EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST

        A Fourth Doctor Short Story
        Including companions pinched from Franklin W. Dixon and a
        somewhat boring science lecture.

Chris Ratcliff (crat1@student.monash.edu.au)

Doctor Who is Copyright BBC TV
------------------------------

Prologue: The Daleks Hatch an Evil Plot

It started with burning humiliation.
    Moral #1: You should never underestimate a fallen enemy. At these
moments, they are at their most dangerous.
    Dalek Commander #3 was in the unfortunate position of having to answer
for his last failed attempt to get rid of the Doctor. (And he would have
gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those pesky companions). He
had been summoned to the seventh floor of the Dalek Military Base, to a small
room which overlooked the squalid battlefields of Skaro. The view did not
displease him; to a Dalek, natural foliage was only so much biomass.
    He was not left alone in the room, to stew on his incompetence. Such
protocol was inefficient, and reflected badly on his interrogators. Instead,
there were three Daleks waiting for him as he rolled from the lift, each
painted in the shiny silver of an Administration Official.
    Almost immediately, the first spoke. "Performance unsatisfactory," said
one of the silver Daleks, not one to mince words. "The Doctor is an inferior
being. We are the superior beings."
    There was a general waggle of gun sticks at this applaudable sentiment.
    "Insufficient funds," croaked Dalek Commander #3 quickly, before anything
else could be said.
    "Negative," said a silver Dalek firmly. "Performance is unacceptable!
Logical inference is gross incompetence!"
    "Affirmative!" said the other silver Daleks. Dalek Commander #3 tried
to cower. He wasn't built for it.
    "Rank  reduced to Dalek Officer, second class," continued the silver
Dalek. "This order is effective as of twenty four hours from now.
Dismissed."
    "I hear and obey!" barked Dalek Commander #3, but he just couldn't
get the voice right. He was too depressed. He rolled back in silence,
descended the lift, wheeled along the corridors of Dalek Military Base
floor 1, and back to his area of command, the Spacetime dock.
    Dalek Commander #3 shut himself in a room, electro-locked the door
and brooded.

Joe Hardy pushed the buttons on the Food Machine and waited patiently. Mere
seconds later, a small hamburger, wrapped in greaseproof paper and steaming
slightly, fell out the small opening and onto the panel. Joe picked it up and
the soggy bun bent nearly double over his hand.
    It was amazing, thought Joe. This wonder of Gallifreyan technology was
able to recreate any edible material you asked it to, with everything the
way you wanted it, and yet the resulting masterpiece still tasted like
something thrown together by a work-experience chef in a Broome
roadhouse.
    Frank appeared at the doorway, the older of the two brothers and
usually the more responsible one. "Come on," he said to Joe, who was looking
mournfully at the saggging food in his hand, "you know how the Doctor gets
if he's kept waiting."
    Joe did. He looked at the hamburger once more, decided he might as well
give it a shot, and followed Frank to the control room.

The Doctor stared at the control room door, like he'd been born in that
position and had remained there ever since.
    He was a tall, imposing man, an impression added to by a shock of
brown hair and a multicoloured scarf that curled down to the floor and
back several times over. Right now he was feeling a little frustrated,
more than slightly regretting picking up these last two companions.
    He knew he never should have set foot in North America, least of all
during the early eighties. No sooner had he set down than two young
college students had come knocking on the door, wanting to know about
some mysterious person on the Boston docks called Sharkey, who was
apparently running guns to an American militia group planning a mass
slaughter in Disney World. The Doctor tried to get rid of them, but the
boys were unusually insistive and before he could stop them they'd
gotten a look at the larger-inside-than-outside control room.
    He had to take them on as companions then; there was no other
choice.
    But it was strange. From what they told him, Joe and Frank were two
smart, intelligent people who had spent the last year solving around a
hundred and twenty mysteries and doing undercover work for the government
via a contact called the Grey Man. You'd think they wouldn't take long to
understand the general principles of Gallifreyan science. In fact, the
opposite had happened - as the days went passed Frank and Joe seemed to
be getting stupider.
    Well, the Doctor aimed to change all that. Starting as of... oh,
here they were now.
    Frank and Joe were at the door, not yet coming in because the
control room looked to be in a complete shambles. There were desks,
large boxes on the floor, valves, beakers and tubes going from valves to
beakers, all sorts of assorted paraphernalia. Amongst that lot, the
steady rise and fall of the time rotor seemed positively normal.
    "Ah, you're here," said the Doctor, an impish gleam in his eyes. "And
about time too. Well, come in."
    Joe slowly took a bite from his hamburger. It tasted like raw sewage
would taste if it was made from hamburgers. Grimacing a little, he and
Frank made their way slowly around the equipment, finding an empty space
near the control console.
    "What's all this about, Doctor?" asked Frank.
    "Isn't it obvious?" asked the Doctor rhetorically. "A science
lecture!"
    Joe nearly groaned. He covered it up by taking another bite of the
hamburger, which was just as bad.
    "A science lecture from a Time Lord, mind you!" added the Doctor. He
made his way nimbly around the equipment scattered on the floor and
found a small bench. On it were several wire cubes, of differing sizes.
He picked up two.
    "Do you remember me telling you how the TARDIS was larger on the
inside than the outside?" he said.
    Frank and Joe both nodded. They could. What they couldn't remember
was the actual explanation.
    "Consider..." said the Doctor dramatically. He showed them the two
cubes - one of them was considerably larger. "Watch." Keeping the larger
cube still, the Doctor slowly extended the smaller cube toward the Hardy
brothers. Soon, it looked larger than the larger cube, which seemed to
be contained within. "The larger fits inside the smaller," he said.
    Joe scratched his head. Frank started to say something, then
stopped. He walked a little to the side. "But that's just an illusion,"
he interjected. "If you look at it from here you can see they're not
close together at all."
    "Yes," said the Doctor, "but imagine if you could have the cube 50
parsecs away and *still* have it here in your hand..."
    "Um," said Joe, munching on his hamburger.
    "Er," said Frank, frowning.
    The Doctor waited for further input, soon found there wasn't going
to be any, and straightened up. They could always come back. Besides, he
hadn't gotten to the exciting part yet.
    "You wanted to know where the Time Rotor got its power, didn't you?"
asked the Doctor. He showed them to the next bench. There was a large
cardboard box upended on this bench, and with great theatrical movement the
Doctor threw it off.
    Frank and Joe gasped.
    Something black and hairy was spinning above the bench, emitting a
furious hissing noise. It was not suspended on anything, or suspended from
anything. It floated in the air like a whirling dervish.
    It was a cat. A cat with something tied to its back, something
whitish and oblong.
    "Here," said the Doctor grandly, "is the secret of perpetual motion.
A cat with a piece of buttered toast strapped to its back.
    "Allow me to explain. You probably know that a dropped cat always
falls on its feet, and you probably also know that a dropped slice of
toast always, *always*, falls buttered side up. What would happen if you
were strap a buttered slice of toast to the back of a cat, and drop the
cat?"
    With his hands the Doctor indicated the general downward trajectory
of the cat toward the bench. The cat, meanwhile, was trying to glare at the
Doctor but it kept spinning around and losing its position. It didn't look
happy.
    "When it reaches the bench, the cat/toast system has to make a
decision on how to land," continued the Doctor. "It can land on its
feet, land on the buttered toast, or sort of fall on its side and
collapse. But each option violates the initial conditions of the
experiment, that toast must *always* land buttered side up and cats must
*always* land on their feet. So the cat/toast system never lands. It
just hovers there, vacillating between falling on the toast, or its
feet, and ultimately choosing neither. A perpetual motion machine. QED.
Now, can either of you tell me which way the cat will rotate?"
    Joe was wondering where the cat came from. He suspected some bizarre
tinkering with the Food Machine.
    Frank stared at the rotating cat with what he hoped was an honest,
intent expression. He was trying to think, but nothing was happening
behind the eyes. All he could see were a thousand cats with stale toast
strapped to their backs, rotating in the white glare of the space below
the time rotor.
    The Doctor sighed. They were getting nowhere, and why was it that
all his companions were so *literal?* He could see what Frank was
thinking, it was written on his face like a beacon, and he wanted to say
no, look, that's just an example, there are thousands of ways you can do
it, arranging initial conditions to violate each other. But they wouldn't
understand.
    It was time to bring out the big guns. "Come over here," he said,
motioning them away from the bench and indicating a cleared out space by
the control deck, bare except for a large box. They walked over, leaving
a rotating cat which had by now passed out from all the spinning.
    This box was not cardboard, but wooden, and about the size of the
treasure chest. The Doctor whipped the lid off grandly. "Behold!"
    Frank and Joe looked in, wet strands of lettuce hanging from Joe's
mouth. They saw a small white kitten, sitting on the bottom of the box
looking forlorn; a clock; a small glass vial; and a small hammer poised
above the vial.
    "What is it?" asked Frank.
    "It's a cat in a box," explained the Doctor.
    "Er," said Joe. He was thinking: More cats. Gee, the Doctor really has
gone insane this time. He took another bite - the hamburger didn't seem so
bad now.
    The Doctor was getting impatient. Come on, this was easy! Quantum
Mechanics! Earth science! Still, it was possible they hadn't quite
realised what the experiment was.
    The Doctor put the lid back on, because it would help the
explanation. This done, he said, "This is Schrodinger's cat. He-"
    "Not *actually* Schrodinger's cat, I hope?" interjected Frank jovially.
    "No," said the Doctor, and his eyes glinted.
    "Ho ho ho!" laughed Frank, who didn't have a sense of humor.
    "*As I was saying*," continued the Doctor, "Schrodinger came up with a
thought experiment to illustrate what he thought was the paradox at the
heart of quantum mechanics. Imagine a box." The Doctor, knowing from
first hand the imaginative powers of the Hardys, pointed at the box.
"There is a radioactive isotope in the box, with a fifty/fifty chance of
decaying. If it decays, it emits a particle which causes the hammer to
break the glass. Inside the glass vial is a deadly poison, which will
kill the cat instantly. And, and this is crucical, we don't know if the
poison will decay or not, and kill the cat, unless we open the box." He
looked at the Hardys.
    "Sounds reasonable..." said Frank, slowly. Joe nodded.
    "So you'd say the cat was either dead or alive, would you?" asked
the Doctor innocently.
    "I..." said Frank. He should have been put off by the way the Doctor
leaned forward slightly, looking at him too intently. "I guess so," he
finished.
    The Doctor smiled. "Wrong! The cat is *not* either dead or alive.
The cat is both dead *and* alive. Until we open the box."
    He turned from them, throwing his hands out grandly. Suddenly, all the
scientific equipment and demonstration areas he'd assembled were in the
way. He wanted to pace around the control console, expounding the ideas
and principles of Quantum Mechanics in a way they'd never forget.
    Instead, he walked away for several feet then turned to face the
Hardys. "Your earth science is sound, but *slow*. For two hundred
years you debated whether light was a particle or a wave. It wasn't
until the twentieth century that you realised light is both a particle
and a wave, and you don't know which until you have a look. And that's
what Schrodinger was on about. If a light/matter/energy is *both* a
particle *and* a wave, if a cube can be *both* fifty miles away *and* still
in my hand, if a radioactive isotope has *both* decayed *and* not
decayed, then the cat is both alive and dead. I think you see the
problem."
   Insofar as Joe saw the problem, it was the fact that he and Frank
were stuck in the TARDIS with this nutter. He took another bite of the
hamburger, and realised he was beginning to feel queasy.
    Frank mused, then said, "Schrodinger must have really hated his
cat."
    There was an awkward silence. "I am frankly shocked," said the
Doctor finally. "Don't they teach anything in Earth schools these days?"
    "We wouldn't know," said Joe. Having spent the last year solving one
hundred-and-twenty-odd mysteries, or possibly one hundred and twenty odd
mysteries, it had been a long time since either of the Hardys had any kind
of education.
    "You two are very depressing, you know that?" said the Doctor. He
walked over to a strange circular contraption mounted on a steel table
and started to make small, pointless adjustments to the calibration. He
could hear them making their way to the control room door, Frank
thinking out aloud: "Then again, maybe Schrodinger didn't have a cat.
Maybe he just hated cats in general."
    But at that moment, something happened which made him forget
everything.

From nowhere, there came a grating, teeth-on-edge sound that slammed
into his body like a gale force wind.  It screamed and squalled, and
somehow a wind arose in the control room. Frank and Joe, at the passage,
turned back and stared, their mouths gaping wide.
    The Doctor ducked his head down and curled into a ball, as
the elaborate apparatus around him began to shuffle and break. He hit
the floor and rolled to the wall, hearing the first of the glass retorts
striking the floor and shattering. Then came the rest, in a hail of
crystal. Benches, tables started to scrape along the floor, pushed
toward the shocked-still Frank and Joe. And somehow, in all the wailing,
the Doctor distinctly heard a cut-off wail from the rotating cat.
    At once the cacophony ended. Slowly the Doctor uncurled. "Dear me
old girl, what's gotten into you?" he muttered.
    It started again - soundless, and motionless.
    From the control room doors came a bright shaft of pure white light,
painful to look at. The doors were ajar.
    Instantly the Doctor leapt up, completely disregarding the
broken glass and metal on the floor, and began to throw switches on the
control console. Frank and Joe, trapped behind a mound of tables and
benches, could only watch as the Doctor's hands flew faster,
seemingingly operating at random.
    It wasn't working. Inexorably the gap widened. Steadily the light
level increased, its greedy fingers continually snatching objects from
view in a white glare. The gap was now wide enough to walk through.
    And just when things couldn't get any worse, they did.
    A tall grey object was shoved through the doorway, by objects
unknown. It came to a halt against the control console and stood there,
motionless.
    It was a steel box, about the size of a refridgerator.
    They were being invaded by cargo.
    The Doctor stared at the box quizzically. After all the drama, it
seemed a little anticlimactic. Not to mention downright odd.
    But something else was happening. From the white rectangle that
opened into the spacetime continuum, three figures were materialising.
    Daleks. Instantly the Doctor's blood ran chill. Then, in an even
steeper change of temperature, it ran red hot. Who did these Daleks
think they were, barging onto the TARDIS like common hooligans? The
TARDIS was involiable! Impenetrable! Out of bounds! How *dare* they?
    The Daleks rolled into the TARDIS with all the grandeur a robot on
wheels can muster. "The Doctor," said the lead Dalek, Dalek Commander
#3. It was an identification, greeting, epithet and declaration-of-war,
all in one.
    Joe and Frank were momentarily forgotten.  "What are those things?"
muttered Frank *sotto voce*.
    "I don't know," said Joe grimly, "but I'm going to rush them." The
debris of the Doctor's scientific equipment was piled around them and
prevented a straight attack, so Joe started to climb the mound of
benches, hoping to launch himself at the Daleks.
    A little foresight would have spotted the flaw in his plan.
Immediately as he began to climb, he was noticed by one of the Daleks.
"Halt!" it cried, swivelling to face him. Desperately Joe scrambled the
rest of the distance and launched himself into the air, drawing his legs
together as he did so.
    The Dalek fired at Joe, hitting him square in the chest. Half a
second later Joe's feet struck the top of the Dalek, knocking it
backward. The Dalek and Joe both crashed to the ground, lying by each
other's side.
    Daleks spend their entire lives upright, and are ill equipped to
deal with any loss of balance. This Dalek handled it no better than
most, and immediately started to thrash about the floor, screaming
"Exterminate! Exterminate!"
    "Poor chap seems to have come down with something," commented the
Doctor cheerfully.
    As the Dalek continued to roll around the floor like a microwave in
a tantrum, Joe was rising to his feet. To his surprise, he wasn't
injured. He thought he was a goner - the Dalek had definitely hit him.
    "Temporal grace," said the Doctor as Joe looked questioningly at
him, talking over the screaming Dalek. "We're in a multidimensional plane,
and hurt cannot be sustained here. They can't injure us, and we can't injure
them. Which sort of makes me wonder why you've gone to all this trouble," he
continued, turning back to Dalek Commander #3.
    Dalek Commander #3 and his companion seemed to confer, huddling near
the writhing hull of the downed Dalek. Then, by general agreement, they
shuffled around the Dalek and pushed him out the still-open doors. Dalek
Commander #3 turned back to the Doctor. Insofar as Daleks had
consciousness, he was conscious of the fact that things weren't going to
plan.
    "Doctor," he began, "you will-"
    Joe sneezed, loudly. And the Doctor grinned a very wide, exuberant
grin.
    Dalek Commander #3 froze.
    "Oh, come now," said the Doctor. "Don't take offence."
    "Shut up!" said the Dalek. With its gun stick it pushed a button on
the crate and one side fell out. The Doctor peered inside and saw
something taped to the ceiling.
    "Inside!" barked Dalek Commander #3.
    "Or what?" said Frank belligerently. "You'll bump into him? Ha ha
ha!" The Doctor was surprised - Frank seemed to have actually understood
one of his explanations.
    By way of answer, the second Dalek turned, and fired a shot at the
console. There was a loud flash of light, and smoke started pouring from
the corner of one panel.
    "Hey!" said the Doctor, no longer amused. He rushed to the console
and flapped his arms indignantly, trying to blow the smoke away.
    "Or we will destroy the TARDIS," said Dalek Commander #3, nodding in
approval at his aide.
    The Doctor turned to look back at Dalek Commander #3. He paused,
then looked at the large box, open and cavernous. He stared at the small
package taped to the ceiling, and started to get a very bad feeling.
    "What is it?" he said.
    "Enter!" yelled Dalek Commander #3.
    The Doctor stepped forward, still staring at the package taped to
the ceiling. Then suddenly he got it...
    It was really a novel idea, he thought, and even felt a small tinge
of admiration. They'd really put a lot of thought into this attempt.
    "It won't work," he announced suddenly, halting. "There's only a
fifty/fifty chance."
    "Enter!" yelled Dalek Commander #3.
    The Doctor bowed his head and started forward again. He glanced at
Frank and Joe, still standing by the passageway entrance. Joe, a little
slow at the best of times, was being left completely behind by
proceedings. Frank, a little faster on the uptake, had formed the idea
that the Daleks were kidnapping the Doctor for their own nefarious ends.
He was, as usual, dead wrong.
    What final advice could he give to them? thought the Doctor. "If
something goes wrong..." he said to the two brothers, and then grinned.
"Just find some stairs and you should be all right."
    Dalek Commander #3's eyestalk flashed.
    The Doctor's next step took him fully into the shadowy interior.
The aide Dalek came forward, pressed another button, and the side of the
box started to rise behind him, like a tiny motorised moat. It jerked
shut with a metallic clang, and now it was very dark in here. Dark, cold,
and cramped.
    Hah, thought Dalek Commander #3. Most Daleks would have been
impressed just to hijack the TARDIS. That had been hard in itself, and
only when he realised that a) conventional definitions of time and space
didn't apply in the continuum, and b) Daleks lived forever, that he
realised sooner or later (it had been later, but that just gave him more
time to get angry in) that he and the TARDIS would eventually cross
paths.
    Dalek Commander #3 smirked. Of course there was only a fifty/fifty
chance. That was the whole point. He, his aide, the two idiots over at
the door, even the TARDIS wouldn't know whether the Doctor was dead or
alive.
    That was the whole point.
    If the TARDIS didn't know if the Doctor was dead or alive, it
couldn't apply Temporal Grace, a property only affecting living things,
to his body. It meant the Doctor was now vulnerable to physical attack.
    Dalek Commander #3's gunstick hovered nearby the last button on the
Doctor's coffin, wired to a concussion blast which would kill anything
foolish enough to enter it.
    Dalek Commander #3 was feeling really good, like someone who had
climbed Mount Everest without any oxygen (okay, wrong comparison for a
Dalek). It was every young Dalek's goal to take out the Doctor. It was
one of the first things you learned in Dalek Military School - the four
basic ways to utter "Exterminate!", handy foreign phrases like
"Resistance is useless", "Submit to us, unworthy scum", etc, and how to
spot a wandering Time Lord whose mischievous hands have foiled the plans
of a master race of robots at every turn. Dalek mothers told scary
stories about an evil being called the Doctor to their children. Insofar
as the Daleks had a theology, the Doctor was Satan to Davros's Jehovah.
    A light on the crate started to flash, indicating that the quantum
event had taken place. Inside, the Doctor was both dead, and alive.
    Dalek Commander #3 decided to settle the matter, and pressed home
the final button.

There were only two eyewitnesses to what happened next, Joe and Frank.
Though there may be plenty to dispute about their testimony, what
apparently occured was this.
    Joe and Frank were standing just in front of the passageway. The
junk and tumble of the Doctor's scientific equipment was all around
them, yards of broken glass, twisted metal rods and sharp looking
retorts. The time rotor was almost directly between them and the crate,
but the two Daleks were in full view at the side. Behind them, the doors
were *still* open, a yawning gateway into a hyperspace of twisty
patterns, groovy psychedelic colours and bad 70s special effects.
    Frank was waiting for the Daleks to start dragging the Doctor away,
and was tensing himself for a leap. Joe was chewing robotically into his
hamburger, scratching his neck. Needless to say, both were caught
completely by surprise when, with a noise like lightning striking copper
sheets, the steel crate suddenly imploded in a cloud of smoke and tiny
yellow sparks.
    Frank gasped. Joe lost his balance. And then, for Dalek Commander #3
and his aide, things started to go horribly wrong.
    The crate was *not* squashed flat into a tiny breadbox. Instead,
just as it seemed to vanish from view, suddenly it exploded out again,
rebounding, with a violent plume of flame. The top flew upward, striking
the ceiling and causing the lights to flicker. The sides were hurled
outward with unbelievable force, whirling sheets of metallic death. Out
came a blast of concussion, smacking scientific equipment and spare shards
of glass into the walls. Frank and Joe were sitting ducks for decapitation,
but by some fluke of luck were out of the direct line of fire.
    The Daleks, standing less-than-secure straight in front of the
gaping doors, were not so lucky. A steel panel, two feet wide, seven
feet tall, an inch wide, whirling mortally fast, and carried on the
concussive blast of a huge explosion, carried them straight out the
door, buried two feet deep in their casings.
    Silence fell, abruptly, only spoiled slightly by the distant,
plaintive cries of "Exterminate! Exterminate!" They were somehow
pitiful.
    When Frank and Joe lowered their hands from their eyes, they saw the
Doctor standing at the very epicenter of the explosion, hand in one
(huge) pocket, another popping a jelly baby into his mouth.
    "What?" said Frank, stuttering slightly.
    "Mmmpph?" said Joe, spat out the hamburger, and added, "What?"
    "How did you-"
    The Doctor looked at the two kids, at their young, inquisitive and
honest faces. They deserved an explanation, even if they couldn't
understand it.
    "The Daleks made one mistake," he began, walking around a control
room that looked like it had been carpet bombed. "Well, several really.
Their main problem is that they didn't understand Quantum logic.
Remember me talking about both-and logic instead of either-or logic?
Well, the Daleks couldn't handle this. They thought that if I wasn't
either alive *or* dead, then that meant I wasn't alive or dead, at
all. But they don't understand Quantum rules. Not at all. You know, this
botched encounter has made me pretty cheerful. If they keep this up
they'll have no hope of conquering the Universe." The Doctor looked very
happy with this statement.
    Frank and Joe stared loyally at the Doctor. Joe, who had his septic
hamburger to eat, was slightly happier than Frank, who was itching for
something to do while he ignored the explanation.
    "Many worlds," said the Doctor grandly, with a sweep of his arms.
"The Quantum paradigm basically requires the concept of parallel worlds.
It's a pity those fellows at Copenhagen wouldn't listen to me," he added
darkly. "Because in the many-world Quantum interpretation, Schrodinger's
paradox isn't a paradox at all."
    "Earlier, when the quantum event happened - I'm not sure what is
was, some kind of radioactive decay - the world, the *whole world* split
in two. In one world, I was alive, and nothing happened. In the other
world, I was about to die. And the TARDIS could see this, unambiguously, and
via Temporal Grace, prevent it.
    "There were two TARDIS's. Each saw me as either dead, or alive, and
acted accordingly. There was never any doubt, and therefore when the
bomb went off I was fully alive and never in any danger. As to what
caused the second explosion, I'm not fully sure. The rebound of the wave
function, perhaps."
    He beamed down at the two. "And that's how it all happened."
    Frank nodded, like someone on wires.
    Joe swallowed the last piece of hamburger. He had a thoughtful
expression on his face, He was cogitatin'.
    Finally he said, "Since the spacetime continuum is outside the
normal Universe, as it were, and not subject to the same physical laws,
how can we assume that normal quantum effects apply here? And in what
sense can hyperspace be said to 'split' in two?"
    The pause that followed this statement was very awkward, indeed. That
settles it, thought the Doctor. Next stop, I'm ditching these two.

THE END