it back in the pocket. In another pocket, I found a flint and striker. In yet another pocket, a fold-over, oiled leather pouch. I was about to open it when the Doctor reached over, took it, and said, "Ah, American tobacco", then slipped it into a pocket on his jacket.

The last pocket yielded an interesting-looking set of goggles. The goggles had two curved, oval-shaped lenses set in an adjustable leather band. It looked like it would hug my face nicely and still give me good peripheral vision. The lenses were amber-tinted, and there was a set of small buttons on each side. I put them over my eyes, and the room looked the same except a little darker. I pressed the first button on the left side. After a few seconds, a set of numbers and words appeared over Kelly and the Doctor when I looked at them. I pressed it again, and the view returned to normal. The next button caused the room to appear slightly brighter; the Doctor and Kelly looked like they were on fire.

“Hey, no dilly-dallying, we have things to do!” the Doctor said.

I nodded, pulled the strap on, and pushed the goggles up on my forehead. I went back to getting dressed for our adventure outside. All of the clothes, boots, coat, scarf, and hat fit me well. Better than the clothes I was wearing. I pulled on the gloves and went over to the others waiting by the door.




Fortunately, this time, the city outside is the same as the last time we came out. That was a huge relief. I had been worried that every time we stepped outside, it would be a different place. The sky was gray, and the buildings were drab. While we were inside, someone had swept the street of snow. And the sidewalk was also fairly clear of snow.

The Doctor moved quickly down the steps, out onto the sidewalk, turned to the right, and started walking at a fast pace. Kelly and I followed as quickly as we could. The boots gave us very good traction, so we were able to catch up and then kept pace with the Doctor. We walked for about eight blocks, crossing streets without any traffic on them. There were a few pedestrians, but they were not close to us.

I pulled the goggles down off my forehead. I could see things a little clearer with them on. I pressed the first button again and looked around me. After a moment, I realized that the numbers and words were telling me information about what I was looking at. For example, when I look at Kelly, right above her head is the word ‘Terran’, under that is the word ‘female’, and above that is a number followed by the small letter m. After I changed my pace, I realized that it was measuring the distance from me to her. When I looked at the Doctor, it had, almost comically, the words ‘The Doctor' above his head, and above was the measure of the distance from him to me, but nothing about his sex.

I pushed the second button, and just like in the Tardis, Kelly and the Doctor looked like they were on fire. At the bottom of the left lens, it had the English words ‘Infrared Mode’. Upon reading that phrase, I suddenly got a rush of knowledge in my head. I have no other way to describe it. It's like the word triggered some hidden knowledge in my head. Suddenly, I knew how the goggles shifted light at infrared wavelengths down to the visible spectrum, and with that came a lot of knowledge about the light spectrum. I had to stop moving to digest.

The next thing I knew, the Doctor was standing in front of me and had asked me a question.

"Forgive me, I ... I'm sorry, I was lost in thought. What did you say?" I asked.

"I asked, 'What was it you have there on your face?'"

“Oh, I found these in a pocket in this coat,” I answered him, hoping he didn't want them back. Looking at his face, I could see red and yellow areas around his eyes, mouth, and nostrils.

He leaned in close and studied them for a moment, and then said, “Oh! Excellent! That's where I left those. Carry on. Try not to lose them and do try to keep up, we have things to do.”

I pressed the second button again to turn off the infrared mode, as it was kind of distracting. I leave on the target tracking mode … that phrase triggered another influx of knowledge. I was almost ready for it, but it was still a little overwhelming; I managed to keep pace with the others. I see Kelly patting her pockets ahead of me, perhaps looking for something similar in them. She must have found something as she took her hat off, wrapped something around her head, and put her hat back on.

She slowed her pace to walk next to me. After a few paces, she asked, “Getting the data dumps?”

Once I worked out what she meant, I replied, “Yes. They are distracting. I don't understand where they are coming from.”

“Yeah. When you were in room 6, you were … uhmm, connected to the Tardis. It … installed something in your head that will give out information when it's appropriate. I won't say any more at this point because it might start a cascade of information that would overwhelm you. It did me when I went through it."

“Ah," I said, like I understood what she'd said. "If I may ask, where are you from?"

“California in the United States of America," she replied, then added. "Actually, a small town near the middle of the state called Roseville."

“I … I ...” I had so many questions to ask her that they were all fighting in my brain to get out.

The doctor stopped at the edge of town. We'd passed the last building, and we stood on the edge of a large field. A couple of dozen people stood with us in small groups. Everyone looked at the huge object in the middle of the field. My goggles told me it's the top half of a sphere that is 531.6 meters away and the part above ground is 204.7 meters. It also said, ‘Unknown Object’ above it.

"Well, this doesn't look right for this period in Russian history. I don't believe they were making 409-meter-diameter spheres and sticking them in fields to muck about with their weather. No, no, this is definitely the work of some exterior agent. I wonder which?” the Doctor said quietly. He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, "Well, we certainly won't find out by standing around gawping, let's see if we can make our way over there."

We made our way along the fence until we came to a bundled-up Russian policeman who stood at a gate. The doctor stepped up to the policeman and asked, in Russian, "What goes on here?"

“I know not. I was told to stand here and keep people from approaching that giant thing in the field,” the policeman answered.

The Doctor nodded, pulled a folded wallet out of a pocket, flipped it open, and said, "You're doing a great job, young man. We are from the Ministry of Strange Spherical Objects in Fields. We are here to investigate this one. It is certainly strange, spherical, and in a field, falling right into our bailiwick."

The policeman glanced at the wallet and said, "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. You and your team go right ahead, sir. I will keep guard right here, sir."

He opened the gate, we filed past him, and started to trudge across the field toward the object. As we approached, I could see it's not as smooth as it looked from a distance. There were protrusions all over its surface. It is easily the largest thing I had ever seen in my life up to that point. The closer we got, I couldn't help but gawk at the sheer enormity of the object.

Another feature of my goggles became apparent as we walked. If I stared at the same place long enough, it behaved like a telescope and brought what I was looking at in closer. A new phrase popped up at the bottom of the lenses: zoom mode. That triggered a short flood of knowledge about optical physics. I managed to not stop walking. It seemed to get easier with each episode.

“Doctor, there appears to be an entrance in the center of it,” Kelly said, paused, and then added. “Well, a door at least.”

I refocused on the center near ground level and saw that she was correct. It was eight meters wide and ten meters tall and divided into six vertical sections. There was a platform in front of the door and a ramp that led from the ground up to the platform.

At each corner of the rectangular platform was a ten-meter-tall post with a small sphere on top with multiple tubes pointing out of it at different angles. Each tube appeared to be about half a meter long.

"There is some kind of fixed sentry guarding the door. Looks similar to the ones we encountered on Meval, but not exactly." Kelly says.

The doctor paused, reached into a pocket, and pulled out a tube. He slid out a smaller tube … it looks like a telescope, like the mariners use. He puts it to his left eye and studies the platform.

"Yes... Yes... No, not Mevalian but … hmm, I have seen them before … where?" his voice faded out as he scanned the rest of the sphere with his telescope for the next several minutes.

"Doctor, something is happening on the platform!" Kelly said anxiously.

I zoomed in and saw the door split in the middle and the two halves fold flat into the sides of the doorway. The interior was black. I switched to infrared and saw something moving. Then out marched several very tall men in black and gray uniforms with some kind of weapon held across their torsos. They formed up into three lines and marched down the ramp towards us.

“Ah. Now I remember, Hemuloghers. Their being here at this time is not good. Still, they are mostly intelligent, and we should be able to reason with them."

The men, Hemuloghers, marched down the ramp and formed up into a straight line, all facing us. They brought their weapons up and pointed them at us.

“Doctor! They are going to shoot us!” I said. I couldn't help myself, I had to say something.

“Don't be silly. Sentient beings always seek to work ...”

The first man on the right dropped quickly to a prone position with his weapon in front. The man next to him knelt also and pointed his weapon at us, and the next man stood pointing his weapon at us. This pattern repeated for the rest of the men.

"Hmm, I believe you are correct. Here, take this and press the blue button when I tell you to switch it on, then walk carefully to the left.”

He handed me a white box, about 5 cm on a side and 1 cm thick, with three wavy lines on it and a big blue button under the lines. Each line is a different color. He handed one to Kelly, also.

The doctor then dropped a larger box on the ground and said, “Now, switch on the invisibility screener.”

I switched mine on, then followed Kelly and the Doctor. As we walked, I noticed that the men did not follow us with their weapons. They kept them pointed at where we had stood.

We walked to the left and then, crazily, we walked forward again. My common sense was telling me to run to the fence and keep running until I was in Holland again. But I didn't. I followed the doctor as we quietly walked past the men with the weapons. On closer inspection, the weapons looked like rifles but with a smoother appearance.

As we walked past, I looked closely (with the zoom on the goggles) at the men. They were not Earthmen. They were very uniform in size. The goggles indicated that they were two and a half meters tall. Their hands were shaped oddly. They had a thumb and only three fingers on each hand. The helmets they wore completely covered their heads.

We quietly walked past them and up to the platform. I looked back to where we had been and almost stumbled. Standing in the field exactly where we'd been were … well, us. I used Zoom, and my doppelganger looked exactly like me. Its lips were moving as it turned and looked at the others.

I caught my balance as we mounted the platform. Kelly tugged on my arm to keep me moving. We reached the huge door and stopped at the threshold. The Doctor took another device out of a pocket and pointed it at the door frame. [Later, I would learn this is called an isosonic phasedriver.] A light blinked on a few paces in front of us. According to my goggles, the room on the other side of the doorway was four meters wide and five meters long. We followed the Doctor into the room.